Walk With Me Through The Remnants Of The Old Orchard
We bought a piece of the old Mesa Apple Company Orchard land. There are still some fruit trees here, not all of them apple. It has been very, very mild this fall and winter and so I went to see how the fruit trees were doing. A hard freeze is forecast for next week and we normally do not see buds until late March at the earliest...
pretty much the same here - most of the trees are getting ready for blossom or even starting - way beyond time... but... what do WE know... maybe it is the right time after all, haha - and huugghhh... maybe it is not.. then what... well, you and I and you and we know what to do.. that is the only thing that counts
The robins are coming back... who knows?
I love your voice, it's so awesome!!! Beautiful orchard you live in, I can't wait to see this in the spring!!! Thanks for this video #walkwithme :) xo
Thank you! It is stunning when it all blooms, and smells like heaven when the lilacs bust out. We have the oldest house in the area, the old settlers who sold out to the orchard folk built this place. I have a 100 year old honeysuckle in the yard :) Wish we had blockchain smellograms lol!
It does sound like Heaven...I look forward to those walkwithme videos!! I'll have to imagine the smell for now :) :)
So does that mean that all the little buds will freeze next week?
And what happened to all the three apple 🍎 trees? Was it just a bad idea because of the weather there?
The trees will be OK, most of them. Almost certainly going to destroy all the fruit. I went walking through my garden area today, my blackberries and raspberries are sending out spring shoots... And no, fruit actually does well here but they needed to practice companion planting and sustainable practices. Instead, they threw money at problems money could not fix. The final straw was the hard freeze.
Oh goodness, I hope you don't get a hard freeze like we have had. We never get it like this and I am worried about my few fruit trees. How lucky that you were able to buy an established orchard. Well you try pressing cider, or have you done in the past?
It is an interesting situation. We can harvest a lot of plums, pears and cherries. The apples are ovverun with coddling moths. Because there are wild apple trees all over the area, there is no winning. We are HOPING to apply some permaculture techniques and harvest more than just a few apples in the future, but mostly they are animal food. We have a bear that lives here spring and fall, lots of deer... we like to share with them and we are all eating ketogenic anyway lol!
Having the trees now is not good news if you get a deep freeze next week. It will effect the crops for this year. The trees look really old. How old are they?
Could be as old as 1909. Here is the "official" story which is mostly accurate. :)
http://co.adams.id.us/community-resources/history/mesa/
That is really cool to have an orchard over 100 years old still producing fruit! 80,000 trees is pretty spectacular. Too bad they didn't put more planning into the orchard before they planted.
It is actually an epic tale of idiocy. They monocropped, and even to this day coddling moths make it impossible to grow apples around here without LOTS of worms. They just made coddling moth paradise. They tried to overcome the moths with insecticides which back then often had LEAD in them... The official story is the bad freeze ended the orchard but it was about to go under anyway. Then they tried wheat, then they tried cattle, and they kept doing MONOCROPS and failing.
I see what happened. Sounds like it’s tkme for some three sisters!
Yep, we have big permaculture dreams and no permaculture budget... lol! But we got our little backhoe, swaling is where it has to begin here. We have an amazing opportunity to replenish an aquifer.