Friday Photo Shoot Out: Trees

In honor of Earth Day (Every day should be Earth Day. The earth defines days.), this week's shootout is Trees. I was home on vacation yesterday, puttering around, getting the vegetable garden in order, so I decided to give you a tour of the trees right here in the yard.

Mushy yellow plums. You must have to pick these on just the right day, not too early, not too late. I've never been able to figure out what day it is. Fortunately, one of my friends likes them.

The really old cherry. It always has lots of flowers but very little fruit.

The golden delicious apple. Goldens off the tree, not too ripe, are in fact delicious. I've always hated the mushy, tasteless lies from the store. This is my number-one apple producer, the Canada not giving many, and the two red apple trees being still quite small, and I'm still working my way through the dried apple slices I made over the summer & fall.
To it's right, the cherry that ripens later.
Bizzy bizzy bizzy.

This one gives yellow, tear-drop shaped plums. Not my favorites. And there's that rhubarb leaping up again. You'd never know I dug half of it up last season.

Don't know what kind of fruit this one gives, though the flowers look like apples. Again! How about a pear tree...?

Some kind of plum. With cats.This apple gives nice tart red ones. No idea what they're called, but at the market many of the apple names are not the same as those in the States anyway.

Here they come...

Another plum, and the cherry that ripens earlier. I can't tell the difference between the cherries except that one peaks about two weeks after the other. Which is nice! I think they're both Burlats, the large, ruby-toned eating cherries very popular here. They make excellent jam, too.

The Canada Grey apple. Love those apples.
Here we are preparing for the next apple crop.

A mirabelle plum. I trimmed off a lot of dead branches in the fall, but there are more. This tree has a thing about putting out a great many tiny branches, but few major ones.

What's left of the apricot, after losing the major branch last fall. Apricots will be precious this year!

The wild plum, always happy to shoot up again, no matter how much I hack at it to make it stop scraping against the house and the shed in the wind. These too you need to pick on the right day. Too soon and they're too tart; too late and they're tasteless.

With all these fruit trees, plus the blueberries and blackberries I pick in the surrounding hills every year, I try to never buy fruit. Though I always do! The yard is way too heavy on plums, with nary a pear or peach. And sometimes I just must have pineapple, or tangerines.

I'm trying to eat from the vegetable patch, too. Still working on the tomato sauce from last season! Peas and green beans I try to keep up with while they're small & tender. A long row of sweet corn is just in, though the seeds are a little old. The potatos didn't come up - perhaps they spent just a little too long in the sack in the basement and had nothing left when I finally got them in the ground three weeks ago. Onions go in soon, and I'll think about salad greens. The herb patch is doing fine.

Only one tree at the front of the house. I've carved out a tunnel to get from the driveway to the front door. Not that I ever use either one, preferring the gate next to the mailbox and the kitchen entry.

I seem to have missed two trees - a plum that gives the kind of fruit you make prunes out of, and the tree way in the back corner that appears to be a hazel, though it doesn't make worthwhile nuts. Darn! I adore hazelnuts!

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So there are my trees for Earth Day. To visit other Shooter, click here!

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