Apple blossoms at pink and frost in the forecast

I spent a couple of hours in the apple orchard with Farmer Bill the other day.  We were feeding the apple trees. We do this with one person driving the tractor pulling a small sprayer and the other walking behind with a spray wand aiming the spray at the base of the trees.  The mix was a bunch of micronutrients - boron, calcium, and about a dozen more - intended to make the trees happy.  It's a chance to take a good look at the orchard when you're on the tractor, because you go so slowly.  Overall, we liked what we saw.

The buds on the early varieties are at pink.  It was April 1 and my calendar of 'Orchard Events in Minnesota' for southern MN indicates that pink should be May 1-9.  This makes it a full month ahead of schedule.  The later varieties are still at tight cluster - or not even tight cluster for some.  The pruning has been finished in the original part of the orchard, so the trees look really nice right now.  The newer part of the orchard - mostly Minnieska trees that produce the SweeTango apples - still needs to be pruned and shaped.

What we didn't like is that the weather forecast is for freezing temperatures for the next several nights.  How cold it gets and how long it stays that cold will both play parts in whether we get apples this year.  Farmer Bill will go out and spray protective nutrients on the trees every day, but that's the most he can do, and we have only anecdotal evidence that it works.  It helps if the wind blows - the hardest frost comes when the air is still - so I'll quit complaining about the wind that's been blowing like crazy for about a week.  The strawberries are not even close to bloom yet, so we don't have to worry about them.  Same for the raspberries and the blueberries.

Family stuff

Our daughter recently decided that she didn't want to have the traditional wedding she had started planning last year. The venue had been booked, we'd gone dress shopping once, she & her fiance were checking on caterers, details were being worked on, etc.  They have decided, instead, to go to Scotland and get married in Castle Dunnottar - former stronghold of the Clan Keith to which Farmer Bill can lay claim through his mother's family - on May 22, 2012.  [Google the castle to see images.]  It's pretty exciting - and Farmer Bill & I are looking forward to attending.  Since May 22 is smack dab in the middle of getting ready to open for strawbery season - and still in the window for a late frost - Farmer Bill will have to be very well organized in order to make a whirlwind 6-day trip to Scotland.  Attention to details is not his strongest suit, so I expect the last days before the trip to be a bit fraught.

At some point, Ellen & Noah mentioned eloping to Scotland - but then they invited their parents and any friends and family who are able to make the trip... so I guess it's not really eloping.  I have to admit that I don't mind her not having the traditional wedding.  Our son did have a fairly traditional wedding - and it was lovely - so we know what it's like to be the parents at a wedding.  This change of venue will make some wonderful memories for Ellen and Noah to look back on - a great place to travel back to one day.

Spring

We've had what can only be called weird weather - even for Minnesota.  A virtually nonexistent winter, with little snow & far above normal temperatures.  Now spring is coming early as well.  The soil temperatures indicate that we should uncover the strawberries as soon as the ground is dry enough to get the tractors in the fields - a good two weeks ahead of normal.  Tomatoes are growing - in a greenhouse and not in our back bedroom this year (thank goodness) - and will be ready to plant in the hoop houses on April 1.  Farmer Bill and his helper have been pruning the apple trees all winter because they weren't hampered by snow or cold, and that job is on schedule.  Machinery is being pulled out of buildings, oil checked, fittings greased, bolts tightened, tires filled.  The robins are back & Farmer Bill saw a bald eagle last week.  I'm keeping my eyes open for the bluebirds, expecting them any time now.  Some much needed rain has fallen over the past few days and the grass is turning green.  The elms have sprouted tiny leaves and the maples are almost done blossoming.  All normal spring events that just feel weird when they happen in mid-March rather than the first of April.
City dwellers rejoice in the beautiful weather that lets them shed their coats and boots, eat al fresco, and feel the sun on their skins again.  We eye the early warm weather more warily.  An early bloom on the strawberries and the apples can mean the blossoms will be out and susceptible if we have a late frost.  And there has been a late frost pretty much every year here.  Often the frosts are not even noticeable in the city - even a rural city like Faribault.  But late frosts mean nights without sleep as Farmer Bill runs the irrigation sprinklers over the strawberries.  Farmer Bill doesn't have any real frost protection for the apples at this point.  Overhead sprinklers are not an option with trees, and the wind machines available are not economically viable for an operation of his size.  Nutritional foliar sprays help, and Farmer Bill will prepare his air-blast sprayer to drive up and down the orchard rows, moving the air and keeping the blossoms wet.  You do what you can do, and hope that it's enough.  Another farming year is upon us.

