Green fruit

Remember those strawberry blossoms? They’re turning into strawberries!

Second year strawberry plant.

Other flowers have gone and fruited, too.

A few weeks ago, I photographed these pretty pink things.

They smelled as sweet as they look.

Then, a couple days ago, when my friend – who also recommended we dig up our carrots — came over to help us prune the fruit trees, we noticed something beautiful.

Where the blossoms were are now the babiest apples I’ve ever seen.

They're already gettin' reddish.

Beautiful baby apples.

I don’t have much hope for those strawberries. Between the mice and the birds, I bet we’ll be lucky to get one sweet bite. That’s OK, though. We don’t have many strawberry plants to begin with.

But I intend to feel the crunch of those apples when they ripen, dang it!

We’ll be looking into bird nets here soon. Although this is the only fruit tree so far that seems to be fruiting (we also have plums, a cherry, another apple and a peach — all in the ground for less than a year), we’ll definitely need to ward the beaks off the blueberries.

Do you have bird net recommendations or other earth-friendly pest deterrent suggestions for us first-time fruit growers?

My big red sentry did catch one mouse last year, but he seems to lay down a lot on the job.

Golden at sunset.