Truce

Last year rabbits in our area had a very good breeding season.  We knew we had to keep an eye out for rabbit damage on our newly and even 2-3 year old trees.  Unfortunately we began seeing damage as early as mid December.  The easy solution was to thin the number of rabbits in the area or come up with another solution.  Although I have fond memories of my maternal Grandfather's rabbit fricassee we decided to find another solution.   

Tree pruning is an annual event for all orchards. We thin the trees to allow for larger fruit, more air circulation, thus better disease control, and more return bloom in the following season.  Usually we prune and move the branches into the wood line.  This year we also made piles of pruned branches along the fence line were the rabbits were coming from nightly.  This worked better than we had hoped.   They stayed in these brush piles and stripped the branches and more importantly we stopped seeing damage inside the orchard.  As long as they do minimal damage in the orchard we can call a truce.  

2106 Honey Harvest

2016 Honey Harvest

This has been another interesting year at our Foster apiary.  We started the season with a strong hive and two brand new hives. Each new hive started life as a queen and three pounds of worker bees. Usually you have a good year if a new hive gives you one super worth of honey once in a great while you can get two supers worth of honey.  A honey super is the boxes above the bottom two larger boxes.  The bottom two larger boxes are for the bees to store honey and pollen and raise bees and survive through the winter. The above boxes are for the bee keeper.

The strong hive was too strong, I knew it was too strong, I knew I should have split it in half but just did  not get to it in time so it swarmed and naturally reduced its size.  When that happens you may or may not get some excess honey we were fortunate to get one nice super of honey.

The two new hives were first installed at the North Scituate orchard to help in apple and pear pollination. Unfortunately the weather was horrible and they pretty much lived on the sugar water we provided.  Once pollination was over we moved them to the Foster Apiary.  One hive was doing well and the other was weak and had a queen problem.  She was there just not producing much.  Things got busy and when I went back to see if I could put on any supers the weak hive was almost gone. The other new hive was doing really well and I suspect that the bees from the now queen less hive started migrating to the stronger hive.  Today August 23rd we were able to remove five full or almost full honey supers from one 2016 hive.

The amount of clover and other wild flowers in Foster is really amazing and for a second year we had layers of clover and other wild flowers right through August.  We left an empty honey super on each hive and we recently planted buckwheat for weed suppression.  Maybe just maybe we will have some buckwheat honey later in the season.

No Peaches or Nectarines for 2016

It is not hard to guess what is missing from this image, blossoms. Out of almost 250 peach and nectarine trees we counted seven blossoms. Most years we lose buds, blossoms and or developing fruit to spring freezes. A peach orchard can lose a very high percentage of fruit stages and still have an excellent crop.  This year the loss is virtually 100%.   The experts tell us that this year the fruit buds died during the extremely cold weather in February, combined with the warm December and January.

We are still renovating our peach and nectarine orchard and replaced sixty trees this spring including the addition of a white peach and a white nectarine.  We will also take the time to cut back the mature peach and nectarine trees to get them in good shape for next season.  

We still expect a plum crop this season.  The plums are also a stone fruit but it looks like they are just slightly hardier.    

A New Friend

Now that the orchard is closed for the season we are getting back to doing some long overdue farming. One of the "to do" items on our list is mowing some of the overgrown fields were our apiary is located.  I just finished making three passes with the mower and noticed a small animal running just off the left front tire of the tractor.  I looked closely to see if it was a field mouse or a vole.  Mice do some damage to young apple trees but voles do much more and can kill new plantings.  Over my shoulder a shadow formed and instantly a red-tail hawk landed and took off with its prey in its claws.  This happened just a few feet from the front of the tractor.  I stopped and watched it feed on the rodent in a nearby tree and tried taking some images with the cheap camera on my phone.  

Not to belabor the story but in the three hours of mowing this occurred six more times.  Because the cleared area kept getting larger each of the other times the hawk was much further away from me when it picked up its meal.   

After the fifth rodent the hawk became a little more trusting and perched very close to were I was mowing, resting on top of a tree stake.  The hawks claws are wrapped around the circumference of the round stake about six inches down from the top with the hawks chest resting on the top of the stake.  From this position the hawk launched itself for the last two rodents of our partnership.  The stake is only about eight feet off the ground and the hawk just pushed off and glided to its prey without a wing beat.  Very cool.  I have one more mowing chore and I hope my new friend stops by for a meal.   

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.

Not Quite the Way it is Suppose to Work

Bee swarming has become more of a problem for us in recent years. Bees swarm when they decide they (the worker bees) want to raise one or more new queens and find a new home taking honey with them to establish a new hive.  This leaves the original hive weaker, less worker bees, and less honey.  Prior to finding a new home they pause outside the hive, usually in a tree while scout bees search for a new home.  In the past we were lucky enough to notice the bees waiting to find a new home and were able to capture them.  This was always a hit or miss operation, requiring luck and depending on how high up in the tree they were an element of danger. This past winter we read a book describing how to build and set up swarm bait traps.  We liked this idea since it allowed the swarm bait trap to act as the temporary home and took some of the luck and a lot of the potential for an accident out of the capture.  The trap is baited with lemon oil and the dimensions are right for the bees to consider it a home.  The way it is suppose to work is that they will set up residence inside the trap and we would block the entrances at night and remove the hive to an area we are going to set up a new permanent  hive and transfer the bees the next morning.  Well as you can see it didn't quite work out the way it is suppose to.  The bees decided in their wisdom to establish the colony below the swarm bait trap.  We were still able to capture the bees and it didn't require a ladder which was the whole point of using the traps in the first place so we are not complaining.   This is also a way to capture bees for your garden and use the trap as a permanent home.  The name of the book is "Swarm Traps and Bait Hives" by McCartney Taylor.  

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.

Stone Boat

This spring we removed some more trees from the woodland section of our orchard. We did this for couple of reasons. First it will provide us, friends and neighbors with firewood for next season, but most importantly it will allow the new orchard we planted last season and added to this season with more light penetration.

Some of the trees were felled in areas that would not support the weight of a tractor this time of the year. My neighbor Jack and I were discussing how to remove the logs, which included too many pulleys and winches, when we began discussing the old time method of using a stone boat or sled to move heavy objects without the use of wheels. Jack remembered seeing a stone boat in a barn on his sister-in-laws family farm. A phone call later we were assessing the condition of the stone boat. The cast iron front was in perfect condition but all the wood needed replacing. Jack's idea was to sandwich 2" pine planks with a sheet metal bottom and a plywood top.

The results can be seen in the blog image. Jack is driving the tractor. The stone boat worked far better than we imagined and saved us a substantial amount of time over using pulleys and winches, plus we saved a piece of farm equipment history. It's also lots of fun riding the empty stone boat back into position.