I also quilt

I've been quilting in the winter months for a long time now.  I made my first quilt in 1991 in Australia. A friend there invited me along to a 'Quilt in a Day' class.  I enjoyed it a lot - and I had a lot of time on my hands since I had no outside job & both kids were in school.  After I finished that quilt, designed for our son, I made another for our daughter.  When we came back from Australia, I had no time for quilting because I went back to school to finish my degree.  Once I graduated, I went to work outside the home, and was busy raising kids, so didn't do much for myself.  It wasn't until we moved to Straight River Farm and the kids were gone to their own lives that I really had time to think about an avocation.  Things I like about quilting: I get to be creative - while still being orderly (the librarian in me). The things I create are useful and (usually) beautiful.  There is no end to the learning process, so I don't get bored.  I can do it by myself - or if I want to, I can join a group and work with others.
This winter I have been working on a new bed quilt.  A couple of years ago we bought a king-size bed. We've been using a queen-size quilt as a covering & it's adequate, but not really large enough.  It took me a long time to decide on a pattern and even longer to decide on the fabrics to use.  In the end I just had to say 'enough' and get started.  I'm pretty happy with the result - and Farmer Bill thinks it's great.  He's always postive about my quilting, but he also has a good eye for color and design, so I appreciate his input.  Here's the quilt:

I'm not a great photographer but you can get the idea.  The quilt is hanging on my display wall in the basement, which is where I do my quilting.  I have a large table that Farmer Bill & I built one winter, cupboards to store my stash of fabric, space to leave all of my stuff out & ready to go when I have time to work on it.  The display wall is a large piece of felt tacked to a board and hung.  It gives a place to work on designs and placement of quilt blocks before they're sewn together. The blocks stick to the felt without pinning so they can be moved around until one is happy with them.  This quilt has 72 blocks - and I spent a good several hours arranging and re-arranging them.  I'm just now beginning to sew the rows together (you can see one is missing from the left).  I love quilt designs that contain optical illusions. This quilt does not have any curved pieces. Every seam is a straight line.  Both Farmer Bill and I love the fabrics and the colors in this quilt - it will look great in our bedroom and be lovely to sleep under for years to come once it's finished.

The other project I'm planning for this winter is a duvet cover for Ellen.  I've never done a duvet cover, but don't see why a quilt top couldn't be made into one.  We looked through my mass of quilt magazines and chose a pattern. Then we made a trip to SR Harris to choose fabrics.

[Fabric shopping is almost the hardest part for me because there are so many gorgeous fabrics available & I just want to have a piece of all of them, just in case.  I've had to make a rule that I don't buy fabric unless I have a purpose for it.] 

I should be done sewing together the king-size quilt in another week or so. Then I'll clean up the leftover scraps, clean and oil the sewing machine, change the needle, sharpen the rotary cutter and start on the duvet cover.  The actual piecing is not difficult at all, but the pattern includes a large appliqued design in the center of the quilt.  I've done applique and have basic skills. This will take more skill and more patience than most of what I've done before, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

The holiday season has come and gone.  Business at the library has picked up again to its normal pace.  Farmwork is mostly planning and paperwork (taxes).  Although Farmer Bill has already started pruning his apple trees because we're having such a warm, dry winter.  [Mouse damage will probably be less, but cold damage may be higher with no snow for insulation.]

Our son and d-i-l are moving to Portland, Maine next weekend.  I went over last weekend to help pack some boxes & will probably go today or tomorrow to help some more.  So far I've contained my emotions, but one of these days I may not be able to.  We're going to miss having them so close.  But the job that Aimee was offered is a great opportunity & I would never want either of them to pass up something so good to stay close to us.  Farmer Bill wouldn't either.  He did say that when they have children they have to come back.  Since living overseas has always been an ultimate goal for both of them, I don't really see a return to Minnesota in their lives.  If Farmer Bill wants to see and spend time with his (future) grandchildren, he'll have to give up farming and take up traveling instead.  Personally I'm looking forward to visiting people who live near big water -- even cold water like the Atlantic Ocean.  I have been in love with oceans since our time in Australia.  But I will definitely miss being able to have both my kids come visit for family time.  So far, Ellen and Noah are pretty adamant that they will be staying in Minnesota, specifically the Twin Cities, forever.  Airfare to come 'home' for visits may be our gift to Will & Aimee in years to come...

The Worm in the Apple

I read a memoir titled The Orchard last week.  Written by a woman who currently lives in Wisconsin, it is about her short marriage to a man who grew up on an apple orchard in Iowa.  The story is typical of many of the memoirs being written these days -- lots of angst and dysfunction; she & her husband were very young when they married and struggled to find their feet within the marriage. The time was the late 1970s through about 1990.  Farming was different then, every type of farming.  Strong chemicals were being used, often without benefit of protection to the person using them, or those going into the fields after application.  Regulatory agencies (EPA) were working to change that & discontinue use of some of the worst chemicals, but those changes were slow in coming.  The husband developed a fast-growing cancer and died at about age 35.  The author blames the cancer on the pesticides being used -- and she could certainly be right since I suspect that they were spraying DDT (it is never named in the book).

