Linda’s Blog about the Orchard
on Feb 08 in CSA News by JosieJanuary 2010
Eagle Creek Orchard
Welcome to our Orchard blog, we are Linda and Rob Cordtz owner/ operators of Eagle Creek Orchard. Along with our dog (Tattoo), cat (Bob) and the bees and chickens we do everything to produce wonderful organic fruit. When I say everything in mean; prune, sucker, grind the brush, rake brush, rake grass, apply soil amendments as needed, replant trees, frost protection, thin the fruit, water, mow, pick the fruit, sort the fruit, box and haul the fruit to your CSA. Some time during this process we also are inspected by Oregon Tilth our certifier. We also live and work together. Did I say that we work and live together? We have been married twenty-two years. Thankfully we have great help from our employees, we hire from 2 to 6 local part-time folks ranging in age from 18 to 62.
It’s early spring at the orchard, and time to prune the 1100 trees. The pruning of the 5 acre orchard takes from six to eight weeks, we’ve been at it for two weeks now. Started on the apples first, which are finished, then on the apricots, pears, nectarines and peaches.
We started in the apples because they required some training which takes more time, we opened up the trees making it easier to thin and harvest the fruit. This also helps with light and air circulation. Hand pruning is done on three legged orchard ladders with hand loppers. The first rule of the orchard is, “Don’t fall off the ladder”. Everyone has fallen but our good friend Hans. Over the course of a day of pruning one must make hundreds of decisions. Cutting off water shoots, looking for disease, training limbs, keeping in mind what the trees will look like when they blossom and leaf out and, oh yea, be sure to leave fruit wood. It reminds us of sculpting the trees.
The weather has been wet this year. The wet conditions can promote fungus and virus such as peach leaf curl and powdery mildew. We will be spraying sulfur and dormant oil to prevent these problems. All products that we use are approved by the National Organic Plan (NOP).
We have had a great gift this year. The wind has been very mild and makes being in the snow and wet conditions so much easier. On sunny days we’ve seen our honey bees out and about. Robert has been feeding them extra honey as a treat. We are blessed with clean air, and the wonderful sound or Eagle Creek, which runs behind our orchard. We have been watching the eagles wild courtship “dances” in the sky. The chickadees hunt on the ground for food. Great Horned owls call out at night in mating calls. Coyote and raccoons parole the orchard and talk to each other as they walk through the night.
Even with all this natural help we have found it necessary to trap field mice this year. We lost our wonderful old cat of twenty years last fall. And the mice population has greatly increased. Our new cat “Bob” is young and care free, not the hunter we hoped for, yet he does get a few. We are in our second year of replanting parts of the orchard and need to keep the mice from damaging the young trees.
When you look on the wet muddy ground you can see the tiny emerald green plants starting to emerge, first signs of spring. Last fall we seeded the orchard floor with a mix of flowering plants and nitrogen fixers to improve pollinator habitat and soil fertility. Soon these plants will be sprouting too. As we finish pruning a block of trees the cuttings are raked into rows and then finely ground up with our brush hog and allowed to reincorporate with the soil. As you walk between the rows of trees the soil is uneven from earth worm activity. The earth worms are key to bringing organic mater into the soil which the microbes brake down into nutriments the trees can use. The worms and microbes are the keys to keeping the soil healthy.
