Dear CSA Members,<\/p>\r\n
At first I thought it was a humming bird! A deep loud whirring noise, I heard,\u00a0while driving through the pear orchard. A light swoosh of air went by my\u00a0ear as I was looking at the blossoms, assessing their stage of development to\u00a0decide when to blow on the pollen.<\/p>\r\nAs you know, we have to mechanically apply pollen on the Warrens to get a\u00a0decent crop. That\u2019s because bees aren\u2019t very attracted to pears in general, and\u00a0they definitely aren\u2019t interested in the Warrens, which are very low on the\u00a0desirability list for bees! So every year we buy frozen pollen from a company\u00a0up in Washington whose sole mission is to collect pollen by hand, freeze it,\u00a0then deliver it \u201cnext day air\u201d, frozen, to farmers like me who have unusual\u00a0pollination challenges. They also sold us the handy-dandy little machine called\u00a0the \u201cscumby puffer\u201d. We mount it on the flat bed of one of our electric golf\u00a0carts, then we \u201cgo and blow\u201d 60 grams per acre of this precious \"gold dust.\" It\u2019s\u00a0actually more expensive than gold... 1000 grams of it will set me back about\u00a0$6000.00. The frustrating thing about it is that no matter how hard I try to see\u00a0the pollen coming out of the puffer and getting up into the trees, I can never\u00a0quite get a glimpse of it; it\u2019s just too fine. It\u2019s really tricky to apply it; the timing has to be just right - the moment of maximum receptivity for the majority\u00a0of the blossoms we\u2019re trying to pollinate. And there cannot be any wind! No\u00a0air movement at all or the pollen will not float up into the trees. It\u2019s lighter\u00a0than dust.\r\n\r\nLucky for us, these 2 critical conditions are convergent this year. Oh yes, that\u00a0\u201chummingbird\u201d was actually a carpenter bee... the females, are big, black,\u00a0shiny and beautiful. They fly around just like a humming bird, zipping around\u00a0from flower to flower. Maybe we don\u2019t need pollen as much as we think...!\r\n\r\nRegards,","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…. Dear CSA Members, At first I thought it was a humming bird! A deep loud whirring noise, I heard,\u00a0while driving through the pear orchard. A light swoosh of air went by my\u00a0ear as I was looking at the blossoms, assessing their stage of development to\u00a0decide when to blow on […]<\/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":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-note-from-farmer-al"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5HwAU-1m1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5209","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=5209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5211,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5209\/revisions\/5211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}