Linda’s Blog about Eagle Creek Orchards
on May 08 in CSA News by JosieYou still have time to join the fruit CSA….don’t be the CSA member with out fresh peaches
It’s been a beautiful, windy, cool spring at the orchard. We’ve been so pleased with all the great support received from all you CSA members who have got our Fruit Shares. Thank You! The income this time of year is very important. The orchard spends the bulk of its money in late winter and spring on soil and pest managements. Robert has been very busy applying soil amendments both to the ground and in foliar sprays. We concentrate on long term soil fertility and micro nutriment balancing. Our practices include yearly soil and plant tissue testing, no till cover crop management by limited mowing, reincorporation of pruning byproducts, and careful use of irrigation. We grow a cover crop which fixes nitrogen and is mowed as a green manure. This is incorporated into the soil by our worms. Micro nutriments and microbes from kelp and compost tea are applied through out the year.
We all made it through frost protection we think but the weather tonight has the chance of being cold for this time of year. However the fruit looks like it set well. We have some trees in the apricots, pears and apples that are light, but we know all the soil amendments helped keep the fruit through almost two months of cold weather.
The bloom in the apricots was short lived due to the cold windy weather. The apricots are the first to bloom and the first fruit section we frost protect. This depends on the stage of development of the buds. The frost alarm is set at the lowest temperature that the buds can go to without damage. As they develop this temperature rises, so now the alarm is set at 28°. We spent fourteen plus nights up this year on frost protection so far.
This time of year we play catch up on office work, repairs on machinery and tools, and the never ending household chores and we need to paint the barn and a new out building. We scratch cook most of our meals on my fire engine red 1940’s gas stove. We have our beef from Debra and Steve Campbell from New Meadows Idaho. Their beef is grass fed and finished. The freezer has fruits and vegetables that we put up. We also have the canning Robert did and the fruit I dried. Robert is in the process of planting our small garden; we try our best to keep up with it through out the fruit harvest.
We were able to capture another wild swarm of bees this year, rescued from an irrigation ditch the tree their hive was in fell into. That brings our total to four hives. Two of them are wild bee’s swarms, we find them out and about even when it’s cooler temperatures, they seen to handle the cold better. We like the wild swarms they aren’t big honey producers but seem to do better because they are native to this area. We use no pesticides or antibiotics on our bees.
As part of our pest management we set out monitoring traps. Robert also put out pheromones confusions lures. They draw the male fruit moths to them because there pheromones are stronger than the female moths, they don’t find each other and they are unable to mate. We are on the lookout to trap stink bugs this time of year as well. They can do a lot of damage to the fruit so we draw them to traps with pheromones as well before they do. We’ve seen a lot of ladybugs already; they do a great job keeping down the aphids.
Now that the fruit is pea sized the next big project we’ll be doing is thinning. This is a process of taking off almost 90 percent of the fruit, the ones that remain will then get much bigger. We will be working with four other people who have experience from the last few years. This is all hand work, it’s nice to be in the trees without tools or a picking basket. It’s not a difficult process, however it takes great focus. You have to imagine what the branch will look like with full sized fruit. We thin the peaches, apples and Asian pears. This will take about a month to finish.
We have started our irrigation for the year. We get our water from Eagle Creek which flows out of the Eagle Cap Wilderness and is applied to the orchard by sprinklers. We move them twice a day. Water is applied only when needed as shown by monitoring the soil moisture. In the spring this water carries rock dusts, which are good micro nutriments. We can hear the creek from any where in the orchard and it’s great to sit and watch it flow by. One of my favorite smells is the spring cotton wood trees.
I had the good fortune to read a great book this spring. It was lent to us by Debora and Dave Mader from “Horsepower Organics” in Halfway Oregon. The title is Dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery. Wow, what a good, informational and very powerful book. It answers so many questions for me about our precious soil and how through out history it has been lost. It has changed me. I will never look at a plowed field or hold soil in my hand and not think of what I learned from this book. All I can say is read it for yourself.
The spring has given me wondrously blue skis, dark cold starry nights, endless wind and the incredible smell of the orchard in bloom. What more could you ask for from a way of life. It’s time to feed the chickens, dog, and cat and ourselves, close the gate and read a good book. Sometime time late tonight when I should be asleep I’ll ask Robert, “What’s the temperature and what time is it?”
