Good suggestion.
I’ve not done any bagging but there’s a first time for everything…might try it on my Odysso…as the birds stole them once before at red (ripe) cherry time…thinking them to be cherries I suppose. 
Looks great!
4 rows planted, 186 trees. Tomorrow I’ll till up another row. Half of the electric fence is up, I’ll probably have to set up temporary fencing for the other half until I plant out the rest of the trees and know how much space I need. Hope to get more planted out this spring, but soon I’ll have to stop and wait until fall to finish transplants. Started mulching around trees.
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AndySmith what kind of pruning / trellis system will you use?
All apples and pears, and I chose rootstocks that would not require staking (but did ad some B.9 later). I’ll be doing modified central leader. I’m probably 60% eating/cooking, and 40% cider for the apples, 150 or so varieties, about 600 trees. Around 20 Pear varieties and 90 trees.
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I love seeing your progress Andy, it’s looking great! Tons of work going into your orchard! I forget how you are going to market your fruits… do you have businesses interested in purchasing or will you sell directly from the orchard to customers, or something else?
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Seeing all that makes my back ache in sympathy!!! Looking good!
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My preference would be to wholesale them. We owned a retail appliance store for two years, and I have no desire to deal with the public again. Looking forward to making cider although I’ll have more than I can use. Fortunate not to be reliant upon a financial return.
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We are all looking forward to all of the cafes opening outdoors again next Wednesday! Tables and chairs are being polished and umbrellas are coming back out. Its been a year and half since we could have a meal at a restaurant. The air is buzzing with happiness. I am just hoping the Indian strain of Covid stays away! The British strain already put us back into a relapse.
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Got our first real shower of the season. It has been incredibly dry here and the pastures were slow to grow not to mention the fire hazards in the forest. Is there anything that smells sweeter than a spring shower?
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as of mar 24 all restictions and mask wearing is gone in Maine! gonna have a mask burning party!
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Went back for another look and found what seems to be some fruit set on the older nectarine tree. I doubt if I’ll have to thin, but who knows?
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I did a first pass at thinning my peaches and Asian pears today. First time I’ve had enough fruit set to thin. Is it always this painful? All those great looking fruits, gone! I’ll have to go back through in another few weeks and get the rest, only took about half of what I need to so far.
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It is for me. I thin a lot of apple trees without much hesitation, but thinning my few peach trees is invariably hard on me. Perhaps the solution to this problem (and the source of many more) would be to plant more peach trees.
If this is your first time, I bet you only took off 20%. They seem to magically multiply as they get bigger.
There will be more pain in the years to come. I spent days thinning thousands off so far this year!
Well, apparently all the planets lined up just right this year (ha) for my plum trees. I’ve had mature plum trees for several year now, but never, ever seen anything like this. The vast majority of my plums and pluots are just insanely packed with fruit. Its taking me FOREVER to thin them, and the branches are so full that some are already in danger of breaking and the plums are only marble sized or a little more. But when they are packed on like this they still add a lot of weight.
It really, really does make me wonder…what is so different this year? Why do I have 3 times more plums on all my trees than ever before (that’s no exaggeration). Is it insect pollination, weather, what? I would not think weather - I actually lost a lot of peaches to frost so how did that not effect my plums which in the past seem to be more sensitive than peaches? And its been a quite wet spring- I thought that usually hurt pollination. Oh well, its really fun and I’m not complaining (except about thinning work). Anyone else having a similarly good plum year? Below are a couple examples of what almost every single plum and pluot branch on almost every plum/pluot tree looks like. CRAZY.
On an unrelated note, if you look closely at the fruit, you will see proof of the “kickback” ability of Imidan. (ie ability to kill insect larva even after the egg has been laid in the fruit). By the time I sprayed quite a few fruit had the tale tale half-moon cut in the fruit. However, after I sprayed very few of those fruit went on to turn colors and fall off the way they would have with other sprays applied after the fact or with no spraying. When you look close at the fruit, you will see quite a few of them have the half-moon scars but you can tell they are pretty old and completely healed and the fruit still looks healthy. Of course the bitten fruits aren’t as pretty and wouldn’t be marketable to most retail stores, but for fresh eating by yours truly it doesn’t hurt a thing.
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This is great. Remember plums suffer (or enjoy) ‘June Drop’. So they will also self edit. Usually the smaller plums turn yellow and fall off of the tree. Looks great though!
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