{"id":5206,"date":"2015-03-23T10:04:31","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T10:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/?p=5206"},"modified":"2016-04-08T10:05:35","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T10:05:35","slug":"a-note-from-farmer-al-march-23rd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/a-note-from-farmer-al-march-23rd\/","title":{"rendered":"A note from farmer Al : March 23rd"},"content":{"rendered":"Cherries?\r\n\r\nLately, regulars at the farmers\u2019 market all have one question on their minds,\u00a0\u201cWhen will fresh fruit start?\u201d The next thing they ask is \u201cWill there be cherries?\u201d\r\n\r\nYesterday my daughter Maddie and I drove (in my golf cart) out to survey the\u00a0cherries. Most trees are still in full bloom, but the Brooks cherries are past\u00a0that, and now the snowy white blossoms are drying up, and fruit is forming.\r\n\r\nWe call this the \u201cFruit Set\u201d stage of growth. We did find some fruit! It\u2019s still\u00a0a bit too early to tell how much, but it definitely looks like a lot more than\u00a0last year\u2019s meager crop! We\u2019re all longing for a great crop of cherries, and the\u00a0Brooks, our earliest variety, are my favorite. Not only are they great to eat\u00a0fresh, they also dry well and freeze well, so they can be enjoyed all year long!\r\n\r\nBings and Rainers are both still in full bloom, so fruit set is not happening just\u00a0yet.\u00a0Next, we looked at the Warren pears. The trees look healthy and had tons of\u00a0bloom in them this year, but it is still too soon to tell what the fruit set looks\u00a0like.\r\n\r\nThe really good news is the apricots. Looks like a good crop in every variety.\u00a0Also, no brown rot! This makes the fourth consecutive year that we\u2019ve dodged\u00a0that bullet....and they are looking to be ahead of schedule. I\u2019ll even make a\u00a0brash prediction....we\u2019ll have Apache apricots in your boxes the last week in\u00a0April! This would make this year the all-time record earliest harvest!\r\n\r\nToday is also the first day of irrigation for us... not a record, thankfully. Last\u00a0year the 2014 winter was so dry we had to irrigate in January. Since we have\u00a0so many re-plants this year, that are actually scattered throughout every block\u00a0of trees, we\u2019ve decided to get started irrigating early to make sure their shallow\u00a0root systems are well-watered. Not to mention the weather report, which is\u00a0predicting 88 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures for later this week.\r\n\r\nBring on\u00a0summer! We are ready!\r\n\r\n<img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Signature of Farmer Al\" src=\"http:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/assets\/FarmerAlSig.gif\" width=\"250\" \/>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cherries? Lately, regulars at the farmers\u2019 market all have one question on their minds,\u00a0\u201cWhen will fresh fruit start?\u201d The next thing they ask is \u201cWill there be cherries?\u201d Yesterday my daughter Maddie and I drove (in my golf cart) out to survey the\u00a0cherries. Most trees are still in full bloom, but the Brooks cherries are [&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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5HwAU-1lY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5206","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=5206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5208,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5206\/revisions\/5208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}