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Frog Hollow Farm exists to offer the best, most delicious, and well grown fruit in the Bay Area. As mentioned last week, this season is a time for us to diversify and expand the products that we offer to our community. During this time we are also constantly at work to sustain the production that we already have in place. As many of you know, our Warren Pear crop suffered failure this season. Our CSA members usually enjoy Warren Pears through December each year. We had to remove around half of our Warren Pear trees, but are working to plant new trees for seasons to come. In addition, Farmer Al and his teams are working hard to save the trees that still remain on our property. It is very imperative that we listen to and watch our trees very closely in order to maintain their production.
Farmer Al has such an awareness of the trees in his orchard that he can spot things that are not visible to the untrained eye. He knows how each healthy tree should look in each stage of its life cycle. If you examine the Warren Pear trees in our orchard, you might notice fat spiraling buds — fruiting buds — lining their branches. When Farmer Al came out the orchard after the pear decline he recognized the vast number of these buds and knew, immediately, that the trees were going into survival mode. Al and his team are not sure what is causing this to occur, but what they do know is that it takes a huge amount of energy to produce this large number of buds. Winter is the time when the trees are supposed to be saving energy and because of this massive consumption of energy, we believe that the trees are being thrown into a weak growing phase. The buds on the tree are robbing the tree of vigor or the growth of more branches, fruit, tree, and healthy leaves. Vigor includes all the processes that are involved in the production of fruit and when energy is stripped from these process the tree becomes too weak to grow the crop. Currently, all the energy in the tree is going to growing buds instead of to growing leaves. Trees derive energy directly from the sun through its leaves, so if a tree does not have enough energy to produce more leaves you will not grow a crop. The leaves provide photosynthesis to give energy to the tree to grow a crop.
Though the large number of fruiting buds on the trees are not a great sign, our teams are hard at work to save our future Warren Pears. The problem right now is that the energy allotment in each stage of growth in our trees is being thrown off. In order to balance out the energy use of the tree, we are in the process of removing half the buds from each branch. Our tree team is enduring the very meticulous and pain staking process of thinning out the buds on each tree with hand shears. Every inch of each branch must be manicured to remove the buds. We are aware that most commercial farms would never dream of doing this kind of detailed hand labor, but at Frog Hollow we are willing to work with difficult to grow varieties of fruit like the Warren Pear. We are willing to go the extra mile and put in the hand labor required to enjoy this delicious fruit.
