Good news! Pruning in the older apple orchard and the peach orchard is now completed. We’ve moved along quite well this year. In fact after checking long term weather forecasts for the week, we proceeded out in rather cold temperatures on the 8th of February to finish pruning the peaches. It was a challenge as quite a bit was left to do, but we were determined. Even though the winds picked up and the skies darkened, we stuck with it and reached our goal. We pulled the equipment in at 3:30 p.m. and by 5:30 p.m. that evening the ground was covered with snow and it has snowed just about every day since. A great feeling knowing that pruning is finished in those orchards. It’s rather difficult to hand prune in 10 to 12 inches of snow on the ground.

There’s a real advantage of having this amount of snow cover, though. Usually as the temperatures warm, so does the ground temperature but with this blanket of snow covering, the ground will stay colder somewhat longer. Colder ground temperatures keep the trees in dormancy. The longer the trees stay dormant the better is the prospect of having fruit this year. Early bloom is not so good as in the Midwest we can have freezes well into May. This is exactly what occurred last year, a killing freeze on May 8th.

Our lowest temperature to date has been a minus 1 degree. Peach trees are not as hardy as apple trees and so extremely cold temperatures damage the fruit bud on peach trees. Our friend who worked as a professor in the Horticultural Department at Purdue University always made this comparison when discussing cold temperature damage to peaches; zero degrees is the breaking point, for every degree below zero, count on loosing 10 percent of the peaches. So, for instance, if we experience 7 degrees below zero, about 70 percent of the peaches are killed. This is not always the case as tree placement and wind factors can somewhat change the outcome. Usually, however, in our experience growing peaches we found his statement to be quite on target. Thus, maybe about 10 percent of peaches will be lost this year as we experienced a minus one degree. We just have to keep our fingers crossed that no more major cold fronts will approach our region this winter.

When the present snow cover melts and we’re able to return to the orchards, we will address clean-up and mulching of the prunings from the aisle ways and from under the trees. A tedious job at best but something that has to be done. We will be moving to the Pick-Your-own orchard soon and it will be getting its “haircut” as soon as temperatures warm up. Before we prune those younger trees, we prefer temperatures to be more stable and not predicted to dip to the subzero range. More daylight hours certainly will help to accomplish both of these tasks.

We’ve been busy with other “to-dos” on our list as well; inventory control, equipment repairs, cleaning and organizing and whatever else was put on the “we’ll do it later” list. Around here there is always another chore to do or another issue to be addressed.