In this photograph, you can see some of our Seascape strawberries bordering a bed of our blueberries. If you look very carefully, you can see them blooming.
Even better, this weekend, I noticed that our Eversweet strawberries were doing much more than just blooming, as can be seen in the following photograph.
Tonight, I was pleasantly surprised to find our first ripe Eversweet strawberries of the year. In fact, our first fruit of the year.
Also, our 4 in 1 pluot is covered with small, immature fruit; however, these will take another two months mature.
Our peach trees have also been filled with blooms this year as you can see from the following photograph. If I can only protect them from the bugs, squirrels, and possums, we should hopefully have a banner harvest later this summer. The second photograph is interesting in that you can see how the spent flower bud forms into an immature fruit.
In the past, our mulberry tree has been the first fruit to ripen. The mulberry tree was here when we moved into our current house, so I am not entirely sure what kind of mulberry it is. However, I am fairly certain that it is a morus rubra. From the following two photographs, you can see the size of the tree along with a close-up of the immature fruit. I would expect the fruit to begin ripening in about two weeks. Then, the tree will be inundated with cedar waxwings who will remain until all of the fruit is devoured. Our children enjoy the fruit, but I find it to be rather plain, albeit sweet. I may try to make some preserves out of them and see how they turn out. The fruit of morus rubra have a reputation for being "insipid"; a description which I would generally agree with, although it is somewhat unfairly harsh. In contrast, morus nigra is reputed to have outstanding taste. To test that reputation, I planted four bush type morus nigra - Black Persian Mulberries.
