Spring

 Spring has sprung!

Last year, for the first time, I noticed a wild plum near my house.  They are readily identified in the early Spring due to profuse blooming and being earlier than many fruits.  Later, I detected not a single fruit.  Which is not unusual for wild plums.  This year, the bloom went unnoticed; the specimen is now fully leafed out and without detected fruit.

https://wmckemie.blogspot.com/2022/03/wild-plums.html

Right now, pears are in full bloom.  They are spectacular.  One might think we had a light snow due to white pedals on the ground.  I don't have many examples left, but peaches should be next.

I'm rather pleased to be "retired'.  For decades, the work load has been the same.  By now, the peaches should be pruned.  That is weeks worth of work.  I recall I had the process fairly streamlined.  I used bottles of compressed CO2 supplied by a welding supply business to power hand held pneumatic pole pruners supplied by air hoses.  I would carry rented bottles of CO2 out in the orchard on my Isuzu pickup truck, converted to a flatbed, and range a hundred feet or so from the parking spot.  I would prune maybe 50-100 trees, then move the truck.   Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Then, all the prunings would have to be removed.  I experimented chipping those prunings in the orchard but finally decided it was easier to drag the brush to some nearby safe burning spots.  Then, wait for the weather to offer a burn opportunity.  For prunings less that 1-1.5", I could windrow them between peach rows and eventually shred them in place with a tractor powered shredder/mower.

I had a few customers that thought that fruit and nut wood made good smoker wood for smoking meat.  2" to 4" prunings would normally be cut into firewood size pieces and either stocked for firewood or given to customers wanting smoker wood.  Apple, peach, pecan.

Then, on to the thinning project which was a project about as big, or bigger, than pruning.  Every spare minute was spent thinning for several weeks.  Until the fruit reached "pit hardening", about the size of a pecan, fruit and blooms spaced less than several inches on branches were removed.  I always tried to get a head start on thinning, by starting when only blooms were present.  The goal is to increase the size of picked fruit at harvest time.  Bloom thinning is far more effective than small fruit thinning.  The risk with bloom thinning is that a freeze could come along and leave too few fruit which would make harvested fruit very large but would reduce the size of the total harvest.  I've seen a number of years where I did a lot of bloom thinning only to have a freeze leave me with a small or no crop.  It can be fun it one develops the proper attitude.