There are 4.5 active fruit trees on our property. In the backyard there is a pear tree that’s sickly and only producing a few small fruits (that’s the half), a pear-apple tree, a cherry tree which the birds have picked clean long ago, and a plum tree. In the front yard there’s a sour cherry of some kind (Israeli, our neighbor called it), with a fruit so tart not even the birds will eat it. We have a couple of fig trees too, but they are small and not yet producing fruit.

For our first harvest, we are mainly getting plums and pear apples. The latter are tasty but a bit bland, but the plums are juicy and delicious. That said, the quantity we are getting is more than plenty for our modest household size.

Enter Kelly Cline, and her generous nature. She has been sharing some of our bounty with a few chef friends, and cooking up delicacies of her own – and there’s still preserves to make.

We are still in the middle of harvest season and this city boy is happy to grow some fruit, even if there’s a lot of it. Not just because it’s fun, but because I also eat more fruit this way. Yay for that. But given how much we have this first year (granted, most of that has already been promised away), I can’t even imagine how much we will end up with, once the other trees get some love.

The people that lived here before us, apparently didn’t do much to care for these trees, hence the sickly pears. That will change because both Kelly and I love trees in general and fruit trees especially (duh).

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I am very excited for the figs to come into their own, even if it takes a while, and Kelly has already picked out a spot for adding one more fruit tree; a persimmon!

As for the birds eating our cherries? Well, we love birds too, so we let them win the battle this year. Same with the blueberry bush we had netted off. When little birds kept getting caught in the net, we decided to just let them have the blueberries instead. Because birbs.