Bumper Crop Needed After Last Year of No Fruit

Last year I got not one piece of fruit off my trees other than a handful of apples. I had none to dry and none to share. Here is a link to my post about that. 

I share in that post about the year before and how I had more apples than any year in the over 20 years we have lived here. I couldn't believe the amount of fruit we got and it was beautiful. Here is a link to that post. 

This year, we have a huge bumper crop of fruit. Everyone in town has apricots but I cut that tree down a few years back as we never got any fruit on it. Everyone is reporting a huge crop of fruit this year as I guess God is blessing us for the lack of it last year. We are truly blessed to have such a huge crop. 
 
I have so many plums on my front plum tree that the branches are breaking. I had to prop a few up in hopes they don't break before the fruit ripens. I can see some of the plums turning a bit and am excited for such a large crop as we had none last year. 
 
As you can see by some of the pictures above, my nectarine tree is hanging on by a few leaves. I can't bring myself to take it out. I am praying that it can revive and blossom again as it has the best fruit around. 

I have a neighbor suffering from some dementia and she would come over and spray the weeds in the field which is a good thing but in spraying the weeds near the tree, it weakened the tree and it started to suffer. I would ask her not to spray and since I started putting grass clippings down to keep the weeds down, she has stopped spraying near the trees but I worry the damage is done. 

It got some black flying winged boring bug and even though I tried to kill off the boring insect, it died off. I didn't see any of the insects this year and the leaves look fairly healthy as few of them as there are, I am hopeful that it will come back stronger than ever next year.  

I have another neighbor who thought he was spraying his trees for bugs and it was total vegetation killer. That was a few years back but I couldn't figure out why the tree nearest the fence was dying with curling leaves and no apples until his wife told me about the incident. I killed one of their trees completely and had to be taken out and their other hasn't quite recovered. Mine hasn't either. 

You can see this back tree is the exact tree as the one next to it and the back one has curling leaves, not much fruit and isn't looking healthy. The other tree has bumper crops and the branches are hanging down. 
 
There aren't many apples on this tree and even the leaves aren't as thick and plentiful. I didn't get to pruning these trees this fall as I had my mother's health issues and never could get to it. It wondered if they would do better or not but I can see this tree never recovered from its accidental poisoning. 

I rarely use poison in my yard and seem to do OK. I do try to keep the grubs down and weeds down but even ordering organic bugs and having several different types of sprayers come, some "healthy" and some not, hasn't seemed to make much difference in my yard. It is the neighbors spraying that is harming my trees. Funny that. 

The exciting part of my yard this year is that the four trees that have five different variety of fruit on them all produced!! This is the first year we have had any plums, pears, and cherries! The cherries were good but we didn't have more than a hand full but Princess Five and I devoured them. 

The pear as you can see has lots of varieties on it and the plum as well. The apple tree in the front with the five varieties has a few broken branches that couldn't hold the weight of the fruit but Yahoo for that! 

My biggest excitement is for my green plum tree. I special ordered that many, many years back and it has never had more than one or two inedible pieces of fruit on it. I had a conversation with it last pruning telling it that I was going to take it out and put a new tree in as green plums are my favorite dried fruit and I haven't had any in many years since it never produced. This year, it has quite a bit of fruit on it. Not as much as the other trees but it has fruit that looks edible on it so I am THRILLED with that.   

The other fun thing is that a few years back, one of my peach pits from my old peach tree took root after we put mulch from the mulch pile into my garden. I didn't pull it out and now I have a little peach tree. My peaches were SO good but as peach trees do, it died and we have missed it so to have another to take it's place is an exciting thing! I will wait until fall and transplant it somewhere other than the shallow garden area near the fence and hope it survives the move! 

Happy Harvesting!