{"id":4420,"date":"2015-05-11T22:20:28","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T22:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/?p=4420"},"modified":"2015-05-11T22:20:28","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T22:20:28","slug":"farm-focus-a-new-hope-for-cherries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/farm-focus-a-new-hope-for-cherries\/","title":{"rendered":"Farm Focus: A New Hope for Cherries"},"content":{"rendered":"Next we\u2019ll be picking Rainer cherries. Our harvest this year, sadly like those of the\u00a0past two years is very meager. But we\u2019re feeling blessed to have as much as we do.\u00a0Cherry orchards all over the state of CA are experiencing a diminished crop. Some\u00a0farm\u2019s cherry crops are so light that the farmers are choosing to leave them on the\u00a0tree because they\u2019re not sufficient to make up the cost of picking them.\n\nThe plague on California\u2019s cherries is ultimately the result of higher winter temperatures. Cherries require a significant number of chill hours, which our rising\u00a0winter temperatures are making harder and harder to come by. Cherry trees regulate\u00a0the growth and development of their leaves, buds and flowers by the number of\u00a0chill hours. Insufficient chill hours leads to diminished and more irregular flower\u00a0development, which in turn reduces pollination and fruit production. Faced with\u00a0the unmovable fact of climate change, many farmers and eaters alike have begun to\u00a0wonder, \u201cis this the end of CA cherries?\u201d\n\nFrog Hollow Farm has been growing cherries since the very beginning. Farmer Al\u00a0planted an acre of rainier cherries in his second year on this land. Today we grow 4\u00a0varieties Brooks, Rainer, Bing and Stella; all of which have meager fruit. In these\u00a0changing times, we\u2019re looking to move to new, more resilient varieties. Already this\u00a0year we replaced our lost trees with 320 Royal Tioga cherry trees. They are a low\u00a0chill and self pollinating variety. Making them a much more reliable fruit producer\u00a0in our hotter, less reliable climate.\n\nJust last week, Al spent the day at Zaiger Genetics in Modesto. Zaiger develops\u00a0new fruit varieties without genetic modification, relying instead on more traditional\u00a0methods of crossbreeding and selection to create varieties that meet the needs of\u00a0organic farmers. Right now, they are working on low chill cherries that don\u2019t depend\u00a0on bees for pollination and are also more drought resistant. Al was curious to see\u00a0if any of their varieties would work here at Frog Hollow and was very happy with\u00a0what he found. Their cherries not only offered the resiliency he was looking for but\u00a0were delicious, even by his standards.\n\nHere on the farm, we\u2019re doing a little of our own breeding and selection. This week,\u00a0Antonio and his team went on a mission to find our most prolific cherry tree. The\u00a0tree they found had 3 times as many cherries at any of the other trees. It\u2019s branches\u00a0were unbroken, thick and hardy - truly a beautiful and robust tree. After harvesting\u00a0the tree\u2019s plentiful cherries, the crew tagged the tree and created an orchard map, so\u00a0we can find it again. In future planting seasons, we\u2019ll graft budding branches from\u00a0this great tree to other less successful trees, in effect reproducing this fecund and\u00a0resilient tree throughout our orchard.\n\nWitnessing such a delicious example of the miraculous genetic diversity inherent in\u00a0all living things, leaves us at Frog Hollow Farm with hope for the future of cherries\u00a0and more broadly California farms. Just like everything else in nature, we farmers\u00a0just have to evolve.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Next we\u2019ll be picking Rainer cherries. Our harvest this year, sadly like those of the\u00a0past two years is very meager. But we\u2019re feeling blessed to have as much as we do.\u00a0Cherry orchards all over the state of CA are experiencing a diminished crop. Some\u00a0farm\u2019s cherry crops are so light that the farmers are choosing to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123],"tags":[680,174,486],"class_list":["post-4420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ca-farms","tag-cherries","tag-climate-change"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5HwAU-19i","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}