COME SEE THE BLOOM – blossoms are fully out and will be for the next few days.  Green bumble bee hives are out on pallets with a sunshade.

The gate behind the barn next to the water tank is unlatched for easy access.  You are welcome to walk out in the orchard – you can smell the blossoms throughout the orchard.

We will be planting more trees today and tomorrow.

The HOT!! weather has brought all the apple varieties into bloom at almost the same time.  Usually the different varieties stretch out over  a week or more, but not this year.

We are at peak bloom now and we will begin to see petal fall by the weekend.  Our bumble bees come tomorrow, but there have been lots of native honey bees and bumble bees out working yesterday.

The “crew” has been busy planting more trees and putting down more irrigation lines.  40 more trees come tomorrow.

The warm weather is moving the bloom closer – right now the leaves are at “1/2 inch green” and the buds are at “tight cluster” – see picture below.  There are lots of fruit buds.

Bloom will probably come mid to late next week – our bumble bees arrive on Wednesday – often we get cold rainy weather for bloom – we will see what happens this year.

The very long cold winter did not harm the trees – heavy snow usually does not break branches – the branches get strong when carrying the fruit in the fall.

We finished  our pruning on April 28.   120 new trees have arrived and are in the cool room until we get them planted – even found time to bring up a little firewood for next winter.

Yesterday the temperature made it up to 64 degrees – warm, sunny, no wind – perfect spring day – warmest  day since October 29 last fall.  Snow is finally gone in the orchard.  We had 130 inches for the winter.

We took advantage of the beautiful day to graft 60 of our Fuji trees (which have not done well) over to Zestar which has been one of our most popular early apples.  The choice was to wait until we could get more new Zestar trees in spring 2018 or cut the center out of the Fujis and insert small scion wood from our Zestars.

In the attached pictures you can see the small twigs capped with green wax to keep them from drying out.  So in three years we will  start getting more Zestars.  It was a long day, but we are pleased with the results.

We have made it to April. The snow (of which we still have plenty) has melted down enough that we have been able to start pruning  again.  It has been too deep to get out in the orchard since early January.  February average temperature was 5 degrees and it was coldest recorded month ever.

The new chipper is making brush clean up much faster – we need to be faster to get the remaining 500 trees pruned.

The weather has not been cold enough to damage the trees  – fruit buds should be fine for the apples and probably ok for the cherries.  Raspberries have been covered with deep snow and we have not had freezing/thawing that sometimes causes damage. Bloom will be late this year – probably sometime in second half of May – there are plenty of fruit buds.

We are looking forward to Spring !!!