JoeReal

This year's harvest would even be better than last year's fantastic crops. The relatively perfect California spring with mild perfect temperature and gradual changes, the long periods of rainless days when blooms are opening everywhere and very dense would mean that we will have once again tremendous fruit sets on most of California's stone fruits.

Expect a bumper record crop of Almonds, apricots, peaches, pluots, plums, cherries, apriums, nectarines, cherry plums, and all the other stone fruits. Cherries could once again go down to $0.59/lb or less at my favorite fruit stand.

Peach leaf curl, brown rot, blight diseases would be at a minimum if you were on top of them last year.

We have had the highest chilling hours of the season in 8 years, even though we did not have the arctic blast early this year.

Already all of my apples and exotic pears grafted a couple of years ago have flower buds and starting to open, the very first time and would be able to taste all of them this year.

None of the fireblight models have placed the blooms beyond the cautionary measure, it has been cool enough that the blooms did not earn enough degree days for Erwinia bacteria to multiply to epidemic rates. There would be minimal spraying too.

Quinces are all having nice bud formation. My blueberries are loaded with flower buds.

There would be a lot of thinning work or my fruit trees would break again. I would be thankful for the coming strong winds to thin out my crops for me.

Citruses are starting to churn out tell tale signs of abundant flower buds. Will have once again loaded trees when there are still plenty of citruses to harvest.

Even my bananas have fruits that survived the winter and I could have trunk ripened bananas by the summer's end. Persimmons are the only ones asleep for now. All of my dormant grafts for this season are showing signs of vigorous growth. Truly perfect winter to spring transition, and I hope I don't jinx this by stating my forecast!

So what do you think of this years harvest?

Richard

It is going to be awesome!! My spring-blooming pit and pomes are going gangbusters!! Oh, no ... I guess this means I'll have the happy chore of thinning a bit later on. There is no sign of fireblight on my pear tree, and it is minimal on the dozen cursed ornamental pears in the neighborhood. My citrus are showing buds galore. I have artichoke plants with leaf structure approaching 5 foot high. The strawberries are in full bloom with dozens of developing fruit.

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