The first stone fruits of the season was from my Goldkist apricots. Their flesh are near orange instead of yellow, firm but juicy. Since I am using them as pollinators, I only keep the branches small but it seemed to be self fertile and so had some nice fruits in the meager branches. This was followed by Flavorella about 10 days later.

Flavorella was really excellent down to its last tiniest fruits, all gone now. Only the pleasant aftertaste remains embedded in my memories.


My Rainier cherries bore fruits the first time, after about 7 years, on Mahaleb rootstock. Boy, these cherries are big and tasty, about 3/4" to 1 1/4" on the widest dimension! And to think that I almost took them for granted and almost didn't bother to harvest them, but when I looked at the $8/lb price of Rainier cheries from Safeway, I hurried back to my tree and harvested most of them. Got about $80 worth of fruit from the Rainier branch! Bird's didn't bother them because they looked like unripe cherries.

I still have many different cherries left with different ripening stages, and different degree of bird bites! My yellow cherries are holding on very nicely without any disturbance. It is the dark red cherries that are being constantly harassed by these pesky finches and black birds.

The very cool below normal early summer temperature resulted in the disappointing taste of my Luther Burbank plum. I am really waiting for some heat wave to perk things up, but no. They are overripe now, only the aroma remains, but it is insipid and not even sweet at all! So off to Jellies they become.

Some Flavorosa are starting to ripen, and they don't taste good fresh from the tree. But those that I let stay in the fruit bowl for 2 days or more until they turn almost black, their flavor becomes complex and pleasant.

There will be more to come...

How lucky you are Joe, your description of the apricots made my mouth water!!! and Rainier cherries (sigh)

Thanks for sharing, Joe. I was wondering last night what you thought of the Gold Kist. When I left the supermarket I noticed they had some of those Duarte trees in small pots so I had to take a quick look. As you might guess, one of the ones I found in there was Gold Kist. I was tempted to buy it but figured I would check with you first. I still don't know that I want a whole tree of it. I am actually thinking I may pull out my Flavor King, Flavor Queen, Flavor Queen and just graft some of those onto another tree. I have more fruit trees than I can use if I can get them to set well.

Normally I would have Katy ripening this past week but my limb was mistakenly cut off by an employee. It sounds like Gold Kist is even earlier. Have you had Katy to compare it with?

Yes I have one Katy branch with one measly fruit hanging, still green though, so can't compare yet. I hope it holds on.

Don't pull out your Flavor King and other pluots. They are patented and the original tree would only be your evidence that you bought them. What I would suggest is for you to graft pollinators with them. I'll have a checklist, and actually we can graft using non-dormant wood anytime now provided you do the grafting within hours from when you take the non-dormant scionwood. Priority and Express mail wouldn't cut it, unless you have a refrigerated container for shipment. So whenever you are in the vicinity, we can cut you many excellent pollinators to ensure branch-breaking fruit sets.

Or you can wait during the 2nd Saturday of January CRFG scionwood exchange to choose from.

I wish we could grow some of those fruits-- we can grow a few plums, in fact a lot of plums are wild around here, but not the good ones like burbank. Cherries and apricots are out of question around here.

We do get good blueberries here-- I am managing a U-pick bluberry patch and we started picking this week-- I have picked about 40 pounds so far. Time for some blueberry pie!

Today's fruit bowl: Pluots, plumcots, apriums, apricots, white fleshed peaches

Cherries harvested today:

Cherries for wine making, this is about 3 gallons worth of cherry, needed 2 more gallons to make a batch:

And here's a few cherries left:

the unreachable portion of Rainier cherries:

Merton Late Cherries

Van Cherries hidden underneath the plums

Assorted Cherries intentionally left for monitoring flavor through the late season

Starkrimson Cherry

Spanish Yellow Cherries