Orcharding

Yes we still do orchard. Actually quite a bit has been happening and this could be shaping up to be a good and exciting year for us. The Farmer cleared about a half acre of trees, mostly cotton woods that were taking up usable and valuable land for cherry trees. The Farmer has a new found dislike of cotton woods.

There was a lot of trees lost to gophers and voles from 2012 planting, yes voles not moles. So The Farmer pulled all of those trees both dead and alive. Then he condensed down and replanted the ones that were alive. That also gave him the opportunity to easily inoculate them with this fungus called mycorrhizal, which causes the trees root structure to grow more. We also got more trees planted, this time it is a different variety. This helps us because it has a later ripening date which enables us to harvest and process the cherries ourselves.

go bees go 

Speaking of processing ourselves, probably the most exciting thing for this year is we will be building an automatic sorter. The design is with an engineer right now getting all the details drawn out. That will then be sent to a fabricator to get the pieces made then we (The Farmer) will assemble it. There will still need to be people on the line to pull damaged fruit and separate any fruit that is connected still. But all of the sizing will be done by the machine and loaded into boxes. I just have to say woot woot! That was soooo time consuming last year. I'm sure it won't go as fast as it could this year since we will be learning the machine but it will be significantly faster then last. Which is good because there were an astonishing amount of blossoms this year and as long as our bees did there job all those blossoms will be cherries. I do love it when the trees are in blossom, it is so pretty.

The Farmer as also been busy keeping up with gopher blasting, mowing, weed burning and spraying has just started up. 

It is very exciting seeing the trees grow.