Sounds good to me!
Sorry you didn’t get interest at the time. It seems a lot of folks here want to teach or help fix up orchards while still having enough time for their own.
Re: friend with stills… I have also thought about selling fruit to local breweries.
Larisa, I’m in a grape growing area in NE Ohio but with trends towards ciders and spirits, distilleries could be a good outlet. They don’t usually pay a premium for the fruit for distilling but sorting and selling 2nds to them isn’t a problem. My buyer sells #1 quince to restaurants and processes all the #2 grade into quince paste- and can also sell that to restaurants. I’m pulling grapes and expanding in quince and cider apples and pears… and a few heirloom eating apples for roadside sales. Trying to block low-spray varieties together and high spray varieties with distance from those… I hate spraying! Now I need t save up for a cooler!
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That’s too funny! Looking forward to reading through some of the posts. Never too old to learn something new.
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How do you deal with SWD on cherries? What timing do you have for your spray schedule and what insecticides do you use?
Delegate ~14 days from harvest
Danitol ~7 days
That take care of everything for a few weeks actually.
For now we have a 3 day label for Entrust in Oregon as well, so in the future we may mix things around a bit. I’ll also be trying Exirel because I like the safety and it works great in my brassicas, but there is a risk of fruit marking. I planted a quarter acre of primocane raspberries and will be using Spear T on those as well as the data and safety on it looks very promising, but it’s extremely expensive.
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I plan to start selling mostly loquat trees around here. It’s a travesty everyone doesn’t have one in their yard here. They are care-free and gorgeous trees if you never ate the fruit they are worth growing for the curb appeal. As my feijoa start producing fruit I’ll propagate those also. Likely mulberries too. Basically I want to offer people in my area work free fruit trees to add to their yard. I’ll sell grafted citrus trees also, but I know that’s more of a niche market due to needing to protect them while young. I don’t want to sign people up for what I commit to. If you start them with a loquat, a feijoa or mulberry they may then decide to take on a citrus or something else in the future. I just want people to see fruit as an option. The only fruit trees I see commonly in my are are figs. Somehow they got a great PR in this area and about 10% of yards seems to have one (not on the east side of the highway as those are mostly beach rentals and I doubt even I could grow much there) but the west side is more residential and people should grow at least one tree, preferably a loquat haha
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