It's the beginning of May. The weather has been cold and wet, keeping plant growth and tree blossoming at bay. We're hopeful that we may get through apple & strawberry blossom times without having to set up irrigation pipe and run frost protection.
Our IPM supplies arrived today (May 3). I was planning to set out insect traps and download logger data today anyway, but would have used lures leftover from last year. I'll be curious to see how many degree days we've actually accumulated so far this year - it's definitely going to be on the low side. Nevertheless, the apples are at the tight cluster stage and we'll be watching them and the weather closely going forward. The tight clusters can take temperatures of 27 degrees F. with only moderate (10%) loss. At 21 degrees F. we can expect 90% loss. So, if the overnight lows are going to be below freezing, irrigation will have to be set up and sprinklers run to protect the blossoms. That often means staying up all night - the sprinklers have to run until the sun is up and the temperatures get above 32 degrees F. Setting up the overhead irrigation in the orchard is a big job, it generally takes at minimum a whole day with 3-5 people working on it. And hooking up the irrigation pump, priming it, and making sure that works is a part of the process. If we don't have to do it, we'll be happy not to!
May 1st is the beginning of a big push of work on our farm. Farmer Bill was out early this morning getting things ready and now his crew is redistributing the straw on the front field (in front of the house along the road) in preparation for rolling out row cover over the strawberry plants. The row cover helps keep the ground and the plants warm & encourages them to grow, blossom and produce a bit earlier than other fields. It lets Farmer Bill get a bit of a jump on the pick-your-own trade or take a load of berries to a market. Either way, it gets some cash rolling in after all of the start-up expenses of spring. When the berries under the row cover start to produce blossoms, the row cover will be taken off.
A field had been chosen to plant the (last) strawberries of Bill's tenure and was being prepared. However, there is one person very interested in buying the business and if he does, he'll want to expand the orchard where those strawberries would have gone, so a different field had to be readied to plant berries, jic we actually get an offer!
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