This Week on the Farm - Archives

Strawberries

OOPS! I guessed wrong on when the strawberries would be ready. I said Friday, June 20th but as always with fruit, it never ripens on a weekend so the date for the first of this year's strawberries is Monday, June 23rd-I think.

We have of course been busy. The fruitstands are really shaping up. Rose and I are working ourselves into a tizzy. John and Jim are busy with the spray program. This is the time of year when the risk of damage from insects and fungus can occur. My mom has been here and you will see her recipes around the fruitstand. (She has a great strawberry pie recipe.) She has also been busy in Betsy's test kitchen with our new Fowler Mill baking mixes. (So far we haven't had a crumb left!)

Along the line of new products, we have some cool things from the Jelly Sisters and some cool new visors to wear while you eat!

The sweetcorn is up and the pumpkins are just peeking out. I'm sure by the next update the fruitstands will be open!

Prediction Week

*Sweet Cherries: Bad news for those of you who like to come pick sweet cherries. There are so few on our home farm that John will not even spray them. We will care for the trees but will not harvest the five or six cherries in the tops of each tree. This is a hard pill to swallow but I'm relieved to know that there are sweet cherries on a few of our lease orchards and down state. This means I will have sweet cherries in the fruit stand.

*Tart Cherries: One minute we have a big crop, the next a moderate crop. The important thing is we have a crop! Our pitter, which was pretty quiet last year, will be busy this year. People will be able to buy the 10 & 20lb. bags of fresh pitted tart cherries. For those of you who drink cherry juice, these bags of pitted tart cherries are a change of pace to your concentrate. I have a customer who freezes yogurt containers of the cherries then thaws one each day for his breakfast.

*Peaches: Some, but not to worry, you should see some in the market.

*Apricots: Very few.

*Apples: Wonderful crop! The trees look good and the apples are sizing. One very tricky job this time of year is thinning apples. John has to watch the weather closely for the perfect sunny but not too hot day. The apples have to be just the right size (about the size of the end of your little finger). Mistakes are costly. If John under thins we will have a bunch of small apples. Or worse, if he over thins we will have a just a few big apples. Why thin at all? In a cluster of blossoms there is a center blossom and then side blossoms. The king bloom will produce the larger apple so we want to knock off the side blooms. When you have more than one apple per fruit spur the quality goes down. As you know, we want quality! Manage the things we can, pray for the things we cannot.

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