There is an ever evolving list of projects on the farm. Here’s what is going on this week. We have an exciting new project for our garden endeavors. A greenhouse is in the works! We’ve cleared a couple of rows of trees in between our packing shed and the dried fruit lot to make room for a new permanent greenhouse. Marlene is very excited about this new structure. We’ve been using a modest soft plastic hoop house, but in order to make our summer vegetable projects more viable, we need more space. Our winter starts can go into small 6 pack cells so require less greenhouse space but our tomatoes need to be placed in 4” pots to grow to an adequate start size for planting and eventually maturing. This coming spring she’ll have plenty of room inside the new 40’x 16’ hard plastic polycarbonate structure for the larger tomato pots and more. In addition to seeding benches and tool storage inside the greenhouse, we will be adding a shaded area for working outdoors and for bringing out the plants to “harden them off. ”
“Hardening off ” is a process by which you slowly acclimate seedlings from a stable, climate controlled environment to one where there are fluctuations in temperature, wind and moisture. When seedlings are raised in a greenhouse they don’t have the opportunity to develop the strength and structure necessary to withstand the elements that outdoor life presents. To acclimate the plants we bring the seedlings out to a protected shady area for a few hours every day. Each day the plants stay out for a few more hours until they’ve acclimated to the outdoors and can be put into the ground. This process usually takes about 7-10 days.
In the orchard, the Tree Team has already begun pruning our apricot trees. Each member of the Tree Team prunes about 2 trees an hour and we prune about 200 trees a day. With about 30,000 trees in the orchard, it takes the Tree Team around 6 months of daily work to prune everything.
Lastly for this week, we’ve pulled out a few acres of Suncrest peaches to make way for two new varieties. The first is a white donut peach called White Saucer that ripens in May, so we can have an early variety peach for our CSA boxes. The other variety is called Sierra Beauty that ripens in mid-June. We are trying Sierra Beauty as an alternative to the Suncrest variety that ripens during that same window. The Suncrest peach is an heirloom variety that has outstanding
flavor, but has an inconsistent crop. About one out of every ten peaches we pick may have the flavor that has awarded the Suncrest the Slow Food Ark of Taste status. When a Suncrest is good, it is very very good, but one out of ten isn’t a great ratio for us or for our customers. We’ll always keep a few acres of the Suncrest variety in the orchard in order to preserve the genetics and to enjoy the one out of ten outstanding peaches, but we are looking for an alternative variety that will deliver more consistent flavor and texture quality.
There’s never a dull moment in the ever changing scene of work around the farm at Frog Hollow.
