Our Heavenly Father truly blessed us this year with a bountiful fruit harvest.
Today Janice and I took three and a half hours to harvest our apples and Bosc pears.
The variety of apples we picked are Spartan (a cultivar of Mackintosh) these were the two boxes at the front of the bed and the two buckets, these were the most numerous. Then there were the Liberty apples which are the two boxes stacked next the Bosc Pears (the dark green fruit in the left rear of the Gator.
Then came the Honey Crisp, love these, they are the box just left of the two buckets.
The next variety was Freedom Apples, in the box on the passenger seat. the Liberty and Freedom Apples were both developed is a study in New York State. The freedom trees are still very small in fact this is the first year some trees started producing. we have a total of six Freedom Apple trees, one stating to produce pretty good several only had four or five apples this year, a couple had none yet.
The next variety is the mystery apple. When we purchased the tree it was supposed to be a Yellow Delicious, when it produced it's first fruit it was green and stayed that way into November, so we assumed then it could be a Granny Smith. Well then the apples started to get a slight blush, and were decidedly sweeter, so now they are the mystery apple.
This is not to mention the Bartlett Pears and the Asian Pears that were ripe a month ago. I absolutely love the Asian pears, really sweet and supper juicy along with pretty crispy. We have three Asian Pear trees but this year we only harvested one tree, and one tree the Racoon's got to before we could, the other is not producing yet. I did not mention the two Fuji Apple trees, they actually produced very small apples but we need to move them to better locations as they are in well tiles alone the driveway and don't do well there. I also did not mention that many of these trees I grafted myself while teaching grafting for the local Master Gardeners.