May 1 activities

Today Jim is planting the new raspberry block at the Creswell market. There won’t be  many berries this year in the new block but next year we will be in business. We have been very happy with the 3 rows of raspberries we have at the M88 market. The workers are planting the last of the replacement trees where trees died.

We use a cool biopesticide when planting replacements. There is a bacteria that causes big knots on the roots of trees. We call it crown gall. It can kill or stop the growth on fruit trees. When panting replacements the trees are more at risk from this since we haven’t prepped the soil for a few years like in a new planting. So, there is a bacteria that will colonize the roots of a tree and repel the crown gall bacteria. When we plant replacements we soak the roots in the no-gall bacteria and we won’t get crown gall!!

I am watching for my neighbors to start planting field corn. When they start I will wait a couple days then start planting sweet corn.

We are awaiting a double bottom load of turkey manure. Due to food safety concerns we do all the turkey manure in the fall on bearing fruit trees, but we will be spreading by hand on the young non-bearing trees and we should get the best bang out of it in the spring. The workers hate this job as the turkey manure can be more smelly than you can imagine. It is eye-watering and nasty. The township gets odor complaints when we spread the turkey poop but a little rain and sun will soon knock down the odor.

Our trimming crew is really going to town. We called all the seasonal workers back April 1 and they have many acres to cover. We try to keep our most experienced workers in the small trees so that they can build a strong frame that will hold up under a large crop load in a few years. We do not want to crop too early so that we can build bigger more productive trees. (We are VERY proud of our young orchards)

The bees have arrived from their Florida vacation. Honeybees are not native th North America and have developed several parasites and health problems over the last several decades. So in response to that our local bee guy moved his operation to Florida for the winters so that the hive could continue to grow new bees year round. He will wait until we call (several times) that the blossoms are imminent and then he will load up several semi-trucks with bees, throw a net over them and then drive them to work in Michigan. When they get here the hives are loaded with healthy bees that get the job done. The bees are one of the great phenomenons of life. The hives are placed in the orchard after the trip from Florida and the next day the bees all go to work. However, a tree half a mile away from the hive will have just as many bees in it as the tree right beside the hive!! They are able to set up a work area grid somehow and they each have a unique assignment.  Amazing to me. We will rent over 100 hives. They will do double duty as they start in apricots and cherry then peach and nectarine and finally apples and pears. We rarely get stung while working around all these bees. They are usually preoccupied with work, but occasionally we sit on one and get stung.

John