Fruits of our labor

Confession: I love fruit.  I eat it every morning for breakfast, usually with yogurt and granola.  I eat it as a snack throughout the day.  And I especially like to eat it in desserts like pies and crisps.  Plus, now that Weight Watchers made all fruit zero points under its PointsPlus system, I can fill up on fruit without guilt (although only the unadulterated kind, not the pie kind).  It's probably not surprising, then, that my favorite part about the farm I'm managing this year is its fruit.  We have quite a fruit salad growing at the farm, including strawberries, rhubarb, mulberries, pluots, peaches, nectarines, plums, figs, apples, grapes, pomegranates, and persimmons. 

Our strawberries, an everbearing Seascape variety, have had a tough year, being invaded by weeds and attacked by slugs, but they are still producing, albeit very little at the moment.  Last week, we only harvested one pint of sellable berries from 6 beds of plants, down from 24 pints at peak production.  Two very dedicated volunteers have been patiently and determinedly working their way through the strawberry beds, removing every weed they see.  Three rows down, three to go!

We have one very large rhubarb plant on the farm, probably of the Victoria variety, which produces stalks that are primarily green, rather than the classic bright red.  The plant is now done producing for the season, but when we had it, the rhubarb was very popular at the farmers' market.  If I were going to farm this site for another year, I would definitely plant more rhubarb.  Granted, customers are not flocking to the market in droves to buy rhubarb, but few local farmers grow it, so demand is high relative to supply.  Rhubarb is a perennial crop, so the same plant will produce for several years, but it takes at least a year after planting to become established enough to harvest stalks, leaving no incentive for a single-season farmer to invest time and money into planting rhubarb for the next farmer, who may not even want it. 

Right now, I am most excited about our tree fruits.  When Becca and I took over The Farm on Hurley Way, our first major task was to prune the fruit trees.  I've always enjoyed pruning, finding it a nice mix of thinking and doing: pruning is a physical activity that should be performed thoughtfully.  Once a branch has been cut, you can't undo it by clicking Ctrl-Z--it's gone for good.  So when it was time to prune the orchard this winter, I was excited to begin. What I didn't anticipate is how excited I would quickly become to stop.  Up until this season, my pruning experience was primarily confined to my own young backyard trees, which total 7 in number, are small in stature, and can easily be pruned in a single afternoon.  The orchard at Hurley, on the other hand, has at least 80 trees, some of which are over 15 feet tall.  As trees branch, the number of pruning cuts needed expands exponentially, such that an established peach tree has a lot of branches to trim back (heading cuts) or cut off (thinning cuts).  Add in height as a complicating factor requiring multiple ladder moves per tree, and you have a recipe for eating up a lot of a farmer's time, in this case several weeks! 

Once pruning was finished (finally!), we needed to spray our peach and nectarine trees with lime sulfur to control peach leaf curl.  Becca was my hero on this task, bravely facing the rotten egg smell for several days as she used a backpack sprayer to thoroughly apply a solution of lime sulfur to each tree.  Smelly though it was, the lime sulfur seemed to do the trick, and we had very few deformed leaves this season.

The next major orchard-related task was fruit thinning.  It is necessary to remove fruit from a tree for several reasons, including to prevent branch breakage from excess weight, as well as to allow the remaining fruit to grow larger.  Apples should be thinned to one per cluster, which for most of our trees meant cutting off about 5 baby apples for every one that I kept.  Peaches and nectarines should be thinned to one fruit every six inches or so. Our trees set fruit pretty heavily this year, and I ended up removing probably 3 out of every 4 peaches.  It was hard to pull perfectly good fruit off a tree and drop it on the ground, but I had to trust my reading and mentors that it would be better for the tree and the harvest in the end.  Pluots and plums need little thinning, thankfully, because the peaches took a lot longer than I anticipated, and time is always in short supply on a farm.

At present, our investment of time in pruning, spraying, and thinning seems to be paying off.  That's right, the tree fruit harvest has begun!  Flavor Supreme pluots were the first fruits to ripen, two weeks ahead of schedule, likely due to a hot spring.  I inherited little information on the orchard when I took over the farm, mostly just a map identifying what variety each tree is.  After stumbling upon a ripe pluot by accident, I realized that I needed more information about the orchard or we were going to miss the harvest window for our fruit.  I've since created documents listing our fruit varieties, anticipated ripening dates, fruit descriptions, and pictures of each ripe fruit, along with space to fill in when the fruit actually ripens in an effort to help both us and future farmers at the site. 



Pluot tree.  First came the flowers...

...then the leaves...



...and then the fruit.

The Flavor Supreme pluots were delicious, but they didn't last long.  Our three trees yielded around 80 pounds of fruit (not counting farmer snacks!), which we sold at the Midtown Farmers' Market and to our sister farm for their CSA, and have been picked clean.  While I mourn the end of these pluots, I know that peaches and nectarines are right around the corner!