Santa Rosa plums
By Christopher Matthews
Fruit trees are great windows into the growing season. In fact, our trees are a primary way for me to process the weather for any given spring-summer-fall period. No year is ever the same, and the trees literally bear this out.
We “inherited” our trees – three apple, two pear and one plum – when we bought our farmhouse nine years ago. Like a duck to water, I took to them right away; I guess some latent gene from my Tennessee farm heritage and upbringing kicked in (on my mother’s side, we loved, grew and preserved tree fruits) once we got the property upstate, not to mention the summer job I had before college at the University of Tennessee agricultural research station, in the horticulture department. There I graded different varieties of peaches, from small yellow clings, to large white cling-frees, on how they performed under different insect and fungicide regimes (including “organic”, i.e. no treatments, as the base line control variable).
I don’t spray our trees with chemicals, but I do faithfully prune the trees late winter/early spring, and I thin the early fruit and cull during the growing year (assuming there is fruit!), in particular diseased or damaged fruit. Call it hands-on organic.
I find that the trees have their own personalities and quirks. And none more than our red plum tree, a.k.a. the Santa Rosa plum. Continue reading →
