Hi There!

 

We would love to see you on the farm.
On Sunday May 5th from 10:00 AM until noon join us for a free tour!
Also, come the night before, Saturday May 4th, to camp out under the stars and wake to birdsong among the trees in the orchard.
Bring your own picnic to enjoy in the orchard after the tour on Sunday!

 

Sunday morning come and walk the orchard with your fourth generation fruit grower, Steve Ela.

 

Steve is like your personal fruit professor for teaching you what it takes to grow delicious organic fruit in Colorado.

You could also make a weekend of it. Come over on Saturday and check out the:

Adair Ela putting out home-made luminarias along the top of the farm’s encircling rock wall Christmas Eve.

When we think of a new year we think of new beginnings, of light or maybe hope refreshed, of energy reinvigorated. What is the most powerful marker of those things, and when is it a new year?

‘a single luminaria, one of 127 this year, casting a gentle light onto the snow around it’

Can you imagine if we turned off the power grid and extinguished all our heating throughout our society in the dead of the solstice (usually around December 21) night? The return of light would certainly become as notable in modern society as it was/is in pre-industrial ones.

In the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice is the longest night/shortest day of the year. Some peoples here used to extinguish all their fires on the night of the winter solstice, then relight them from scratch as a new beginning.

On the farm we really see this. Following the solstice, as the sun starts its return to longer days, the amount of solar energy coming our way starts coming back too (yay!). All the fruit trees depend on sunlight for their lives and for their ability to produce sugars in their fruit. Our farm gets 70%-80% of the electrical energy we use from solar panels. Does the new year begin with the solar turn-around of the winter Solstice?

Luminarias line the waist – high stacked rock wall on each side of the entrance to Ela Family Farms.

There are other ways to think of it though. Although the sunlight is returning, we are just beginning our winter season. It’s a time many of us would like to just curl up by a fire and rest. The trees, too, need to rest. In fact, they must accumulate a certain number of Chill Units, or chill hours (hours between 32° – 45°F) before they will emerge from dormancy and set fruit. That is certainly not a predictable calendar date – it depends entirely on the weather.

The almost-full moon shines down on an old apple orchard at Ela Family Farms. Luminarias illuminate the length of the bordering dry-stacked rock wall.

So is the new year Chill Unit or weather related? Does the new year begin when the fruit trees emerge from dormancy, perhaps? Or maybe when blooms emerge? Or something else?

This winter the full moon occurred just a few days after the solstice. So we have a kind of new lunar year, though the Chinese lunar new year isn’t until the start of February. And Diwali, the festival of lights in the Hindu calendar which combines lunar and solar calendars, marks the triumph of light over darkness with the new year starting the following day, but occurs around the start of November. And of course there’s the tradition of counting down the last moments of December 31 to a grand finale of clinking glasses and maybe fireworks ushering in a new calendar year.

Steve distributing luminarias along the rock wall

Is the new year related to solstices or to moon cycles? To a calendar we can mark with vows and parties? Each year Steve makes candles which we use for a light display on Christmas Eve, lining the dry-stacked rock wall which surrounds a big part of our farm with luminarias which burn well into the night. That is an annual ritual of quiet, and of time coming together and sharing beauty. It certainly marks a turning point for us. It has the feeling of closure, and of something renewed. Maybe this is our new year.

Spring on the farm is a glorious time, especially this year after a winter with such an astounding snowpack. Verdant green overflows every nook and cranny – such a contrast to the past couple dry years. Inevitably the new life invokes contemplations of the long line of life and years which have come before. Some aspects feel like kindness. Some are bittersweet. In all aspects, spring is a conduit of connection. We were especially surprised this spring by a reach-out for connection from our local community. We were invited into a production called Story Share – a superbly executed evening of integrated arts and community. Strikingly, the fully packed house got to share glimpses into the lives of 4 sets of folks (one of which was us :0 ). Taking the time to hear each other’s stories, and then to see those stories reflected back through the lenses of sculpture, poetry, prose, music, and live improv theater was magical. The perspective shifting set up a resonance of connection which is hard to convey, yet was profound.

We’d like to take a stab at sharing at least a part of it, because you are part of our community too. And because the echoes of sharing back and forth bring our hearts alive.

