What did in your plutos, frost? I am seeing some disease on my plutos, too. They are developing bare wood.

I don't really know. It got very cold. I have also never noticed many pollinators on them. Some asian plums don't set well until they are more mature so that could also be a factor. Wickson is supposed to be particularly bad on that count for example. The Howard Miracle started blooming the same time as the pluots, but it kept blooming longer. So length of bloom time could also be a factor - it may be too late when the nearby Japanese plums are at their peak bloom. My two pluots are far apart and have very different pollinators but neither set.

Scott

Dang spell check, I meant pluots. How embarrassing. There, now it is added to dictionary.
It is hard to believe you wouldn't have something cross pollinate with as many varieties as you have, but then I don't think they have to be too far away from a pluot to have problems. Can't you keep them a year or two more?

I'm going to keep 'em for a couple more years. I am topworking a good chunk of the trees but also keeping enough to give them a fair shot.

Scott

Scott: Flavor Supreme is worth keeping if you can get a half dozen fruit sometime soon. If it is as good as mine that will keep you going another couple years. You should try Flavor Grenade if you don't have one. It will at least set a crop if frost doesn't get you...at least I think it will. Don't know how it would do on disease front.

The Fruitnut

Fruit set report

Apple: They are still in flower, but are very healthy looking this year. Two of my tree (Fuji and Gravenstein) are only 2 so I will not let any fruit set on them. Fiesta is flowering well, interestingly in some places where there were spurs last year there are no flowers. I do not think that it over produced last year, as I dropped all but 1 fruit per cluster and removed over half of the buds.

Apricot: Lots of frost damage to young buds, and it is only a 2 year old tree, therefore, no flowers yet

Peaches: My Frost Peach is loaded with fruit, in fact I thinned the fruit to one every 6 inches last night. I have it trained up to about 10 feet along the south wall of my house. The trunk is only about 2.5 feet and the fruiting wood starts there. Almost every blossom set fruit. Some of the nodes along the fruiting branches had fruit sets of 6-8 fruitlets the size of small marbles. I need to thin out some of the growth as well. I just planted a Veteran in February and I am going to remove any fruit that sets on it. Unfortunately, I do not think the nursery was very good about controlling leaf curl as it has some despite my application of copper before bud brake late in the dormant season.

Pears: The Pears had tons of blossoms. My Flemish beauty seems to have set quite a few as well. The Anjou had fewer blossoms but it seems to have set a good amount of fruit as well. We will see how many drop naturally, in the past I have found that most do, as my trees are only 5 this year. Conference is new as of February, it has 1 flower cluster, but I will be removing any fruit that sets.

Plum: Stanley plum has lots of fruitlets on the lower branches, and fewer on the upper branches. There are probably 4 to 5 pepper corn sized fruitlets per spur, I will drop fruit next month after natural drop occurs. My Green Gage is new this February.

Persimmon: Just leafing out now. It dropped all its fruit last year when they were the size of a quarter. Hopefully that doesn't happen this year, but it is young too.

Figs: Lots of embryos swelling on outer tips of the branches on both the Italian honey and brown turkey.

Grapes vertical growth is only 2 inches now

Citrus: Lisbon Lemon set many fruit last month, I have thinned them out a bit, and it continues to flower. The lime (I think it is a Tahitian) is producing some new flowers now. I put my citrus out two weeks ago, and of course a light frost hit them the first night. I sustained some damage, but I think they are tough enough to handle it.

cheers
Sam

way past beyond the fruit set report. Already ate my first cherry of the season. Flavorella's sizes are accelerating... It would be next.

I got lucky on apricots, so far, this year. Both Tilton and Mormon-Chinese are heavily set; history suggests thinning will not be necessary, as the June fruit drop and the squirrels will accomplish most of that.

But my beloved prune simply failed to emerge from dormancy. Many of the branches appear to be alive, but the extremities are progressively dying back. It's waaaaay too late to expect a recovery.

Still, we have apparently succeeded in grafting a bud from one its root suckers to a Nanking cherry rootstock. So we may have it again in a few years.

The pear, multi-grafted last year and this, hasn't bloomed, in spite of doing so in the past two seasons and even though pears all over town are abloom. We'll see what happens.

The Liberty apple is nothing short of enthusiastic, and eight of the varieties on that tree are blooming. We've had lots of bees and I'm anticipating decent fruit set. Hasn't happened yet. Stay tuned ... :-)

Good luck all,

Mark