News letter March 2010
on Mar 12 in CSA News by JosieIt is warming up and seeds are in the ground ready to spring up and bring food to your bellys. the new farm is great and we are having a great time dreaming and Scheming.
Remember CSA dues are due March 15CSA Work Day on the New Farm
We need help cleaning up the creek on the new farm. It will be a hard work to cut down dead limbs and chip them up. The Dry Creek goes through the new farm and is such a great treasure but it has been neglected for some time and needs some love. We need some help with this. Could you give 2 hours of time to help us? This is not a kid friendly activity. The idea is that we could get it cleaned up and make it a kid friendly area and help the creek out. We will have the big farm clean up March 27 from 12 to 5. We will also be cleaning up the fence line and hopefully planting trees. If you would like to help out send me an email at peacefulbelly@yahoo.com.
Linda’s Fruit Blog
Eagle Creek Orchard
March - April
We’re well into the peach block with our pruning, having already finished the apples, pears, apricots, nectarines and plums. Our two helpers with the pruning are Kingsley and Lynn, with Linda and I we make a good team. This is Kingsley’s second year pruning with us, he has a small farm up the creek where he lives with his wife Reb. Lyn has a farm down the valley from us which he works with his wife and 7 kids.
The trees are waking up now and buds are swelling with anticipation of this seasons fruit. We are on guard for frost now; we have a frost alarm in the house with a remote sensor out in the orchard. When a frost event is detected the alarm goes off, a loud ear piercing sound Linda tells me, of a frequency which I can’t hear but Linda, thankfully, can. I guess my folks were right about all the loud music in my youth or maybe it was the tractors and chainsaws over the last 40 years. When the alarm sounds, usually between 02:00 and 06:00 we jump up and rush out into the orchard. It’s quite peaceful out there then, still, dark, stars sparkling in the cold night sky. I’ll run around the orchard checking temperatures in the different blocks of trees, if the temp is still falling we’ll fire up the wood heaters in the apricots, the most sensitive earliest blooming trees. Then we’ll watch the temps if they continue to fall I’ll start the Orchard Rite Wind machine, so much for the peaceful night. This machine is a 20’ propeller on a 50’ tower powered by a propane fueled 454 Chevy truck engine, the propeller spins real fast and sounds like a helicopter drawing the warmer air down into the orchard and displacing the cold air, this really warms things up protecting the entire orchard.
All these efforts to warm the night air are not the most important means of frost protection, it is keeping the trees as healthy as possible and this is done by keep the soils healthy. By balancing the soil micro nutrients and organic mater so the soil microbes can keep working braking them down making them available for the trees to use. It all starts with the soil.
