Spring Is Finally Here!

Hi everyone,

April was so cold this year that everything is running late, but the warm weather the last couple weeks is starting to catch things up.  Since I haven’t posted for awhile, I have a lot to tell you about what’s going on around the farm these days!

First of all, as you can see from the picture, asparagus is here.  It started about two weeks late, but at this point we’re cutting it fresh every day, and the heat is really making it grow fast!

In other news, one of the things that we do every winter is prune.  Every perennial crop that we grow gets pruned every year, with the exception of the rhubarb, asparagus, and strawberries (I guess there might be an additional exception I’m forgetting right now.  We grow a LOT of things).  This means all the trees, all the vines, all the bushes…even the old raspberry canes get cut out and the young ones get trimmed.  One of the things my amazing wife pointed out to me the other day was that we need take more videos of the things we do around here.  Of course she is totally right.  Unfortunately most of the pruning is done for the season at this point, but we will definitely shoot more videos around the farm this year.  She caught me pruning the cherry trees the other day:

And then there are the bloopers, mostly just of us laughing (shooting videos of ourselves might make us a little self-conscious).

But that’s from a couple weeks ago.  By last weekend, those little cherry buds had turned into this:

The cherries, plums and peaches are always the first things to bloom.  So at this point, they’re past peak bloom and starting to fade out.  Pretty soon, we’ll be able to see the tiny fruit forming where the blossoms used to be.  About a week later (aka right now), the apple blossoms open:

So that’s what the apple orchards look like right now.  I gave a couple of Blossom Walk tours last weekend for Bent Ladder and we saw the peaches and cherries.  I’m doing two more this weekend on Friday and Saturday to show off the apples.  They’re $15 and include a drink at Bent Ladder afterwards.  If you’re interested, here’s the link: https://bentladder.com/product/evening-blossom-walk/ .

Spring also means planting season at the Orchard.  We added some more apples this year, including some new cider varieties for Bent Ladder, replaced some more winter damaged peach trees, put in some elderberries, and are currently planting strawberries:

In market news, we just brought back ice cream, started carrying Whitehorn Meats products out of Rittman, plus we have some great gifts for Mother’s Day:

Two other quick things you might want to mark your calendars for.  Melinda Hill from OSU is coming back again this year to teach some canning classes for us.  Her first one is on June 14th, and it will be about using water bath canning to make things like fruit jams and jellies.  Also, we’ll have more details about strawberries later (they, like everything else this spring, seem to be running a little late), but our annual Strawberry Jam-Boree will be on the 16th and 17th of June this year.  We just about have the schedule worked out, so I’ll get it posted soon.  For more details on either Melinda or the Jam-Boree, you can visit our Events page.

Ok, that’s it for this time.  I’ll talk to you again soon, and thank you for your interest in our farm!