Orchard Talk

This prolonged warm weather is very scary for fruit growers. Fruit buds are moving along slowly. We don’t know how much they have advanced yet but with each warm day we lose a little hardiness. I guess that some seasonal cold nights in the teens would do some damage to stone fruit buds. I think it is a long shot that we will get through this with a full crop but each night that it doesn’t get real cold we are one day closer to having a crop. I am hoping for cold weather without any bitter cold nights to slow things down. I was always very confident that we would have some level of an economic crop but in 2002 we lost everything but the apples to early warm weather followed by a snowy cold spring. Now I am wondering about delaying expenses for equipment and projects until we get through this spring. It’s like rolling a huge boulder up the hill. You can’t just stop and rest!

Hello,
Today I am writing about a little crusade I have taken up. It seems that I get piles and piles of catalogs in the mail. Most of them go straight to the recycle box, but this should not be the responsibility of the Antrim county taxpayers to pay for the disposal of excess unwanted catalogs. So a few weeks ago I started calling every one of the companies that sends us catalogs and asked to be removed from their lists. I expect that this will work, however, there is one company that I have been battling for 2 years to quit sending catalogs.
We get our cardboard from a company called Uline. Uline is very good at service, and the prices are good. However, Uline sends catalogs every few weeks, and they send one to every person who ordered from them,  so at first we got one catalog, then Uline was sending 2, then we were getting 4 catalogs every few weeks. I complained and got it down to one but I cannot get Uline to quit sending them altogether. I just received a new one today addressed to Betsy. It weighs 1.5 lbs.
It seems crazy to conserve and recycle (paper or plastic, reusable bags) only to have Uline wantonly waste many times the amount of resources that we can conserve.
I wrote Uline again today and I told them to check out our blog. We should be able to opt out of their wasteful catalog marketing scheme, and maybe seeing the Uline name  associated with anti-conservation will move that along.

Tags: business, spraying