We found ripe pears in the orchard. Well, they weren't quite ripe, but that was fine, since pears are supposed to ripen off the tree. We needed to use the long-handled fruit picker, and I had to call Brian out to help us, since he's tall. From four trees, we got over a bushel--which looks like a lot of fruit.... ...until I started checking my orchard sources, and I read that a mature standard pear tree should yield 2-8 bushels. And we have FOUR mature standard pear trees.

As you may recall, we have scores of productive peach trees, and we have a big problem with a fungal infection. It's time to fight back! Tom is laboriously and systematically working through the orchard, tackling one tree at a time. For each tree, he is collecting all of the fruit (even the fruit on the ground) and the branches and twigs will diseased leaves. We'll destroy all of those parts in a bonfire. Even though heavy pruning should ideally be done in late winter, th

Br'er Rabbit certainly made the brier patch out to be a foreboding place--and ours was no exception. We've got two rows of black raspberry canes, about 20 feet long. They were planted with enough room to walk between them, but that is no longer possible. We picked more than four gallons of berries this year, and there were many more deep in the thicket where we couldn't reach them. Theoretically, a brier patch CAN be kept neat. The berries are borne on canes that sprouted