warmwxrules,
Stop bragging about how much rain you get. BTW, did you buy that soaker hose?
warmwxrules,
Stop bragging about how much rain you get. BTW, did you buy that soaker hose?
What a mess. This is your livelihood, and I’m sorry to see it affecting you like this.
I see those terraces of yours are those peaches’ only hope for survival.
Thanks to everyone for all the kind words. The fruit are huge, but as so many mentioned, all the flavor is washed out. Plus it’s been cloudy so much, they don’t have the sugar they should have anyway. So it’s sort of a double wammy on flavor. I’ve mostly been selling these peaches for canning or cobblers.
I’ve seen this happen before (though not this bad) and it took a week or two of good weather to start getting better fruit. We’ve had a few days of good weather where the temps have been in the 90s and very sunny (and windy) so things are drying out fast. The next thunderstorm is not till due Thurs here, so there will be a few more days to dry things out.
The tractor did come out once unhooked. It’s a FWD which helped. I hate getting stuck. It’s such a waste of time. I had to go home and get 45 feet of chain (it’s 1/2" chain which weighs a ton) and drag it through that muck to hook up to the sprayer. We drug the sprayer out and there was mud packed everywhere to clean out. Of course we had to jack up the tongue with a floor jack in order to get the sprayer jack back on, then finally hook it back up to the tractor.
MuddyMess may use that name as her handle, but I really looked it after that ordeal.
From the photo it looks like this row is at the bottom of a slight incline in elevation of your orchard, so I’m guessing the other rows were probably ok for traversing? I didn’t realize till now how highly bermed your trees are. In the photos you’ve posted before I knew you had mounded them, but I don’t remember them being as high as in this pic. You moved a lot of earth for those berms didn’t you?
I’m guessing you have something to smooth those ruts back out when it stiffens up a bit. I was kinda joking about the “living in the mountains” part…you know it’s a catch22, you have little to zero problems like that at elevation, but in the bottom land it’s always like that.
When I was a teenager us hillbillies thought that stuff was fun, now it looks like a tiring nightmare.
And yet your trees remain vigorous and healthy. A testament to your high mounds. Too bad you are in the fruit business and not the nursery business. Tree growth is so much more reliable than cropping.
I really hope you can keep the remaining peaches healthy enough that if summer brings drying weather you will begin to have the best flavored peaches for sale in the state of Kansas again.
There’s possible large hail in our forecast today. I’ve never seen large hail here and obviously hope this is a false alarm. With hail it takes only a few minutes to destroy a long season of perfect conditions. Monsoons are a slower form of torture.
olpea, it is good to know the weather improves in your area, hope this years rain only affects small portion of your fruit quality. Hate to see your hard working effort did not turn into profit, not fair.
Don’t need any…i’ve got about 30 craftsman rubber hoses stockpiled in the garage If you think its wet up here, take a look at TX/OK…
Last 30 days…
Where we are near Minneapolis, we have been blessed with nearly perfect weather the past month or two. I hope the rest of the summer continues as nice as it has been. Watching reports of the weather elsewhere in the country makes me feel doubly blessed.
I am right in one of the most rainy spots on that map but am lucky that my house and orchard are on higher ground than some. The farmers are not so lucky. Fields of corn and beans are now mud with dead crops in them.
Speaking of nasty weather, terrible storms in my area tonight, The adjacent county (just 2 miles from me) issued a tornado warning tonight. I came home from work to find one of my plum grafts snapped off in the high winds. Speaking with my wife and neighbor it was really a hellish storm.
The graft was an Early Magic plum Alan had sent me. Really ticks me off because it was growing so nicely.
Always something.