It has been a long, dry, growing season this year for stone fruit.
Two months without any substantial rainfall is not conducive to large fruit sizes. Consequently, when Amy and I decided to pick the peaches and nectarines tonight, we were slightly disappointed by the harvest.
Luckily, the netting that Ben and I had put in place had worked, and no birds had managed to weasel their way underneath it.
Both trees were intact. It took us about 10 minutes to remove the net and to pick all of the fruit, which although were quite sweet to taste, they were lacking moisture and juice.
Having said that, these fruit are edible, but I think we are going to stew them and make sorbet out of both lots.
So tomorrow night we will be attempting to make some sort of iced confectionery.
Wish us luck.
you are so very lucky indeed! 🙂 we have 2 very old and large blood plum trees and lost the entire crop due to poor rains, poor pollination.. even possums i think lost out. enjoy!!
I often find that the smaller water restricted fruit has a more intense flavour, But with heat and lack of water this year, we had mixed success with our fruit trees as well. Although we did get reasonable crops of some things other failed completely.
I’m hoping there are still apples left on two of the trees when I get back in a few weeks. Still, the team back home picked and froze all the cider apples so I can have a shot of making a couple of batches of cider maybe with some home grown honey as well. 🙂
“Swings and Roundabouts” as they used to say.
Sweet. Nice – gautam