Fri Aug 04, 2017 8:22 am
Oh yeah, forgot my Apple orchard, peach, and cherries. All apples but a Macintosh and Northern Spy are the "Free" varieties, and those are awesome for yields without spray. I have problems with the trees becoming too laden with fruit and have to thin them around mid July or the trees will self-destruct. Last year we ran out of time and a whole bunch of apples went to waste. The year before, we canned more than a hundred quarts of sauce that didn't even need sugar added the apples were so sweet. Lots of other apple products made, to the point of being sick of apples.
I was worried about the fruit trees this year as a very warm mid-winter spell coaxed the native mason bees out in January, and it killed them all. I barely had any native pollinators in the fruit trees this year, and I quit European bee-keeping two years ago in frustration. We did wind up with good apple pollination on the later bloomers like the Free varieties, but the early old-fashion Macintosh has maybe 2 apples. The crab-apples look particularly sad as they over-did themselves on flowers in the spring, and no fertilization on the flowers which lead to hardly any leaves and a handful of crab-apples. One tree looks dead.
We also harvest maple sap in the spring and make syrup, this year we made 2 gallons in the old fashioned way... over a fire. Propane is too expensive so I went back to wood. It was a LOT of work. I could tap almost 4x as much, but that would be more than I could boil off with the equipment I have.