Blossom awesome

 We have flowers.  The kind that turn into fruit.  Very exciting.

honeyberry blossoms

Honeyberries were the first blossoms to open, the Cinderella bush a little ahead of the larger Berry Blue.  Fat bumble bees with orange-banded abdomens wasted no time attending to pollination.  They must have been so hungry!  One evening I went to inject some water into the rooting pots and had to back off for fear of disturbing the bees and being perceived as a threat.  Returning after sundown, I confidently reached into the bush and began pressing on the syringe only to hear a deep humming somewhere around my armpit.  Uh-oh.  But no stinging ensued.  Glad to know they are so dedicated to the task that they will work overtime to make sure that no blossom is left behind.

strawberry blossom

Strawberry blossoms are so simple.  You can see the little berry already forming in the center of the blossom.  We have two or three varieties of strawberry planted in a small bed at the front of the house, some of which produce heavily in June and some of which produce less heavily all summer.  Before the end of the first summer, 2008, I lost track of which plants were which.  Furthermore, they have all sent out runners with new plants that get moved to where there is a bald patch in the bed.  It doesn't matter; we happily take what we get.  After destroying the Saskatoon bushes and moving the blueberries last year, we moved a few of the babies into the five holes left in the back yard.  Can't have two many strawberries.  When the front yard plants began to bloom last week, I felt defensive, remembering the long ago sight of empty stems after a herd of marauding deer had passed by in the night.  On went the bird netting, which apparently is enough of a deterrent.  Just then, along came a nice bumble bee that immediately crashed into the black plastic filaments.  Argh.  So I left the bed half covered, hoping that enough pollinators can get to the blossoms and hoping the deer try that end of the bed first and give up.

pear blossoms

 The Early Gold pear tree is covered in blossoms right now.  When I came home from work one afternoon, Barry told me to go listen to the tree.  The sound of industry.  This time it was honey bees rather than bumble bees.  I watched a bumble bee land on a pear blossom and quickly take off without feeding.  Not her station, I guess.  More numerous that honey bees were flying insects too small to be bees (or so I believe), that also seemed to be very excited about the blossoms.  They'd better not have been sawflies, who like to leave their slug-like children to make intricate lacework out of pear leaves.  While it is delightful to see a fruit tree covered in a haze of pollinators, it's a bittersweet experience for us who know those pollinators are unlikely to have any useful pollen on their bodies.  There isn't another early blooming pear tree close enough to us for natural pollination. I stopped downtown on Wednesday and pulled handfuls of blossoms off a city tree, blossoms that are then brushed up against our own.  It has worked in the past, but our tree is getting much to big for that.  Neighbours down the alley are planning to buy a pear tree this summer.  I hope the variety and the proximity will be fruitful for both of us.

cherry blossoms

I don't know what to make of the Nanking cherry bushes this year.  A few blossoms here and there.  It seems at odds with the amount of fruit they produced last summer.  Maybe this few blossoms a day goes on for a good long time.  I don't remember.  All three bushes are the same.  I wouldn't be surprised if they are in need of pruning, since I don't understand pruning and therefore don't prune any of my trees or bushes.  Last week, in wrangling some grapevines that were making it difficult to get to the greenhouse door, I snipped one vine that insisted on being in the way.  An hour later I returned to find a large wet spot beneath the wound.  No, I don't like pruning.  The cherry bushes will be fine.