Plant Talk

Harvest Time

This morning as I was walking up our alley in Langley, I was thinking about "Restoration Harvest", a piece Tim Egan wrote this week on his New York Times blog about the beauty of the Eastern Washington apple harvest. Of course, this was Tim Egan, so there's plenty in there about food safety, irrigation, etc., but mostly it's an ode to apples...

It begins “The apples look like Christmas ornaments, wearing a blush of dew at first light” and ends with the conviction that the harvest satisfies a need that has never been bred out of as people.

So just as I’m contemplating this comforting thought, I come upon my neighbor’s final pear harvest and his wheelbarrow full of pumpkins and squashes. So beautiful on a sunny October morning – harvest visuals courtesy of Linda Morris and Dan Babbit’s fruitful garden. 

Beautiful Fruit

If you've ever debated between planting trees that are ornamental or those that are productive, you can put that quandary to rest.  I've never seen such sensual, sumptuous fruit as that growing  in the garden of Linda Morris and Dan Babbit, right down the alley from our garden in Langley.  Really, these pears and plums are so shapely they should be painted by Renoir, so colorful you need a Van Gogh or Cezanne to do them justice. These trees are such beauties, with perfectly healthy leaves and fruit.

This is a semi-dwarf, 'Rescue' pear, with red-orange blushed fruit that matures in September and keeps until December. Both the pear and the plum tree are available from Raintree Nursery in Morton.

As you can see in the photo below, the 'Hollywood' plum tree is so laden that Dan's supported the branches with bamboo canes. It's a Japanese plum with purple leaves that show off the pinkish red fruit, grows about 12 feet high, is disease resistant, and self-fertile.