Well into summer, I can see that our neighbor’s fruiting trees will yield a generous harvest of Granny Smiths and that his sickly, aged cherry tree is doing just fine, with a batch of plump cherries at every juncture where the tree still fruits.

My own fruit trees are not nearly as happy. Three large cherry trees are fruiting, but the fruit is only about the size of the pit and is being gleefully devoured by the bewinged dinosaurs that frequent the area. A smaller apple is not apparently fruiting.

The largest of the cherries is comparable in size to the untended and grand cherry back at the apartment building, which produced bushels of fruit even under sustained corvid assault. That tree also produced a volunteer seedling that grew from a sprout to a fruiting tree of twenty feet in the ten years we lived there.

That reminds me, I need to swing by and pick a peck, for eating and for planting. I bet I could get my old landlords to let me dig up the smaller tree, come to think of it. Word is that they are not renting the vacancies – just letting the leases lapse to ease sale prospects, which I believe will mean demolition.

That makes me pretty sad.

Back to cherries: clearly, this calls for research!