White Orchard

This is the time of year were the orchard looks very unnatural with all the apple trees having a white haze.  The white haze is multiple layers of kaolin clay.  Kaolin clay is a naturally occurring mineral that is used in prepared foods, toothpaste, baby power and is were "kao"pectate derives its name.  The orchard formulation of kaolin clay is called Surround.  Surround was the final piece of the puzzle in making organic apple growing appear economically feasible in the Northeast.  Surround works by being an irritant to insects and creates an unnatural environment.  Surround applications are the only practical method of controlling the insect Plum Curculio (PC).  Surround is placed on the trees at petal fall in three separate sprays to create a layering effect and reapplied after rains until the PC mating/egg laying season is over, estimated at early June this year.  It need not be said but, Disclaimer: If you use Surround always follow the label, not my musings.   

peaches

Two years ago we planted two very late ripening peach varieties between our asian pears.  The thought was that we would replant a new area with pears and mange them organically and expand our nectarine and peach orchard by combining two adjacent fields. As the peaches grew we would cut down the asian pears and rely on the new pear orchard.  The peaches are doing really well as can be seen in the image.   The pears not so well.  The peaches are Flaming Fury Big George and Autumnstark and if all goes well we should be picking them during apple season.  

Raspberry Patch Redux

The right side of the image is a new planting of Himbo Top red raspberries. Folks who have picked raspberries from our little patch in the past will recognize that the image is the area we previously grew Kiwi Gold raspberries. We originally planted Kiwi Gold to have a yellow raspberry to go along with Heritage and Autumn Bitten, our red raspberries. While we really like the taste of Kiwi Gold, when picked ripe, we and our customers found it difficult to identify the color phase when Kiwi Gold is at its best flavor. This difficulty caused us to make the decision to replace the Kiwi Gold with Himbo Top.

Because of disease concerns it is not advisable to replant raspberries in an area that previously grew raspberries so, although not ideal, our workaround was to plant the Himbo Top in the walking path next to the Kiwi Gold and use the Kiwi Gold row as the new walking path. We really like the flavor profile, picking characteristics, and disease resistance of Himbo Top and look forward to trying them in a year or two.

Garlic Harvest 2011

We began lifting the garlic out of the ground on July 16th and finished on the 18th. This season the weather could not have been more perfect. All three days were some of the coolest temperatures of July. As always we placed the garlic in our barn's loft and use commercial size fans to begin the curing process. We began cleaning the garlic on the 23th and finished on the 25th, some of the hottest days of July. But working in the barn on those hot days with the fans going was quite pleasant. The turkey poults are still in the orchard and each of the days we pulled garlic I was surrounded by the poults and their mothers for the entire day, some times I would look up and the poults were no more than 15 ft away eating weed seeds or bugs or both. This years crop of galric looks very good with some real nice size Music and German White garlic. The image is some of the Music garlic crop.

Turkeys that look like Quail

Seeing Turkeys in New England and in our Orchard is usually not noteworthy. Jean and I were moving a piece of fencing last week and heard a flutter of wings. When we looked up it looked like a covey of quail was in the air, about eight birds. We looked down and seeing an adult female Turkey still walking we quickly realized that we had flushed a group of baby turkeys, poults. We have never seen poults fly before and were surprised how strongly they flew. The next day we noticed a second adult Turkey with poults and we now have two adult females with poults hanging out at the orchard with a total of twelve to sixteen poults. Today starts the second week they are hanging out. Very cool.

Where are the Sheep?

Shortly after we sold the bottle lamb this year we received a call from another family that purchased a starter flock from us last year. This family really liked the Soay and wanted to expand there flock. In discussing what they were looking for I suggested that they might want to purchase our entire flock. The combined flock come from three distinct blood lines with the newest line from our purchase of a lamb ram out of New York last season.. They now also have a ram and ewe that are pure "Johnson" line. The "Johnson" line was the original line of Soays prevelant in the New England area and were the Soay we began with back in 2003. We sold the sheep for a few reasons. Although we really like Soay we were ready for something different and this was an oppurtunity to place the entire flock with a family that wants to raise and breed Soay. Another reason was that we wanted to replace all the fencing in the front of the sheep's pen with new fencing and make a number of other infrastructure changes in that area. What's next for animals at Elwood Orchard? Not sure, we have a few ideas but some of our first thoughts are turning out to be difficult to find, but we are still working on them... stay tuned.

Limousine Lamb

This season one of our older ewes gave birth to twins. She, Dalilah, has consistently given us a healthy lamb since her first breeding season five years ago. She is a great mom and always raised healthy lambs. This season we noticed that she was much larger than any previous season and initially we anticipated that she would be the first ewe to lamb instead of the last. We raise heritage breeds because they rarely need help lambing and if you leave them alone you will find a healthy lamb feeding on her mother the next day. We were concerned that she was so large and noticeably uncomfortable that I broke my rule of leaving her alone. She was very vocal while giving birth and I would check on her frequently. I spooked her with a flashlight just while she was dropping her second lamb. At that point I left her alone for the night and visited her the next morning. It was clear the next morning that she did not bond with one of the lambs. I called my brother the help get the lamb some initial feedings of colostrum from the mother which is important for future health and needs to occur in the first 24 hours. We tried some techniques for bonding the rejected lamb with the mom all with no success. We had our first bottle lamb after sixty lambs born over the years. Bottle lamb feeding is relaxing but requires a commitment. Four feedings a day for the first ten days then three feeding a day until weaned in six to eight weeks. Occasionally folks look for bottle lambs as a family projects so we decided to list the lamb for sale as a bottle lamb looking for a committed family. We expected the lamb to be sold as a pet and not necessarily to a Soay breeder. We received a call from a lady who already had two Soay and had a home based business. After some conversation we realized that she bought the Soay from us the previous season. Of course the home based business was a limousine business and yes the bottle lamb was picked up in a limo.