This picture shows what it looks like to have too many apples in one spot. We have to go through certain rows and knock some off by hand. If we just left the apples to grow like this, we'd have a lot of apples but way too small, and possibly the tree limbs would break from the weight of them all.
For the size of this tree, it has too many apples too, even though the apples aren't clustered together as much as the picture above. On some varieties, if you leave too many on the tree one year, like Honeycrisp, the next year there will be no apples, or at least very little.
We don't have to thin every variety every year. We just play it by ear and see what each variety looks like.
We also are paying attention to our bug traps in the apples! Thankfully we don't have to worry about too many different kinds of pests bothering our apples. But the ones we really care about are the Codling Moths! Codling moths can lay eggs on the apple and soon there will have a worm eating away. The little red "eraser" looking thing in the trap in the picture above, has a pheromone on it that attracts the codling moths to it. (Phermone is a yummy smell to the moths...think "cookies in the oven" smell to us!) So if there are moths present, we will know and take care of them!
Well, besides apples, we have other crops demanding our attention.
In the next week or two, we will be harvesting our early ripening blueberries! That is when things really getting hopping around here! Our busiest time here on the farm is July and August.
Other random things:
A fun side project! We had a water leak so we had to dig down to the mainline and see what was going on. We couldn't water our corn until this was fixed. But all is fixed now so one more project checked off.
We usually start harvest for our grass seed around the 4th of July. Getting closer! Yikes where does the time go!
Hope you are all enjoying it being almost summer time!