Phillips Orchards & Cider Mill

The crops keep growing.  We have a better idea on the size of the apple crop now that June drop had finished and the apples have grown enough so you get can see them better in the tree.

The crop will be extremely variable by variety this year.  Some varieties like McIntosh, Ida Red, and Jonagold seem to have a real nice crop.  Others like Cortland and Golden Delicious have a moderate crop.  Still others like Empire and Fuji are very light this year, and many of the apples we do have will have frost damage and will have to go into cider.

All in all it looks like we'll have between 1/2 to 2/3 of the crop we had last year.  That seems in line with the overall Michigan crop which is estimated at about 14 million bushel this year compared to 2009 crop of over 28 million bushel. 

Thursday I'm calling the peach thinning for the year about 90% complete.  I've thinned all the peaches twice already, but as they continue to grow, you always notice some that should have been thinned, so we'll have a little touch up thinning to do over the next month or so.  The fruit set was much lighter this year compared to last season.  I believe this was due to several freeze events during and shortly after bloom that reduced the fruit set.  When I did the first pass of thinning on the 3 year old peach trees, I thought we would have a nice crop on them, however now it's looking quite a bit lighter.  Hopefully as they continue to grow, the crop will look better.  The older trees have a better crop.  This is probably because they are higher off the ground, and therefore withstood the cold nights better.

Now I need to figure out how to keep the deer out of the young peach trees. Last year, they ate almost every peach off our young trees, just a day or so before I was ready to pick them.  I'm resigned to the fact that a real deer fence will be the ultimate solution, but I'll have to come up with something in the next month or so to give us a fighting chance this season.

Wednesday was tomato planting day.  We decided to recycle the black plastic mulch we used last year for melons and get another crop on it before it's pulled up.  So we transplanted the tomatoes right back on the plastic from last season.  We'll see how it goes, but getting two seasons out of the mulch seemed like a great idea.  We planted 4 varieties of red tomatoes, one variety of yellow tomato and of course some Roma tomatoes.  So, in a couple months we should start having some awesome fresh tomatoes.

The weather has certainly warmed up and we have the pumpkins, winter squash and gourds all planted.  This year we planted approximately 1 acre of pumpkins and squash.  So the battle to keep the deer, woodchucks, etc. from doing too much damage.  We've planted several new varieties of winter squash this year, so with some luck we'll have some great new treats come August & September.