I could have finished my spray rounds on Sunday, but the rains came and I’m waiting for a window to finish the last four orchards I manage that need their final (I hope) insecticide application of the season.
If sanity was part of my personality structure, I would be using this break to get some much needed rest, but my seasonal COD (compulsive obsessive disorder) is in full swing, so I’ve been dressed up in my rain gear and out trying to finish up the thinning of my own orchard.
Hard to keep my hands working as the thermometer reads 49F and the trees are dripping wet. Pulling fruitlets off is also a bit awkward with the neoprene gloves I have to wear to keep from cramping.
Just as the trees came into bloom this season we went into a mini-drought, bringing about a month of continuous sun and warmth. This not only provided plenty of good days for the buzzers (our buzzem buddies) to do their work, but also provided the trees plenty of opportunity to gather energy and get their accounts into the plus column.
These two things have led to a massive set of fruit, which is very good and also very bad. As those of you fortunate enough to have your own mature orchards to tend know well, even on a year of average set, thinning is the most tedious job a fruit grower has to do.
The last two days I’ve been working on the plums. Most of the Japanese plums almost always have a heavy set here but Euros are not so reliable. This season all of the E.plums are positively loaded, including two big Valor trees, a Green Gage, an Oullins, an Empress, a Castleton (as usual) and a young Bluebird. Only my Autumn Sweet has little crop, probably because it is still too young.
Santa Rosa and Elephant Heart are two J. plums that tend to set lightly on my site but this year they too are loaded and require substantial thinning, although not as much as other varieties.
It is interesting how tiny the fruits of Satsuma still are. I can’t even be sure yet what is actually set and will wait another week to bother trying any more thinning on it, even though the branches look like continuous clusters of tiny grapes.
The young Bluebird trees in my nursery are also loaded, which indicates that this is a very precocious E. plum. I’ve yet to need to carve any black knot out of this one so I’m beginning to believe that Adam’s claim of BK resistance of this one is correct. The fruit is quite good so I will be ordering a lot of these for my nursery to use as base trees for multi or at least dual variety plums.
I did a lot of plum grafting this season starting with the J’s. After grafting them there was a week of warm weather but the grafting of the E’s had the opposite. It seems as though grafts of both species are taking equally well so success may hinge more on the relative development of leaves than on specific temps following grafts. But then, I guess it is just as likely that Euros thrive in cooler temps. However, I grafted peaches with the E plums, and they also appear to be taking well.
One other thing, the only apple in my orchard not to set well is Ashmead’s Kernel, although its current meager crop is the most it has set in years. I’m not convinced that this is entirely the fault of the variety, I know of one wild crab tree that I grafted over to AK for a customer that seems to be very productive. I also grafted it onto a different tree on my site and the two year wood has a decent crop on it. The problem tree is, for some reason, overly vigorous, even though it is supposedly M7 rootstock.
And so forth…
Back to thinning.
No thinning so that’s nice.