Unfortunately, she got so much wrong about the pests that her book cannot be taken as a serious work.  It is strictly her memory of parts of her life, told the way she wants it interpreted.

I can't speak for every orchard, but I know what is being taught at conferences and workshops, and I know what other orchardists tell me at those meetings.  What went on in the 1970s & 1980s does not happen anymore.

In The Orchard the author tells about her husband showing her where the Codling Moth -- a major pest to apples -- are boring into the tree trunks.  Codling Moth do NOT bore into tree trunks, not ever.  They are a real and persistent problem -- the proverbial worm in the apple -- but they bore into the apples themselves, lay eggs inside the apple that hatch into worm-like caterpillars that then bore their way through the apple leaving brown trails behind -- and often the process hasn't finished by the time the apple is ripe, so the caterpillar-worm is still in the apple when you pick it.

A pest that does bore into the trees is Dogwood Borer -- another real and significant problem for apple trees.  [There could be other borers that I don't know about  that infected the author's orchard.]

As scientists have learned more about the life cycle of the Codling Moth, they have also developed ways to deal with the moth rather than spraying a broad-based organophosphate pesticide that kills everything in its path, good and bad alike.  Farmers have learned more about the inter-connectedness of nature and are concerned about taking care of the soil and the water, and still making a crop that can be sold to earn their living.  There are 'organic' sprays (remember, gentle readers, that organic label on your food does not mean no chemical sprays have been used).  The trouble with the organic sprays for Codling Moth is that they must be sprayed every 10 days from May through September, as well as after every major rainfall.  And they often don't work as well as 2 well-timed conventional sprays.

There are also pheromone disrupters.  This past year, Farmer Bill & I tried a codling moth pheromone disrupter for the first time -- with pretty good success.  Pheromone disrupters for Codling Moth come in various shapes and sizes.  We used one that is similar to a giant twist-tie.  At the beginning of the Codling Moth season -- determined by the number of degree-days recorded that year -- we sent a crew out to the orchard to twist a disrupter onto every tree, and extras on the perimeter trees.  The pheromone scent imitates the scent of a female Codling Moth and excites the males.  The males fly toward the scent, planning to find the female and copulate with her, so she can bore into an apple, lay her eggs, and complete the circle of life.  But with pheromones coming at them from absolutely every tree, the males get disoriented -- and the premise is that they will get completely frustrated, not be able to find an actual female, and not be able to fertilize her eggs.

For years we have had a pheromone trap hanging in the orchard.  This trap has sticky stuff on it -- the pheromone lure draws the moths in & traps them in the goo.  We hang the traps in April and check them weekly.  When the number of moths in the trap hits a threshold, it is time to spray the orchard.  In 2011, once we'd hung the disrupters in the orchard we never saw another moth in the trap -- they were all flying around trying to find those elusive females elsewhere.  And we had virtually no Codling Moth damage to our apple crop.  While not cheap, the disrupters are less expensive than the organic sprays available, and similar in cost to the conventional sprays.  If they work over the long term -- multiple years -- they will be far less costly than any spray program in terms of their impact on the environment.

I guess my point in telling this story is to remind my readers (all 3 of you) that you can't believe everything you read.  No one fact checked this author's book before it was published & she got her facts wrong.  I don't believe she was intentionally wrong, she just didn't know.  And she wrote about what happened on farms 25 - 35 years ago by the time the book was published.  There is a tendency among some groups of the public to vilify conventional farmers en masse.  But I don't think Farmer Bill is a villain.  He uses chemicals judiciously and sparingly.  He sprays early in the day or late in the day when the 'good' bugs are less likely to be active.  He wears protective garb and a ventilator mask and doesn't allow staff into the fields before the interval proscribed by the label.  We eat a lot of apples at our house, and a lot of our friends and family eat them, too.  We're not interested in poisoning any of these people.  We are interested in making our farm profitable -- and wormy apples are not saleable.

Winter

The strawberries were covered this past week; the blueberries were mulched; machinery was winterized & put away.   Farmer Bill took off this morning to pick up a new (to him) tractor in Virginia and won't be back for about 6 days.  I plan on spending a lot of time working in my sewing room while he's gone.  I hope to finish the wall quilt I started last spring, and make a start on a new quilt for our bed that I've been planning for almost 2 years.  When I need a break from sewing I'll work on a few home improvement projects -- light fixtures in the hallway come to mind -- and do some fall cleaning.

We had a light dusting of snow last night, which covers up the brown and makes things look very clean and pretty.  Not enough yet to get out the snowshoes...

We had a pretty good apple season this year, which helped make up some of the deficit from the strawberries (see posts about the river field).  But Farmer Bill will still be on an austerity budget -- except for the tractor -- this winter.  He's needed another tractor for several years; to be able to keep the employees busy and the work moving along in the summer.