Ripening Pink Champagne currants.
This week top of mind is summer pruning on pome trees (especially apples), fungal and insect pest management, fertility management in young trees and grapes especially, and preparations for more harvests to come. While things are all a bit slower to ripen this spring/early summer than last year, we’re getting closer on cherries, currants, and jostaberries. We’ll likely be harvesting the last couple flushes of strawberries this week as well before our June-bearing plants are finished up for the season.
Fruit/Bud/Tree Development
- Table grapes are beginning to flower! We’ve got flowering in Lynden Blue, as well as first flowers in Interlaken and Jupiter varieties. Seeing some shattering of buds/clusters particularly in Interlaken which is somewhat concerning and could be due to a whole host of things: weather, overbearing last season, nutrient deficiency, etc.
- Ribes and Cherries are both ripening quickly and we expect to begin harvesting by end of week/early next week.
- Foliage on apple trees this spring/early summer looks good – deep green, and relatively clean of scab.
Pest & Disease
- We’ve had some anthracnose pop up in our front orchard planting that’s been unfortunate. Very obvious lesions (red-black center, dead cambium underneath, etc.) have been pruned out or even carved out an cauterized with a torch if we could. This spring has been a particularly bad one for anthracnose and there’s plans to remove more apple trees adjacent to the field.
- Black knot is coming back in plums. Some of the knot that we cut out earlier this spring is looking fine, but some of it is coming back and we’ll ultimately need to remove those limbs/leaders entirely.
- Earwigs are now showing up and moving into the tree canopies both in stone and pome fruit. We’re collecting some of the ones in our peach orchard and moving them to an apple block. Once fruit is getting closer to ripening, we’ll also utilize some sticky trunk wrap to prevent them from feeding on ripening peaches.
Grapes in bloom.
What’s Ripe?
This week we’re harvesting: Strawberries, and maybe the very first of the sweet cherries and currants by the end of the week (or possibly early next week).
Anthracnose on a young apple tree.
Earwigs collected from traps in our peach block.
