We have dozens of grapevines on our property as well as wild grapes growing along the ditches. The ones above are from our 100 year old seeded concord grapevines that were planted here by the Triplett ancestors before we lived here.Below is an arbor that I built in our backyard with several varieties of seedless and seeded grapes This is one of 2 arbors in this garden that also has apples, asparagus, cherries, plums, hazelnuts, rhubarb, raspberries, jerusalem artichokes, and chestnut. Below that is an arbor that I built that has a dozen varieties of seedles grapes as well as kiwi, thornless blackberries, Medlar and strawberries. This arbor is east of our house. We also have 3 other grape arbors on the property with other varieties of seedless grapes.
We also have a variety of winter squash growing in a forested patch by our north woods, the packet was of several different heirloom winter squash, and there are a few baby squash setting now.
The fun thing about food forest gardens is growing trees, shrubs, vines, bulbs and herbaceous plants all together.
This bed has baby blueberry plants among wild strawberry plants. We are gettng some huge blueberries off of the baby plants this year and the wild strawberries, although they are small berries, they give us berries all summer long. Behind it you can see a medlar tree with perennial wildflowers growing around it for pollination.
We have a number of pear trees, many are dwarfs. By the red crocosmia is a 5 on one pear tree, it bloomed this year for the first time but haven't seen any baby pears on it. The small tree to the left of it is the Moonglow pear also shown below, and it has a lot of small pear trees on it. Beyond it is a red plum tree which I've shown in several pictures, loaded with plums.
The pear tree below is the Ayres Pear tree that was so loaded last year, it has some pears on it but a lot of the blossoms froze this year so it isn't as loaded down as last year. Below it on either side are 2 baby peach trees, so small that they aren't showing up in the photo.
This tree below is a baby Bartlett pear tree, it also had a few blossoms on it for the first time this year, but I don't see any pears on it, we did have a late June freeze that killed off a lot of blossoms.
This one below is a fruit on the Moonglow pear tree, There are a lot of baby fruits on this tree.
This corner of the back garden is where the hazelnuts are growing, but the corner is American Wild Plums. There were none on when this photograph was taken earlier this spring, but they are all loaded now with small red plums. We grow these wild plums in a florest setting mixed with 2 kinds of nut trees as well as maple, cherry, aspen trees and gooseberry bushes, Jerusalem artichokes and apple trees.
We have a dozen or so apple trees, several of the small ones were damaged by wildlife over the winter but all but one have grown back, obviously no apples on those, but we have several larger apple trees as well, one is loaded with apples but the blossoms frozen in the June freeze on all the rest. The crabapples mostly survived the frosts. All the berries are doing fantastic, we have black and red and gold raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, gooseberries, service berries, wintergreen berries, blackberries (which haven't bloomed yet), and elderberries and other wild berries yet to come.
Soon we will be overwhelmed with fruit to can and freeze and make jams and jellies with. As well as tomatoes and vegetables which we also grow. Kinda glad to have a bit of a slow fruit year this year as last year everything was so loaded we couldn't give it all away..maybe we'll have another bumper year again next year.
The hazelnuts are still not quite ready to pick, when they are it will be a race with the forest creatures to get them first, last year they won, year before we won..anyone want to put bets on it this year??
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