Wild fruit galore

As I mentioned before, this year the wild plums are producing abundantly. Last year, nada. This year ... holy cow.

We have a massive plum tree in our driveway.

The fruit was so heavy, I was afraid some of the branches would break.

The fruit often looked like clusters of big grapes.

I was describing this bounty of wild plums to a woman at our church, and she wanted to know if she could have some. You bet! In addition to our tree, I called a neighbor who has two abundantly fruitful trees right on the road and got permission to harvest some of his plums.

Between the neighbor's trees and our tree, our church friend went home with somewhere on the order of ten gallons of plums. The branches of our trees are a lot lighter.

And that's not all. Now the apples are maturing. They're not ripe yet, but they're getting there.

We have several venerable apple trees on our property, trees we had professionally trimmed (back when we had money) in an effort to bring them back into productivity. The trees are producing heavily, though the apples are still fairly small. However they're delicious.

There are also thousands upon thousands of wild apple trees in our region.

But wait, there's more! We also have blackberries. Lots and lots of blackberries.

Again, last year, this ubiquitous fruit yielded nothing. Zip, zilch, zero, nada. This year, as with the plums, it's making up for lost time. While we have some outlier berries already ripening, most won't get ripe until late August through mid-September.

Personally I hate blackberries. Not the fruit itself (that's delicious!), but how aggressively the vines spread. There are whole hillsides and pastures taken over by blackberries. That was one nice thing about our last home; we didn't have any blackberries around us.

But say what you will, we live in a spot that has wild fruit galore. It benefits the wildlife immeasurably. That's a lot to be thankful for ... even with blackberries.

A partridge in a pear tree, Idaho style

I was just about to step outside onto the back porch the other day, when a movement caught my eye. A male pheasant flew into one of the apple trees in the driveway, and sat there apparently gobbling up an apple.

A partridge in a pear tree, Idaho style.

Calling fall

Every year about this time, Don tries to "call fall."

In other words, he attempts to detect the almost imperceptible signs that signal the change of seasons. It's not always temperature-related – last year, it was 103F when he called it – but somehow he knows.

For the last few days, he's been sniffing the air, waiting for the undefinable point where the season turns from summer to fall. This morning (August 12), he called it.

A few days earlier, he said, "It occurs to me one of the unconscious things I note is the lack of birdsong." He knows the nesting season is over, the nestlings are all launched, and the singing is significantly decreased.

(That said, yesterday afternoon I saw a female quail in the barnyard that had a huge clutch of newborn chicks with her. I was photographing them from a distance and they were getting hidden behind debris on the ground, but it looked like she had 12 to 15 babies, even this late in the season. More power to her.)

One other oddity worth noting: This year we have no wild plums or blackberries. Both plants are incredibly abundant in the region, but none of them are putting out fruit.

We had no particular deviations in the weather (wind, temperatures, rainfall) than normal, but for whatever reason, nothing is producing, to Mr. Darcy's disappointment. Anyone know why?

We have vast swathes of blackberries along our road. Vast.

Finally, after a fair bit of searching among the various blackberry patches, I saw ONE small clump of unripe berry clusters.

This is odd to the point of creepy. Every year we've lived here so far, the blackberries are producing veritable cascades of fruit.

As for plums ... we must have hundreds of thousands of wild plum trees in the region. Here's the giant one in our driveway.

Normally this tree, and every other plum tree, would be dropping overripe fruit by the bucketload. This year – nada.

Some people have blamed wind (that stripped the blossoms before the fruit could set) or heat (we've had hot days, but absolutely nothing outside of the ordinary) or drought (we're no drier than any typical summer), but nothing explains the complete and utter deficit. Instead, it's like every plum tree decided en masse to take the year off. Go figure.

On the other hand, the apple trees – both wild and domestic – are producing abundantly.

On yet a different note, Don read that we might be in a La Niña year, which in our area means cold and wet (read: snow). As always preceding any winter, we will spend the next couple months getting ready for a bad one. Over twenty years ago, when we first moved to North Idaho, we didn't know what to expect concerning winters, so we decided to face each winter as if we would be snowed in for three months. While that might sound extreme, we've had a couple winters where that diligence paid off in spades.

So we'll stock up on firewood, make sure we have food for everyone (including pets and cows), and do everything else necessary to handle deep snow and inaccessible conditions.

Fall is here!

More tree trimming

Last January, we hired some professional arborists to see if they could salvage some old (about 75 years) and shaggy apple trees we have on our property. We knew this would be a multi-year project.

These stately trees were wildly overgrown. As a result, they produced scads of little bitty apples. The arborists promised to bring them back into production. In the span of one day, the team did what they could, which was quite dramatic.

The result last summer was larger apples, though still too much fruit on the tree to produce anything bigger. The head arborist warned us the trees would "sucker like crazy" the following summer, and he was right.

The team came back yesterday and did some follow-up work. Their goal was to trim suckers off the two trees they worked on the most last year, as well as to tackle some of the other smaller trees and see what they could do to bring them back to health.

They got right to work.

Soon we could see lopped-off branches as they pruned and shaped and cut away deadwood.

Definitely a job that requires a head for heights.

But while it was easiest to photograph them as they worked in the trees closest to the driveway, in fact most of their efforts were concentrated on the one tree they didn't have a chance to do last year. This poor tree was so overgrown and laden with deadwood that the arborists weren't certain they could pull it back from the brink. By the time they were done, the poor little tree was just a stump of its former self.

By the end, we had another huge pile of branches.

We asked the head arborist when we should have them out again for follow-up work. He suggested about 18 months from now, during high summer, so they could trim away unproductive suckers and gauge how the trees are doing in full production mode.

One thing is certain: We're grateful for the chance to pull these mature heritage trees back into beautiful production.

Will wonders never cease?

As I mentioned earlier, we live in a very "fruity" area.

We have wild plums galore, both red and yellow.

We also have blackberries up the whazoo on every roadside and in many fields.

We have an infinite number of apple trees, both wild and domestic.

We planted four peach trees a couple years ago, which are doing well. The blueberries and strawberries are also thriving.

But the one thing we lacked was pears. We had two pear trees in our old garden that produced so heavily that every year I had to transform myself into the "Magic Pear Fairy" and flit through the neighborhood, bestowing the blessings of pears on anyone I could catch.

We have plans to plant a couple of pear trees here, but hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Then earlier this summer, we had a county crew come in and clear out the underbrush on some of our acreage.

This opened things up the land to a tremendous degree, allowing us to see yet more plum and apple trees we previously didn't know we had. And ... one pear tree!

Seriously. look at this mature beauty.

The pears are beautiful, especially considering the tree has been wild and untended for who knows how many years.

It's also unexpected. A pear tree. Who'da thunk? Will wonders never cease?