Jana and I\u00a0made our first dollar as fruit growers this past Monday.\u00a0 It was rather unexpected actually.\u00a0 Two weeks ago, we didn’t think it would be possible that the berries would be ready by our traditional opening on\u00a0Memorial Day.\u00a0 It was still very cool,\u00a0with highs struggling to get out of the 60’s,\u00a0and the plants just wouldn’t stop blooming\u00a0to grow.\u00a0 Two warm days changed that, and by last Friday I was thinking that maybe we needed to pick the field soon.\u00a0 By Sunday it was clear that we’d need to have a “soft” opening on Memorial day with just ready-pick berries.<\/p>\n
Then just as we were finally ready to open the patch for pick-your-own on Tuesday, the heat wave hit.\u00a0 We went from cool cloudy weather to sunny and hot, and not just one day of sunny and hot, but five days of summer-like, humid, 90-degree\u00a0Berumuda high pressure.\u00a0 It felt like peach season.\u00a0 I was amazed that people were tough enough to come out and pick in the hot sun.<\/p>\n
Strawberries, at least the kind we grow around here, are a cool weather crop.\u00a0 When hit with this kind of heat, they don’t size properly and they go on defence – just trying NOT to turn to mush in the sun.\u00a0 Fortunately, we had a new field with irrigation.\u00a0 This helped, but it wasn’t the opening week I would have wanted.\u00a0 By Saturday afternoon, picking was getting hard and we were waiving our usual minimum charge.<\/p>\n
I think most of you were happy with the berries we did have (and to be sure, there were lots of nice ones) \u00a0but after all the work we’ve done out there, I was hoping for better.<\/p>\n
Maybe it’s appropriate to have some missed expectations right off the bat.\u00a0 Even when we do everything to the best of our ability, things will go wrong in this business, and there is nothing – absolutely nothing – we can do about it.\u00a0 Rather than focus on those missed expectations, it is more constructive to look ahead.<\/p>\n
Next week will be cooler, and thanks to the irrigation, our later variety plants look very healthy and should give us a good second wave of berries.\u00a0 At least, that’s my hope!<\/p>\n
…Now if it would just rain…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jana and I\u00a0made our first dollar as fruit growers this past Monday.\u00a0 It was rather unexpected actually.\u00a0 Two weeks ago, we didn’t think it would be possible that the berries would be ready by our traditional opening on\u00a0Memorial Day.\u00a0 It was still very cool,\u00a0with highs struggling to get out of the 60’s,\u00a0and the plants just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","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\/61","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=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/62"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}