Midseason fruit flowers
The
peach
flowers are mostly
done. A few are still pretty and pink like the one shown above,
but most are starting to "undress", with dried up petals slipping off
of fuzzy young fruits.
If you can see the
ovaries left behind when the petals drop away, you know the tree has
decided to mature the fruit. Even if you can't quite make out of
the ovary, it's a good sign if you notice "dead" flowers clinging to
your fruit tree twigs after the petals are gone. Of course, late
freezes, self-thinning, and all kinds of other
things could result in a fruitless year even if you see ovaries at this
stage, but we can always dream.
Our plum tree did drop all of its flowers,
as I suspected it might since this was its first bloom year, but the nanking
cherry bushes seem to be keeping theirs. So do the lower
limbs of the pear trees, despite my topworking.
Still lots of floral
excitement left to come in our perennial plantings this spring.
Our 
Virginia Beauty apple opened
up a few flowers this week, and several clusters are still in the bud
stage. Meanwhile, one of our gooseberries is also well laden.
Next up, blueberries!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Your peaches are finished before your blueberries come in?
This is the first year my peach tree is in bloom, but it still has a few flowers and a few very small fuzzy fruits beginning. The blueberries began blooming more than a month ago, and the berries are almost mature now.
Here in southern Oregon, my 3 plum trees have just come into full bloom. It has been raining like mad, so I am not sure if the bees/bugs will be able to polinate much for fruiting this season.
My apple trees, asian pears, cherrys, strawberry plants and blueberrys still have buds plumping up.
Rasberrys are starting to leaf out. This is the first year for red current, so I noticed it is changing but not sure if it will be leaves or flowers.
I love this time of year.
Sara --- Very interesting that your flowers opened in the opposite order compared to mine! I would say you might have a different type of blueberry, but these are actually rabbiteye blueberries (we're on the northern limit of their range) which is almost definitely what you have way down south. So, maybe the answer is that blueberries and peaches use different cues to decide whether to bloom? For example, if one uses day length and another chill days, they might bloom in the opposite order in different places.
Mona --- Sounds like quite an orchard you have! I hope you get enough of a break from the rain to get fruits. I've read that if it rains constantly while the flowers are open, some trees might not get pollinated, but have never experienced that here.