OK, so even the casual reader will note that I didn’t do a very good job of updating my blog this season. That’s putting it mildly.<\/p>\n
There are lots of good reasons for this, but they all come down to the simple fact that I don’t have much time.\u00a0 See previous posts for an idea of why.\u00a0 The 2014 growing season included many of the same challenges presented in 2013, most notably, maintenance issues.\u00a0 Pretty much every piece of equipment had something go wrong with it at some point.\u00a0 From collapsed buildings, to repairs on 70 year old refrigeration equipment, to rewiring of\u00a0complicated irrigation systems,\u00a0to tractor fires and more, I was never bored.<\/p>\n
But now that the season is over and most of the money is in the bank (a later article on that perhaps?), since I didn’t make any other distracting posts during the growing season, let’s just do a quick analysis of my last post and see how well I did with my\u00a0crop\u00a0predictions.<\/p>\n
Apricots – yep, they all froze.\u00a0 Moreover, we actually lost a few trees when they never awoke from the long winter.\u00a0 I’d like to plant more apricots, but it is difficult to find a variety that grows well here.\u00a0 Our biggest problem is a disease called “bacterial spot”, which sounds dangerous, but simply causes ugly blotches on the fruit.\u00a0 It doesn’t occur in dry climates, like California or Persia, but around here it thrives.<\/p>\n
Strawberries – right again!\u00a0 It was the best crop in a long time – maybe ever.\u00a0 The plants went nuts and the moist soil pushed some really nice berries.\u00a0 It will be a hard act to follow this year.<\/p>\n
Peaches – right.\u00a0 It was a good crop.\u00a0 Most of the peaches did really well though we did have a block of peaches fail at the end of the season.\u00a0 The trees are getting old and they seemed to just give up on their heavy crop.\u00a0 Next time, I’ll throw some fertilizer at them at the first sign of trouble; maybe it would have helped.<\/p>\n
Blueberries – right.\u00a0 It was a great crop.\u00a0 We had some freeze damage from the winter, but not enough to knock back the plants.\u00a0 In fact, it is probably time for some serious pruning to help the plants produce bigger berries.<\/p>\n
Cherries – my concerns were warranted.\u00a0 It was another poor year for cherries, but at least we had a few.\u00a0 Orchards to the north and west had almost no cherries at all.\u00a0 I was once challenged by a customer who told me that cherries are too expensive.\u00a0 The challenging crops of the last few years show why they are so costly.<\/p>\n
Apples – I projected a good crop, heavy on Reds, light on Golds, and otherwise average.\u00a0 I was happily wrong.\u00a0 It was a huge crop.\u00a0 We broke records on our Golds and hit benchmarks not seen for many years.\u00a0 The quality was very good on our fresh eating apples, with a cool summer providing optimal coloring conditions.\u00a0 Apple scab continued to be a problem, exacerbated by heavy rains in the spring; but the disease was largely limited to the processing apples so the economic damage was minimal.\u00a0 The only downside to the crop was that everyone else in the country had a good crop too – in fact, a record crop – which lowered the wholesale price of apples yet again.\u00a0 This is the classic problem with farming: if you have a good year, chances are good others did too, and the prices fall.<\/p>\n
Raspberries – they didn’t grow as quickly as I would have liked, but after a shot of mid-summer fertilizer they perked up and provided some good snacking.\u00a0 They should be well-positioned for a harvestable crop this year.\u00a0 I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!<\/p>\n
We raise a few other crops that deserve mention.<\/p>\n
The pumpkin crop this year was pretty good.\u00a0 I devoted even larger fields to it this year, but yields didn’t seem to be quite as good as the last few years.\u00a0 We grew a record variety of “curbits” (the technical word for squash\/gourds\/pumpkins) including some really tasty new squashes.\u00a0 I really enjoy watching these form in the field because you always see a few interesting hybrids.\u00a0 This year we found a unique orange and green “camouflage” squatty pumpkin that Jana quickly claimed as her own.\u00a0 It was rock hard up to January when we finally decided to eat it, and were pleasantly surprised by how good it was.\u00a0 I saved the seeds, but don’t really expect the sons and daughters to look like their parent.<\/p>\n
Corn and soybeans were good for most farmers this year, but just average in my fields.\u00a0 The wide variety of food and water on our farm makes an ideal habitat for deer, and deer love soybeans.\u00a0 So between the deer, the groundhogs, and the hired spray applicator that missed two acres of beans, we had a highly average year of grain.\u00a0 (And yes, the record harvest elsewhere pushed the price down to about half of what the price was just two years ago.)<\/p>\n
All in all, it was a very good year.\u00a0 But I’m happy for\u00a0a little time off!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, so even the casual reader will note that I didn’t do a very good job of updating my blog this season. That’s putting it mildly. There are lots of good reasons for this, but they all come down to the simple fact that I don’t have much time.\u00a0 See previous posts for an idea […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}