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.