Blackberry Winter

Winter is the time to clean up beds of perennial plants. We took a nice morning in late February to start cleaning up our blackberry beds. What we did was cut out all the dead canes that produced fruit last year. Next we have to get the primocanes into shape bit that is work for another day

Eugene cuts old growth as close to the ground as he can

The berry patch

Carrying the dead canes away. We never leave the debris behind as that can lead to pest and disease problems as well as clutter which can badly impede work efforts

The final resting place for the dead canes. The burn pit where they will be lit on fire and all the potential pest and disease problems will go up in smoke

It's Pruning Time

Things are heating up here at the farm. The snow is gone and, at least today, the weather is warm and that means we are getting busy pruning trees and raspberries. Pruning is amazingly important, without proper pruning trees and brambles cannot produce as well as they do when pruned. Pruning gets rid of dead and diseased material as well as branches that cross each other and opens up the plants to sunlight and air. After we are done pruning than we will spray dormant oil on everything to kill scale, aphids, mealybugs and other pests. Than lime sulfur is sprayed on the trees to control various fungi. After that we quit spraying and wait for the trees to flower and the bees to come and pollinate the flowers. Than we hang sticky traps which we make from orange plastic sleeves our in which daily newspaper is delivered covered with this waterproof sticky stuff called Tangle Foot. These sticky traps catch coddling moths, curculios and other fruit pests (we also use them for keeping arugula and eggplant free of flea beetles). they also will catch beneficial insects such as bees which is why we wait until after the flowers are gone to hang them. We even will bag some of the fruit (Martha Stewart had a segment on bagging fruit). It is the most effective organic way to keep everything off of the apples but it is also amazingly labor intensive so we never do more than about 5%. We simply do not have the time to bag several thousand pommes and pears and plant 3 acres in produce in the spring. And since apples are not our main crop, by any means, we get a bit slack with the bagging.

Eugene does most of the tree pruning. I have a fear of heights so will not climb way up into the trees (and we have 2 old apples that are 30'+ tall) and because i am not a man and do not have the upper body strength of one I cannot use the saw and cutters on the long extension for more than 10 minutes at a time. Nor can I control the extension well so it takes me several minutes to make a single cut. in that same time Eugene will make about 10 cuts.

So I get bramble duty. I started in on the red raspberries today and got about 30% done before my hand got too sore and stiff to use the pruners. I have applied arnica and heat and by Friday I should be able to continue my task. I would continue tomorrow except we have a big vet appointment in the morning that should take a few hours (3 dogs and a cat all going to the vet) and it is supposed to rain all day on top of that. I think I will need the time to heal my hand.

We grow two kinds of red raspberries, Latham, a summer bearing plant and Heritage, an everbearing type that we make into a fall bearing crop by cutting down all the canes in late winter. The Latham are a bit more complex to prune but by no means rocket science. What I am doing with the Latham berries is first going in and taking out all the dead canes and any live canes that have crept too far out of their bed. If I leave these in they will by summer grow into the aisle way making raspberry harvest difficult as well as making it difficult to deal with the crop in the beds immediately to the east of the raspberries (4 of them). I cut the canes as close to flush with the ground as I can with a pair of anvil pruners (I do not like the offset kind as much). After I get the dead stuff out, I look at the canes and remove any that are not straight and any that are crossing other canes. The goal is to leave 5 to 7 canes per foot. The cut canes are removed from the area and either will be composted or burned. We are leaning towards burning now that we have found mealy bugs and some sort of white scale on some of the canes.

Once the raspberry canes have been cleaned out we will go back and take out any small, misshapened or crossing canes we missed before and also cut about 10% off of the top of the canes (between 4" and 7" depending on the size of the cane) as this allows the plants to make larger fruit. After that they will be sprayed with dormant oil and mulched with cedar chips (these are acidic and raspberries like an acid soil) and either straw (expensive) or grass clippings (free). than we wait for the canes to leaf out, bloom and than make berries. Last year we had an incredible bumper crop and were when the season was over for the Latham we had harvested over 26 gallons, one 1/2 pint at a time. I really doubt we will have such a great crop this year, but you never know.

So for the next couple of weeks we will be pruning trees and brambles. Than it will be about time to start transplanting onions and leeks which is pretty much like planting several thousand blades of grass one blade at a time. It's a pretty Zen job if you have your head in the right place.

Seedling Madness

Yesterday was spent dealing with seedlings, lots and lots of seedlings.

The first round of lettuces went out to a hoop house where they will be transplanted in the next couple of days. The first round of onions and leeks went into a cold frame because they grow better in such conditions than under lights in a too warm and humid for them grow room.

