For most of us, summer fruit season is now winding down.
I am in central NC. Gone are the local strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and peaches. Melons have just finished up their best time of the year. Pears and apples are coming in, but they are the swan song of the local fruit season, and NC isn’t known for either of those, though you can find some good ones from the northern and western parts of the area.
Strawberries here are almost always good and that held true this year.
Blueberries were hit and miss – the best ones were the ones we raised ourselves, but we only have two bushes, so not enough of those. Late season blueberries here were not great for eating out of hand, but fantastic in pancakes and scones.
Blackberries have been pretty good.
Watermelon was just OK, but cantaloupe and honeydew were very good.
Tomatoes were just OK; in my own garden I got a lot more leaves and stems than I did fruit, which was disappointing.
This was a bad year for raspberries – not many on my own plants and a very short local season – not really sure why.
Any fruit we get over the winter here comes from far away, costs more and is almost never as good as what we can get locally. Honeycrisp apples and clementines are the two things that I can usually count on as being decent winter fruit choices. Red grapes are OK sometimes too (I don’t care for our local muscadines or scuppernongs, though those are available right now for people who like them).
So how do you rate the quality of your fruit this year?
Bumper crop of blueberries. Last year was very slim. Birds ate a lot last year. This year we picked about 16 one gallon zip lock bags full. Let the rest fall off. 6 large, mature, plants.
I haven’t gone out to eat in months, so have been buying a lot of fruit to take with me to work for lunch and snacks. Red grapes, blueberries, and strawberries have been good, and all are still available. I particularly liked the cherries over the last couple of months, but they are now out of season (which is something I have never noticed before), so I can’t get them anymore.
Apples and bananas have been good, but the oranges and tangerines have been awful.
I just got some blackberries today in place of the cherries. They look pretty good, too.
The watermelons we had available here were…mediocre, the cherries were unusually good this year, haven’t seen any red delicious apples in a long time (and no great loss) but plenty of pink ladys, fujis and ambrosias. The oranges I’ve seen were good up until a few weeks ago, now all I can find are those thin skinned, hard to peel seeded kind that don’t seem to taste as good. Pears have been pears, around here they seem to maintain a constant level of quality over all regardless of season. Um strawberries, blueberries, just berries in general, I haven’t really paid much attention to. Apricot season seemed rather short this year, or at least I saw fewer apricots for a shorter period than I remember the season for them being. Peaches nectarines and apricots all together have seemingly been in short supply locally as far as I can tell this year
Strawberry season for Hood berries was good but too short. Wasn’t a heat wave either, which would normally be the end of the Hoods, which are very delicate berries. My strawberry hill at home was prolific but the season felt about a week or two short. Harumph.
Cherries were very mediocre here, the Rainiers barely existed and the cool, cloudy weather kept most of them from ripening properly so very sour. Disappointing.
We did have an early run of white nectarines and apricots that were fookin’ awesome but were then supplanted by disappointingly mealy non-local produce. Hood River produces some of the finest stone fruit on the planet, switching over to picked green California fruit is always a shock.
Little personal watermelons have been quite nice although my home grown teensy melons are adorable but I doubt they’re going to ripen properly. It’s been a very cool summer with morning marine fog much later in the season than usual–it’s our regional air conditioning but it’s not conducive to good fruit production. Sigh.
Our tomato crop (my daughter and son in law and I all co-garden both our places, they rent the house next door to me) is pretty huge so far, I have plum tomatoes that are prolific AF and the kids’ little orange cherry tomatoes have produced what seems like four metric tonnes so far. It’s a good problem to have and I just set up a dehydrator so winter dried tomatoes it is.
I don’t eat apples, grapes or oranges until October. I have to count on those fruits to get me through the winter.
I live on watermelon and cantaloupe all summer. I buy a huge Sam’s Club watermelon every week along with 4 Sugar Kiss cantaloupes. I pretty much eat all of it by myself. My husband has a few pieces here and there. I’ve only been disappointed in maybe 3 watermelons. The rest have been excellent and you can’t find a better tasting cantaloupe than the Suger Kiss. They are amazing and always ripe when you buy them.
I eat a banana every day all year long. They’ve been very banana-y! Never have an issue with bananas.
I also love raspberries but they weren’t very good this year. The wild ones were practically non-existent. We had a very hot and dry summer.
Blackberries and blueberries were ok - some were over ripe when I bought them.
Cherries were pretty good. Although I had one container where the cherries weren’t very firm.
Peaches, plums, etc. are always a crap shoot here. They’re hard as a rock when purchased so then I do the paper bag thing. Hopefully I remember there is a bag of fruit in the pantry before the get over ripe. Of all the stone fruits, I only bought one bag of nectarines this summer and we didn’t finish them. We threw them out for the critters out back.
Buying a watermelon is always a crap-shoot for me. This past summer I bought two excellent watermelons, four extremely average watermelons, and one that was inedible.
I found most seasonal fruit (plums, peaches, nectarines, berries, cherries) to be pretty disappointing this year. Bananas are bog standard regardless of season. Haven’t bought a melon yet.
I like to pick all of my fruit but because most of the groceries have been delivered, we probably missed out on a lot of the best of the crop. Getting out to the store more often these days so I will pick some melons to avoid completely missing out. Looking forward to the grapes and pears this fall.