2015 Honey Crop Experiment

We have three hives at an apiary in Foster.  This season was an interesting honey year and we actually tried managing the wild flowers making it even more interesting.   Early in the season we had large areas of Red Clover.  Red clover is a tall coarse stemmed purple/red clover.  As the red clover began to die back our cutting revealed white clover which grows much closer to the ground and a high field cutting left the white clover intact.  We also left some areas completely alone providing the bees with a succession of wild flowers.  This was all helped along with a decent amount of fairly consistent moisture going into August.

The normal occurrence, in much of New England, is for the bees to have a very difficult time, from late July and into August, finding nectar producing flowers, sometimes referred to nectar dearth. That has not happened yet this season.  We are not sure if managing the fields in the manner we described will work in a year without such consistent moisture but we think it is worth another try next season.

While we would feel comfortable calling this years honey crop clover honey, we won't.

Our honey is not organic.  We only treat, when necessary, with formic acid which is allowed in the organic program for mite reduction.  Because our bees forage at other farms, residential areas and even a golf course our honey can not be certified.

Peach Tree Borer - Twist Tie Solution

Unlike our apples and pears our stone fruits ( plums, apricots, peaches, nectarines) are not organic. However, whenever possible, we use organic solutions to control disease and insect problems.

A new solution we are using is mating disruption to control the greater and lesser peach tree borer. These twist ties release a pheromone that disrupts the pheromone released by the female insect thus confusing the male.  No mating means no egg laying in the bark of the tree meaning no borers killing the branch or tree.

This is one of the few organic allowed solutions that work as well or almost as well as conventional controls.

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.  

Birds Nest

Jean and I we out thinning apples a few days ago, not a lot of apples this season, but that's another story.  We often come across birds nests in our apple trees, robins, sparrows and swallows.  But we came across this nest, one we have never seen before.  Often bird nests rest on branches in the tree but this one was woven around a  Y shaped branch with no bottom support with what looked like spider webbing and the body had wasp nest paper incorporated into the nest.   At the time we initially saw the nest it had two eggs, when we went back to take an image of the nest it had one more egg plus a cow bird egg.  Cow birds parasitize the nests of other birds to get the mother to raise the cow bird's offspring. Since the cow bird offspring grows quickly it often out competes the host bird's offspring.

We did some research to identify the nest and eggs, not wanting to harass the mother. Our best guess is that it is a Red-Eyed Vireo .  Most of the pieces fit including the use of wasp paper in the nest.  One item that didn't fit is their preference to nest in forest canopies.  I guess if you stretch the definition of forest canopies nesting at five feet in a couple of acres of six foot trees would qualify.   If you think I have it wrong with the identification please let us know.

Peach Blossom Time

This is the time of the year when people pull into our orchard and ask if they can take images of the Peach  and Nectarine bloom.  Some folks take images of individual blossoms, some individual trees and others take images of family and friends.  This gentleman took images of his 1949 22nd Series Packard Station Sedan, also known as a Woody.  Very cool.  

Replacement Trees

This season we decided to replace many of our JonaFree trees.  These were the first apple trees we planted back in the early nineties.  We kept about twenty trees because we liked the fruit however they have a tendency to drop when they ripen.  This obviously is a big problem for a pick your own (PYO) orchard.  In addition to losing the fruit the clean-up was very time consuming.  Back when we were a conventional orchard we were able to use a spray that held the fruit on the trees during the PYO season, making dropping less of an issue.

The replacement trees will produce a fruit called Sansa.  We are excited about Sansa which is a straight cross between Gala and Akane, and was developed in Japan.  Sansa contains Gala's inherent sweetness along with Akane's disease resistance.  We expect to begin seeing fruit in two to three years with full production in about five years.  By the way that is Raven laying down waiting for me to finish taking pictures.