I was good to see all those flats and pots of seedlings going outside because the second round of lettuces germinated and had to be put into 4 flats of 2" soil blocks (49 per flat). This round of lettuce includes two of my favorites-lollo rosa and cracoviensis, both heirlooms. Also did with 3 flats of kale-winterbor, Holona (aka Dinosaur kale) and Russian white. the winterbor we have been growing for years and the other two are new to us.

I still have to do up another 3 or flats of large soil blocks for the celery and celeriac that is just beginning to germinate. Hopefully, I will get to that today after harvesting the leeks for the farmers market this Saturday in Oxford. otherwise they will wait until Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning.

I also did another round of onions yesterday as the Stella Natura indicated it was a good day to plant root seeds. We thought we had enough planted with the first go round but two pots of red onion seed failed to germinate (well one had a whopping 2% germination rate, the other zero) leaving us with 6 pots of onions. So I prepared 6 additional pots and planted more Ailsa Craig, Boulder belt Sweets and some older Copra seed which had fairly poor germination but needed to be used up or thrown out so I sowed them very heavily in hopes of getting 2 full pots of seedlings. I also did a pot of some red onion seed Eugene saved last year that has been doing well for us.

While I was doing that Eugene made soil mix, trimmed the blackberry canes, carried lettuces up to the hoop house, tried to dog proof the fence only to find while he was fixing one part, Nate was wiggling out of a new hole he had created further down the fence line so he could run across 127 to see the dogs on the other side of the road. Damn Dogs.

And it is still early in the season. I have not gotten into the thousands of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, etc., seedlings that will be started in the next couple of weeks. Or all the seedlings that need transplanting or all the perennials that need mulching or the fruit trees that need pruning. We have a lot on our plates but it will all get done as it does every year.

Pruning Season

Spring must be on the way as the tempo of farm life is beginning to pick up after a long winter's rest.

Eugene has been pruning the apple trees. It does not appear that these trees have been properly pruned in decades, if ever. Nature has done some pruning on her own via high winds and periodic cicadas but nature tends to leave the detached limbs in the trees which is counter productive. we have 2 huge old trees that need pruning and it looks like Eugene will get about 50% of the work done this season that needs to be done to these trees. He would do all the work this year but one is not supposed to cut out more than 50% of the tree (and 1/3 is a much better figure) ever and these trees need about 75% of their branches removed to be healthy trees that let in enough air and light for the developing pommes.

Now I don't see the use of doing anything to these trees as long as there are mature eastern red cedars within 10' of the trees. Apples and Cedars do not get along at all. Cedars pass a disease call cedar apple rust to apple trees making the apple trees sick enough to not grow fruit and in extreme cases drop all their leaves by July. There is also the fact that we have no idea what kind of apples these trees produce (red of some sort for one and I don't remember what the other had on it last fall). for commercial purposes it would be nice to know what we are growing and selling.

The plan is to get disease resistant trees for our future tiny orchard (we plan on getting 7 to 10 trees total) so we do not have to resort to incredibly toxic sprays in order to get a decent looking crop (since people tend to buy with their eyes). our own trees will also have the advantage of not being neglected for decades and thus will be super simple to prune and care for compared to the trees already here.

We have already been through the experience where we had to rehab someone else's apple trees. It was a good learning experience and one of the things we learned is in order to make any money on apples (and there is a thin margin with this crop because a full orchard takes a lot of time grooming the trees-pruning, spraying, etc., and a lot of money for all the sprays used on conventional apples) one needs trees that do not need a lot of spraying and pruning. But if you take over neglected trees that is exactly what you will get into for years and years. After 11 years at the old farm we got the apple trees into really good healthy shape and did not have to do much to them in the spring as far as pruning went but in the early years it took weeks and weeks to get 8 trees pruned because they needed so much work and than just to get any apples we had to spray the trees (with organic sprays) weekly for a couple of years. After figuring out that apples did not make us much money for all the work involved we stopped spraying the trees more than a couple of times a years and found they apples were about the same and we made more money from them when we did less work. I mean one year we grossed about $300 from the apples but we probably put 250 hours in to the care of the apples so we ended up making well under a buck an hour when the inputs costs were subtracted from the gross.

So Eugene prunes the old apple trees and improves them. And this will mean we get some heirloom apples of unknown types while the new trees (which have yet to be selected or bought) grow to maturity over the next 3 to 5 years. They are some really nice old trees with a swell canopy of branches set behind the barns along an old fence line and towering over the possible chert outcropping. they have created a nice work space and possibly the place where the packing shed will be.