Fruity?

 
Lots of lovely blossoms right now. It could be a good fruit year. Of course, it's only the second week in May, so we could have a hard frost yet.

And in deciding what to picture this afternoon, I learned something new. If you had shown me just these blossoms, I don't think I could have identified them. Even if you'd given me the three trees, I would have had to guess as to which is which. Now, maybe I'll recognize them better.

The three all have white blossoms: sour cherry, Bartlett pears, and edible crabapple (possibly Ralph Shay variety).

Let's do the easy one first. This is our crabapple. It's an old-fashioned one that you can eat the apples, not an ornamental one. It's so old it should be long dead, but it continues to be wonderful every year. The flowers have long twisted petals with a spray of yellow stamens and anthers.





The other two are harder to tell apart. Here is the sour cherry. The petals are nearly round. The filaments are white with greenish anthers (the two parts of the stamen).





And the pear. The pear petals are nearly identical to the cherry, and maybe it's easiest to distinguish them by looking at the longer view. The filaments are white, but the anthers are darker, looking as if there is a spray of dark dots surrounding the center of the blossom.





If we have a good fruit year, it's hard to do enough with it all to keep me from feeling wasteful. This is especially true of the pears. Although, I have now collected quite a few recipes of things to do with them that we like, and can be frozen.

Last year, I didn't manage to do much at all with our fruit. Even though it wasn't a great year, I didn't do a single thing except with some apples. Hopefully, I'll do better this year.

	See Red, Lovely Crabapples
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