Once again, more than a few days have gone by without any posts...

Not to necessarily take a Buddhist film out of perspective, but 'Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring Again'...before any mention of Orchard happenings. As soon as the last apple was plucked from the tree last fall, we began clearing a few hundred trees (it is much easier to prune a tree with one cut at the base than several at the top!) to make way for more varieties and younger trees.

We added thirty varieties and about 500 trees to the Orchard this Spring. We planted a couple new varieties, but the vast majority of them are apples from long ago: Kingston Black, Calville Blanc, Duchess of Oldenberg and Blue Pearmain to name a few.  We also planted a few peach, pear and cherry trees.

This Spring has been interesting, though, to say the very least.  Most of the orchards in the Midwest have been hit hard by a late freeze.  Well, the freeze isn't late so much as the blooms and fruit set came early, about a month early!

Folks have asked if there is anything we can do to save the fruit.  We will see what we were able to save in a couple of weeks as many small fruits have been dropping and will continue to do so.  We got up in the middle of the nights a couple of times to start fires throughout the orchard.  The days were spent building cairns of firewood and the nights spent burning them down.  I had never ran a chainsaw at 2:30/3:00 in the morning before this year, I don't ever want to again. 

Anyway, the fires glowed in the night sky.  They would have been even more beautiful under different circumstances.