Hi everyone,
It’s been another wet week (you can see as much from some of my photos below), but overall, things aren’t looking to bad. We thankfully avoided almost all of the hail that slammed a lot of our area a couple nights ago. Hail can be devastating to a fruit farmer even this early in the season, and we luckily only had a couple of small pellets.
Other than that, all the crops are moving right along. I posted about strawberries yesterday, so I won’t repeat all of that today (you can read it here). The blueberries are starting to get some size (as you can see from the photo above), as are the raspberries. Pollination is done with just about all the fruit now except the grapes, and we mostly have baby fruitlets of various sizes.
Grapes flower later than any of our other perennial fruit crops, and while they have a good amount of growth at this point, their flowers are still not quite open yet.
The next (huge) job for us in the tree fruit is to go through and hand thin. If you leave clusters of fruit, you end up with tiny fruit and so much weight that you can get broken limbs. We go through every apple, pear, peach and nectarine tree to thin out any clusters we find. Once the grapes set fruit, we thin off clusters on each grape vine as well. It’s a big job, and we’ll be working non-stop on it for weeks now.
Ok, that’s it for this time. I’ll be back soon with another update. Thanks for reading!
