NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:A less-than-fruitful summer

We have a fruit orchard of sorts. It didn’t do a dang bit better than our veggie garden did this year. Because our yard is small, we planted mostly semi-dwarf trees. The only standard fruit tree we have is a Santa Rosa plum. We also have a mature standard olive tree that never makes olives and two dwarf Eureka lemons.

In all fairness to our mini-orchard, we should point out that about half of our trees were planted in early 2006. They really can’t be expected to produce much yet. And they haven’t.

The peach and plum were the first to bloom this spring, raising our hopes of a bountiful harvest. Our little Florida Prince peach tree set nearly a dozen peaches. It had almost as many peaches as leaves. The tiny twigs that passed for branches weren’t strong enough to hold that much fruit.

Vic recommended that I cull some of the fruit to keep the branches from breaking off. I whittled the crop down to eight peaches. They ripened when they were no bigger than golf balls. They tasted great, but all eight of our home-grown peaches gave us about as much fruit as one large store-bought peach.

I had higher hopes for the Santa Rosa plum tree, but my hopes were dashed. It blossomed profusely, but then set only one fruit. The lone plum was green and the size of a golf ball when we left for a short trip in June. When we came back a week later, it had ripened and fallen off the tree. One of our roaming possums or raccoons had eaten half of it.

Our Granny Smith apple tree is about 10 years old. It has never given us more than two or three apples during a season. But this year, it outdid itself, possibly in response to some E.B. Stone organic fertilizer I lavished on it and the other trees. Our Granny Smith responded by setting 30 full-sized apples.

However, we have cats in the neighborhood. You’d think that cats wouldn’t bother an apple tree, but we have bird feeders close to the tree. The cats jump up to catch the birds sitting in the apple tree, which is only six feet tall. Since the branches were already heavy with fruit, the added weight of a full-grown cat was more than they could withstand. So far the only apples to come off the tree are ones that have come down attached to entire branches.

Our Gala apple tree is too young to produce much. It set eight apples this spring, of which six survived. They’re the size of golf balls and not getting any bigger. I guess we’ll eat the poor little things soon.

Our Twentieth Century Asian pear required more cooling than our yard offered this winter. It didn’t bother blooming at all. The Shinseiki Asian pear bloomed and set two fruit. I don’t have to tell you what size those little pears are, do I? We had one today. It packed a lot of flavor into one small, crisp, juicy package, but that one petite pear was 50% of our crop.

Our 12-year-old navel orange tree is a much happier tree now that we’ve removed the cypress trees that had shaded it most of its life. Its usually yellow foliage has turned a healthy green. The tree filled the air with the sweet, heavy scent of orange blossoms this spring. Buzzing bees swarmed the tree and over 100 diminutive oranges began to develop. Then, one by one, they fell off the tree.

A mere 13 oranges remain. They show no sign of orange yet, but we don’t expect them to ripen for several more months. Right now, they’re the size of—you guessed it—golf balls.

One of the two dwarf Eureka lemon trees bloomed this year, but it set only a paltry three lemons. The other tree didn’t bother to bloom at all.

Our avocado tree is old enough to bear fruit, but it simply chooses not to. Every year, it blooms and blooms and blooms, but the flowers never seem to get fertilized. Our next-door neighbors get lots of avocados on their trees. We rarely get even one. So imagine our thrill when our avocado tree set a whopping four avocados. For us, this constitutes a bumper crop.

The most productive trees for us aren’t ours. They’re our neighbors’ peach trees. Our neighbors let us have the fruit that hangs into our yard. Their trees were filled with luscious, rosy peaches this summer. But the raccoons seem to know when the peaches are almost ready to be picked. Before the peaches get really ripe, the raccoons make night-time forays into the trees. The peaches grow right outside our bedroom window. All night long we hear the happy purr of raccoons and the thump, thump, thump of peaches rolling off the roof and splattering onto our concrete walkway.

Even with the depredations of raccoons and opossums, we still managed to harvest about 80 peaches. More than half of each peach ends up in the compost bin because of worms and rot, but after a bit of work, we end up with some good fruit. We’ve had peach crisp, peaches on cereal, peaches on ice cream, and peaches in fruit compote this summer.

Our neighbors told us they plan to cut down their peach trees, so there goes the bulk of our fruit crop. Maybe next year we’ll manage to grow some fruit of our own.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].