TODAY IN THE ORCHARD

Our Red Haven peach tree, freshly mowed and thinned today.

Today the temperatures were much more acceptable - barely 80 degrees with a few light showers in the early morning. As always there was a lot of weeding to do; no sooner do we arrive at the end of the rows of young trees than the weeds are popping up in the rows where we started. At least for today the nursery looks great. We also updated and replaced missing tags in the orchard. Hard to document what’s going on if the tag is gone.
In the afternoon we thinned the fruit on several peach trees. Our magnificent old Red Haven tree is approaching twenty-five years old and produces a great deal of fruit. The other peach trees are younger and are producing more fruit each year. Most peach trees don’t grow to be very old, especially in colder climates. Every year or two we plant a couple of new ones to replace the inevitable victims of cold winter temperatures. We try to thin the peach crop as close to July 4th as possible. First we remove diseased and damaged fruit. Then we thin the remaining fruit to about 4-6” apart. We try to leave only 3-4 fruits on a branch so the branches don’t get too heavy and break, but sometimes we leave a few extra because it’s hard to discard perfect looking peaches. This year is not a banner year for peaches, but it does look we’ll be eating our fill in August.