Finishing the Honeycrisps

Hey, I'm back, and we're finally done with Honeycrisps! And I have another Follower! Yippee, Stephanie:)

Here she is with her lovely daughter Johanna. Stephanie is a Fun Farmer and an awesome friend. She and I are kindred spirits for 4 reasons:

1. We both began our work experience as teenagers picking eggs at chicken farms. OK, I've never met anyone else on this earth that has picked eggs at a chicken farm!
2. We're both keen fisherwomen. Her version of fishing is amazing! It includes a private lake, sunshine, a puppy and champagne with hibiscus flowers.
3. We both love farming and farmers, specifically the two that have been best friends since kindergarten.
4. We're both moms of exceptional children. Johanna's baby shoes are on the dashboard of Stephanie's Jeep. Natalie's umbilical cord clip is in my sock drawer, and my positive pregnancy test results with Shyla are in the safe. I keep an avocado green coffee cup Grayson found and gave to me the first weekend we met when we were 4-wheeling on the mountain. And the string of peppers John gave me 2 years ago are still on the kitchen wall. (Geez John, I must really like you because those peppers haven't aged well!)

So much to CELEBRATE!

This was our biggest crop of Honeys ever. Triangle C had their biggest crop ever, and we had the most difficulty we've ever had getting enough pickers. Our core group of 14 guys have worked non-stop for the past three weeks. I found out yesterday that several of them are also attending night school to earn their GED. Wow, wow, wow!

Here they are again. They've been an awesome crew!

 

Some things we want to remember for next year's Honeycrisp crop:

• We need a much bigger crew year around beginning this winter
• Spend more time summer pruning to get more light into the tree canopy
• Irrigate a couple of times a week rather than daily
• More aggressive pest control specifically for the leaf roller

This is an example of leaf roller damage on a Honeycrisp.

• If it's a big crop, go back in again in August for another round of thinning
• Although our soil had excess nitrogen levels, we kept bitterpit down by weekly foliar applications of calcium throughout the growing season
• Post harvest recommendation from Gary Johnson, the soils guy at Wilbur Ellis, included a band application of Gypsum ( Calcium Sulfate), Pro Natural Soil Stimulant if compost not added and a foliar application of moderate boron and 1 gal of either True Organic 4-0-2 or 3-1-5
• Well, I don't know how we're going to foliar apply anthing now that we've finally harvested the fruit and next week the forecast shows snow? The irrigation water is off and all the lines have been blown. The sprayers have been blown as well.

Here I'm distracting Bill from working on blowing the sprayer. That's our compressor hose strategically located to blow all the remaining fluid from the lines. Hey Ray, do you recognize that sprayer? Bill bought it from you 20 years ago!

Do you see the spray coming out of the nozzles. Bill is doing a great job!



Back to our list of things to remember for next year's Honeycrisp crop:

• We had concerns about low temperatures at night this past week. We had signed up for weather alerts from Ag Weathernet so recieved an alert with extra information. The suggestion from WSU was that although there was the potential for low temperatures, there could be an inversion so wind machines might help keep the temperatures from dipping too low by pulling the warm air above into the orchard.

Here's one of our wind machines.

 Bill is setting the thermostat for 32 degrees.

The canyon got cold Tuesday night through Friday morning. The wind machines came on every night soon after the sun went down. One of the canyon neighbors called me Friday morning to let me know we had some wind machines going.  According to him, wind machines couldn't possibly have a purpose this time of year plus they were disrupting his sleep. Oh my gosh, he's the same neighbor to call us in August wondering if we had a meth lab in our cherry block because of the odor wafting up to his house after we applied Dried Poultry Waste.

In the morning after the first cold night, we cut open an apple and saw frost on the seeds. Our fieldman explained that the cold temps travel up through the core from the bottom calex end of the apple frosting the seeds without freezing the apple.

The last night it got down to 25 degrees for several hours, and we did have a few frozen apples. This was obvious because the skin was wrinkled and the apple felt rubbery. We waited until almost noon for the apples to warm up so we could begin picking. We marked those bins of apples as 0's meaning they should be sold immediately. Those apples having been frozen once won't store for any length of time.

We didn't have many apples that froze, and we're pretty sure we kept the temperature up five degrees more than it would have been without the windmachines.

In addition to the good news on finishing the Honeycrisps, Natalie got her third interview for a job she's excited about in Dubai. Yay Natalie, good luck!

Now we move to harvesting our Red Delicious, Pinatas and Fugi apples.