not so much fruit this year...

 This is what happened to one of our 10 year old apple trees last April's snow storm... Rolf is walking around with a big stick to shake the snow out of the trees, but it pretty much was already too late. We lost a lot of limbs, a few fruit tree tops, all the older wood of our 60+ year old lilac bush (the flat thing behind Rolf) and one of our larger dwarf trees completely toppled over. We tried to push it back - this is as far as it goes - and Rolf pruned most of the extra limbs off to give it a change. It still lives and go figure, it's the one with the most apples this year! I think next Spring we'll chainsaw it down and ent a couple of new shoots on it, the roots do seem to work fine and Rolf did do a pruning & enting workshop.

Our peaches didn't have much snow damage but the frost that came a little while after did take care of most of the blossoms. I think from the 8 or so trees we have only one fruited. Last week Rolf chopped our whole harvest (minus the ones the toddler ate) and it came to a whopping three quart bags total! And no pears at all. This would have been their first year and they were covered in blooms but the tiny fruit buds all blackened and then fell off... I was so disappointed.

Even our fruit shrubs are doing poorly, not from snow or frost but from lack of rain. The summer raspberries and blackberries only bore one crop quite some weeks (seems like months) ago and the blueberries are sooo tiny it's not quite worth picking them. Our fall bearing raspberries are only now starting to fruit a bit and they only grew to about 3-4 feet tall. Same for a lot of the weeds, our butterfly & hummingbird garden is normally taller than us this time of year and it never quite grew more than chest height. Not much of a maze if you can see the paths :)