What is going on today 2017?

I’m taking a little lunch break from Peach and Nectarine grafting.This week is the first one this year,when the temperatures will be in the 70-80’s.That’s rare,even for here.
That shot from Colorado though,is incredible. Brady

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I think those are Ozark Beauty, a gift from another user here.
I probably have over 20 cultivars around the yard.
I should have took photos when most were flowering, many are forming berries now. Mara Des Bois is an interesting strawberry, it’s an everbearing, which are supposed to poop out after a few years, but these things are 5 years old and keep producing. I keep them in long rectangular planters, and I just remove all, line it up against another and add the runners and start over. Problem is I don’t need to start over, the plants keep producing, and produce well.One of the best strawberries out there too!
I will always grow them.
Not a great photo here is MdB and most of the flowers are fruit now

I have some pink flowered stawberries I snuck into my flower garden. My wife even asked hey what’s that? LOL, a strawberry my dear! All produce well as I threaten them, seems to work well! These get huge and are decent too!

Some escaped into the cracks of my sidewalk, loaded too!

Here’s a White D pineberry that’s going to have over 10 fruits. Don’t mind the onion, they look closer than they really are.

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I was over at mom and dads today and they had cut this out of a blown down tree In the woods, a natural bridge graft on a wild black cherry.

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I have a fig forest in my driveway, what to do?

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thinning and thinning and thinning and bagging and thinning and thinning …

Oh yes, I remember now that you lived in Texas. That one spring in 2015 was horrible. I had NO tomatoes that year. Last year wasn’t as bad but still had a lot of rain. We live on a hill and our garden washed away and the creek at the edge of our property flooded to an amazing level. Big logs washing over the road.

Yes I’ve been to Canton and it is fun. I really like to prowl around the non commercial areas and see what I can find. It has flooded though the last two years and then a section of it burned. It’s so big though that nothing can really set it back too much. I stay away most of the time. Too many crowds and too much junk to eat!

Your farm looks lovely! Enjoy! We have a female tuxedo kitten/cat. Her name is Sylvia—female version of the famous tuxedo, Sylvester!!

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Well, about the tractor :blush:. The night before the storm I went to check it out and put the battery charger on it for a while and noticed a totally flat tire. These tires are all 25 yrs old and pretty cracked. I had fixed the other side a few months ago and now this one went. The splits are so bad no tire place will work on them. Ah well, my payback I guess for trying to squeeze a bit more life from them. I did order new tires and they should arrive and will get put on next week. Until then it’s shovel time. Actually with 3’ of wet snow my little tractor probably would not have been able to do much, snow’s just too heavy especially with “mud” underneath for traction. The county “plows” the road in these storms with a road grader. I did have the good sense to park a couple of vehicles at the bottom of the driveway, so with minimal shoveling we could get out. May storms like this are not unheard of here, but it’s been a while. Probably a good thing for the cities down below that this came as snow, if it had been all rain they would have had flooding. As it was, we lost power 4 times in the storm (I now have the elec co’s phone number memorized).

Yes that is the orchard/garden fenced area in the pic; you can see the solar fence charger at the right corner. The big snow area with no trees is the garden. There were a few things coming up, onions, garlic, a few potatoes and peas. I expect all will make it thru just fine since they were covered by a lot of snow when the 18F temps hit.

I’m surprised to hear you are on city water, I would have thought you had a well/pump. Hope they can get it running again soon. In the mean time, 5gal bucket left out in the rain or under a gutter down pipe, or if you have a cistern or stream you can draw from, can be used to “flush” a toilet. Works just fine no need for clean pure water to flush.

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Oh noes, bad tires. And those aren’t cheap, and surely aren’t easy to change. Will someone will have to come out and do that for you? What size of tractor do you have, HP wise. Mine is about 40hp, but I don’t know if it would handle 3ft deep snow, especially considering it’s not 4wd.

I thought you had a generator up there in the hills? Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.

Yes we have city water here, but it’s only been here for about 20 years or so. We have a pump house/cellar down by the old house, but the pump was removed last year as it didn’t work. We have a drilled 6" well, and a dug well there, done years before I got here, but don’t have a way to get the water out of the wells. The pump lines are still in the drilled well, so the plan was to pull those and put a hand powered pump on it. Our water table is very close to the surface, so it wouldn’t take a lot of effort. I’ve had the pump in the shed for almost two years, and haven’t got around to installing it. I could do all the work in a day if I put my mind to it. Other things to do, I guess, or maybe just lazy? :grinning:

It’s a neat pump, you just have to buy PVC pipe, one inch thick and half inch thick. Here is the place I got it from:

http://www.ezwaterwellhandpumps.com/

My wife just yelled from the throne that we now have water! But, we are on a boil water notice until they get it fixed for good. But, good to see some water now. We have water jugs with bio/chem filters on them for drinking. We were using rain water in buckets to fill the toilets, but won’t have to now.

