More Apples -- No More Pumpkin Patch

This year we planted more apple trees utilizing the space we previously used to grow pumpkins. We will continue a grow organic pumpkins and winter squash at another location, as well as buy pumpkins (not organic) from another farm, but will no longer have pick-your-own pumpkins.

Most of the trees we planted are Liberty, Enterprise, and Freedom. Theses three apple varieties have outstanding disease resistance, including apple scab and apple cedar rust.  They are multi purpose Macintosh type apples that cover early, mid, and late season.  The late season apple, Enterprise, will keep several months in a refrigerator.

I think these three apple varieties are perfect for a home owner wanting to grow their own apples.

Rejuvenate Peach and Nectarine Orchard

Many of our Peaches and Nectarines are reaching the end of their useful life.  This year we began a three to four year plan to replace all of these trees.  The bad part of doing this is that we will turn marginally producing trees to non producing trees for at least two and most likely three years.  The upside is it will allow us to try some new varieties including a later Nectarine and a White Peach.  We also included some Red Gold Nectarines.  Red Gold is the first nectarine we grew and was also the best tasting, but difficult to grow.  Because of this difficulty we have not had Red Golds for about ten years.  I'm believing I'm a better grower than when we started....we will see.