Mala-O-Ao, Fruit

We’d love to hear about your garden, please contact us:

Kandice & Rodney Crusat

P.O. Box 6932

Ocean View HI 96737

(808) 929 8198

Email: kandicecrusat@gmail.com

or rodzukes@gmail,com

Thornless Blackberries - We ordered the bare root stock from Johnny’s in the spring of 2017. By the end of the summer we had some blackberries already. It was necessary to make a net house to keep the birds from eating them, especially the Hawaiian Kalij, a wild pheasant.

Anna Apple does really well at our elevation. The first tree we planted in 2004 produced a lot of sweet juicy apples. Some years we get more than one crop.

We also planted a Dorset apple tree and they are still young, and produce only a few apples a year.

Grapes - We have several varieties of grapes and grow them on wire trellises along side the vegetable beds. We do get some grapes, but not as many as we would like.

Nectarines - These seem to be having a hard time here, as they get a fungal disease.

The flowers of these trees are so pretty and resemble the cherry trees in Japan. So we at least enjoy the flowers, if not the fruit as well.

Hawaiian Lilikoi (Passion Fruit) - These wild vines can get out of hand. We have it growing on a long trellis. At our elevation we aren’t getting much fruit yet, or maybe the plant is still too young.

Now, years later, we never get any fruit and we think it’s too cold up here. After all this is a tropical fruit.

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This photo, left, was taken in the summer of 2020. The bushes are huge and we get a lot of fruit. Last year; 2019 we got 4 gallons of berries from 10 plants. They need a lot of pruning.

2020 and the Anna Apple is doing really well. We had a bumper crop with all the rain we had this year. The apples were sweet and juicy.

We cover all the fruit trees with bird netting to keep the birds from eating them all.

Dorset apple - In 2020 we finally got

a good crop of apples from this tree. They were also sweet and juicy.

Peaches - This grafted tree has 3 different peaches. One seems to have died off and two are still dominant. Next year we need to prune it drastically and cover with bird netting. The birds and gnats get at least half of the peaches before we do.