Glad you got water again.

I do have solar and batteries, enough to keep a few lights on and the refrig and freezers running for a day or two. Since we were the only house around with lights and a working stove (propane) neighbors came over and we make an impromptu dinner. Had a nice time and then the power came back on (for a while). Wood heat for all, so no one was cold. It was a nice way to spend a storm.

I do have a generator, but it is not wired in permanently, and a bit of a PITA to setup. I use it when I anticipate not having grid power for several says or more, but for short outages it just isn’t worth it. We just hold off using the toaster oven and coffee maker for a while

My tractor is 4wd, but only 18.5HP. It can push up to about 2’ of wet snow no problem. But when the snow is much deeper, I have to take it in two or more passes, and this wet heavy stuff will high center the tractor since I can’t push enough off on the first pass to clear the underside of the tractor. In colder weather, I’d just hire the driveway out to someone with a big rig. But we’ve been 50-60F since the storm ended, and it looks like it will be mostly melted off tomorrow or Tues.

I plan on just taking the front wheels off and bringing them down to the tire place. Should be easy as I can use the FEL to raise those tires off the ground. Now the rear tires, which are only a little behind the fronts in terms of cracks, will be quite a bit harder, but they need to be replace too.

That does look like an interesting pump, for emergency use. I’ve got an old fashion cast iron one that I can throw on top of our cistern. I suspect yours is more efficient.

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Probably a good idea to get rain barrels. Use the water from the rain barrels to flush your indoor toilets.

Get a chair and sit and watch them.

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I took an hour to start bagging the old Standard tree. I’d say I got about 1/20th of the tree done. I forget how much work this tree is every year… I also bagged the single cluster on my ‘new’ standard that I’m managing to keep around 10’.

Each night this week I’ll stop back and bag a few more and just keep pushing at it.

Works for me!

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Man, despite being in CA, I can never get my strawberries to look anything near as good as they do in those photos.

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We are supposed to get couple of inches of rain now through Thursday. Looking forward to that. Still have some plants in 4 packs that I need to plant. I was hoping to get it done before all the rain . But that didn’t happen.

I have a maple tree with both trunks connected like that. I have an oak branch that is about swallowed up by a cherry tree and still growing.

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Had some time to work on my black raspberry row today. Got the trellis wire up, some mulch down and the drip tubing installed. This project is almost finished, just have to anchor the ends of the trellising to the ground, plant a red current bush at each end and add mulch to the ends.

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The one good thing about the cool, wet weather. .
. got a nice mess of these today

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That looks great, JD. What kind of black rasps do you have, Bristol, Jewel, Mac Black? And how old are those plants? Have you ever got any fruit off of them?

I have 5 rasps coming in this week. Your setup would be a good one to copy.

Two years ago this was just a dream…

And that doesn’t count the plums and mulberries earlier today. :grin:

And much more to come! Thanks to all the members of growingfruit.org for ideas, encouragement, and problem solving.
Katy

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Well, I went out to the strawberry patch (mud hole actually) today, and several of the Earliglow plugs’ roots were exposed, a couple were just laying in the mud. The others were in fair shape, but they were in mucky wet mud, and I wasn’t too confident about them surviving in such poor conditions. Plus we expected and got more rain this evening. In some spots, I sunk down past my ankles in my boots. So, I thought I’d pull them, wash them off and put them back in a bag and replant them later this week. I know we might get another rain storm in the future, but the plot needs to be reworked. I also pulled the 11 Jewel’s as well. All of them are now back in their bags with wet paper shreddings wrapping them.

We’ll see how they can handle another planting, but I just couldn’t leave them out there in that mess. Seems like every May or June we have at least one of these storms hit us. Two years ago, I planted out 40 tomato and 20 pepper plants and two days later we had a severe thunderstorm hit, with hail and driving rain and wind. We only lost 4 plants but the others were really shredded, but they did make a good recovery. Last year one day after we finished planting 70 tom’s and 30 peppers, we had another severe storm hit. Just about all the plants were laid over, but because I gave them a good mulching before, they recovered very well. So, I hope we’re done with our annual catastrophes!

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