At Kubota Garden the other day, the prettiest rose hips (former roses) I’ve ever seen.

Shiny red rose hips on a wild rose in Kubota Garden in South Seattle

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Dark red cherries of some kind on my backyard 5-graft tree, right before I picked them. I lost the tags, so don’t know the exact name. But they are delicious! I really love this image and I am calling it my weekly Saturday Top Shot.

Shiny dark cherries hang from the tree

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Right across from my house, the pink tree magnificence, at least when the sun comes out. An early spring this year. Sorry, Boston!

A cherry tree in full bloom, with some bare branches behind it

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In the break we had from rain a couple of days ago, I went out with my dry paintbrush and pollinated my two little fruit trees. (“Make like a bee!”) I am lucky enough to have a dwarf cherry tree with multiple grafts on it of different varieties. However, even though it is “self-fertile,” all that means is that it doesn’t need another variety to pollinate. It still needs some pollen to move around for the fruit to set. So out I go, on a sunny day, with my soft, dry paintbrush, and gently brush the blossoms. I have found it makes a big difference. Use this technique on tomato plants, too.

Fruiting cherry tree blooms in backyard orchard

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Not too many flowers blooming around the neighborhood right now, so I’m posting an image for our Southern hemisphere friends: cherry blossoms from the opposite season, from a tree close to my old house in Des Moines, WA.

Cherry blossoms on a tree in the Pacific Northwest in April

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We have a very young cherry tree with five different kinds of cherries grafted onto a dwarf rootstock. This is its second year and it actually had some cherries. I put some old sheer curtains around the fruiting branches and attached it with clothespins, which I had read about online, and it did work to protect them from the birds, even if it looked ugly in the yard. So here are the bing-type black ones that I picked a week or so ago, and they did taste as wonderful as I had hoped.

Do you see that the cherries are so shiny that they are like little mirrors, and they are reflecting my backyard with the tall trees and the blue sky? The trees to the left in the reflection are still in the sunlight and the others are now in shade. Fun!

Shiny black cherries, just picked

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