More Union Valley

Last week involved several meetings as we worked towards making a final decision on the Union Valley acreage. I spent an hour walking through the Honeycrisp block looking at trees and counting sick or missing ones. Before they were grafted to Honeycrisp, they were some variety of Red Delicious. The typical healthy Honeycrisps had a strong central leader and large scaffold limbs that spiraled up the tree.

 

This tree, while small, is not really weak or a problem.  Maybe it was a replant.

This one is more of a concern. You can see the tree is lopsided with good strong growth on the right side of the picture.  The left side is another story.  If you look closely, you can see two stumped limbs.  These two both appear to be sick or dead.  Sometimes when a limb is cut off, rather than send out a new shoot of growth, it dies.   Once the limb dies, the limb will continue to die back retreating towards the main trunk.  This die back is irreversible.  So, leaving it untreated or unattended will eventually kill the entire tree.  This process is slow, taking several years.  The solution is simple.  You must cut the dead limb back to good healthy tissue.  Sometimes you may be forced to remove the entire limb or you may choose to just clean things up.  We suspect that this problem came about when the Reds were grafted to hHoneycrisp.  It is common for at least a few grafts to break out of the limb they were grafted into late in the first year.  The wind is the most likely culprit pushing on the new growth that has grown large by late summer.  The first year the graft union is not very strong and can be broken easily.  Blowouts are uncommon after the first year.  The key is to address this before there are blowouts by somehow stablizing the graft.  Those grafts that do blowout need to be reworked the next spring.  Either regraft them or cut off the entire limb flush with the main trunk of the tree.

Bill wanted me to use the quad to do this assessment but I decided not to because I'm pretty sure I would have froze to the quad and flown by such interesting specimens as the one above. Luckily I had my hand warmer packets that I deployed when the sun went down. With hand warmers in my gloves, I was able to make a tally mark and take a picture.

Meanwhile, Bill was at the Union Valley housing talking to the Manson Grower's employees with the help of our bilingual employee Rodolfo. They were discussing the change of management and future plans. When I finished my task, I walked through the Golden block to join the conversation.

The Goldens still had their leaves, and it was like a deep long corridor of autumness to cross the property to the housing area with the shop.

Once in the shop, I determined that Victor was going to stay to work for us and the rest of the crew would be leaving between now and January 1st. Victor is coming to us with stellar recommendations, so we feel fortunate that he wants to stay with us. He has experience spraying on the steep hillside with the Red Delicious acreage. He also knows the irrigation lay out and the frost control system. All of this will be new to us and our crew, and Victor's expertise will be a huge help.

The housing includes 4 units with 2 bedrooms each. The shop down the road has 3 bedrooms. There are multiple out buildings and a mobile home pad with hook up for power and septic. All of this looks good.

The only part of this plan that has us concerned is the Fugi block. Before I started my Honeycrisp walk through, Bill and I looked at the Fugi block. We saw the winter injury that we've been aware of since last winter, but this time we really looked at it.  We had determined this block needed grafting or reworking of some kind.  It has not been producing positive cash flow.

Notice how the bark is cracked and loose?

Bill broke off the bark and used his Leatherman to cut into the bark and cambium layer to check for living tissue. There were a number of trees in this condition so we're not sure what to expect this spring. We're talking to several fieldmen and Gary McMonagle (our grafter) to get their opinions.

Tomorrow we have the Washington Horticulture Association meetings in Wenatchee. Every year we attend these meetings to get the latest horticulture information and network with other business people in the industry. We've previewed the topics and the sessions look to be good.