Below, you’ll find a sample of the writing and sculpture derived from our story – that of family generations growing fruit. From the Story Share 2023 night hosted by the Blue Sage Center for the Arts:

Generations of fruit growing captured in sculptural form by local artists Ryan Strand and Nina Clouse

GLORIOUS

By Michael Cooper @michaelcoopermusicandlyrics

Story Share 2023 – Ela Farms 

GRANDFATHER

“If we sell you a two-worm apple and it’s only got one
Bring it back – and we’ll give you one with two!
We stand behind the fruit we grow:
We’ll make it right if it’s not so!”

WORM

I am the worm
Inside of the apple
The apple from Ela Farms.

I peel a piece
And burrow in
To feel alive
Beneath the skin

I steal a bite
Reveal a seed
The sweetest crunch
Is guaranteed.

My meal amounts to
So much more:
The heart inside
The apple core.

FARMER

His reasons for coming back?

“To raise kids in a place where they can jump on bike
Play in the dirt
Dig a hole
Pick a peach
Walk outside and look up at the mountains
Get your hands dirty, feel things
(Even though he doesn’t do that as much as he used to anymore, because he’s in the office a lot…)

What would she miss?

“I’d miss the cascade of growth
The profusion of blooms in the spring
And watching them – burst
And then get tiny, into little, tiny fruits that start to grow
And then those get picked
And the leaves change
And they fall…
And the trees are bare
I love that.”

CUSTOMER

I tried a tablespoon of Ela Farms applesauce this afternoon:
And it was glorious.
Not too sweet. Smooth. Velvety.

“There is a satisfaction
Of taking sunlight and water
And turning it into really good fruit.”

FARM

Codling moth netting extends as far as the eye can see, like generations:
Long, long, long rows of trees, completely covered in continuous sheets
Diaphanous ghosts, scaring away the worms, so they can’t get into the apples
Mother Nature is dynamic.
Organic farming is dynamic.
There is so much heart.
Every morning, a mediation, a prayer.
Thank you, grandmother bee.
Thank you, grandfather sky.

Glorious.

As climate change makes harsh weather events even more impactful, we know no single family can go it alone. Be part of the resilience backstop, supporting organic fresh food in our local supply chain at its roots – adopt a tree or three!

You, our community of people, are an integral part of the food system. Your preferences and fruit choices play a deciding role in what we choose to grow on our farm.

You’ve seen past the surface of the shiny fruit to the years of nurturing needed for that fruit to flourish.

It is directly because of this that we have had the heart and resources to continue through some very harsh climate events. Among the most powerful things to happen over the last few years has been the emergence of your tangible, emotional and financial, deep support. We’ve seen direct tree adoption, gifting to graduates, gifting on holidays, and memorial contributions. Thank you!

In the next few years we are very much looking forward to seeing the new peach trees and youngest apple trees begin to come into production, and to having a renewed bounty at the farmers’ markets. We are currently at Stage 2 (see below). In the intervening while, we will keep tending them – each one pruned by hand, protected from freezing and pests and disease, watered through the dry times of summer, and hand-thinned as they come into fruiting maturity.

If you would like to participate in the nurturing, click here.

Every single fruit tree in the orchard gets cared for by hand every single year. Your support helps us care for our young trees every step of the way!

STAGES OF AN ORCHARD

STAGE 1: PREPARING THE ORCHARD & PLANTING:

• • We cut down and remove old trees. Those get cut up for firewood. Then the stumps must be pulled out of the ground – luckily we’ve got big equipment to help with that! Then we have to prep the orchard block for water delivery by putting in a pipe system to run water to each future row of trees. In the case of grafting, we chainsaw off the bulk of the tree creating a clean new start on the preexisting trunk.
  • Buying the nursery stock for planting usually has to happen 2-3 year in advance, the nursery grafts our selected variety (which selects for seasonal timing, flavor, & fruit characteristics) onto the rootstock (which selects for things like cold hardiness, pest or disease resilience, tree size)
  • Planting takes place in the spring after plowing, discing, and roto-tilling the field. It takes multiple people working quickly behind a tractor pulling a heavy pointed weight which digs a furrow, creating space for slipping the trees in one after the next as it progresses down the row.
  • Lastly in the planting process is laying new irrigation lines, and planting cover crops which retain moisture, for controlling insects, for building soil nutrients, and for fertilizing.

STAGE 2: GETTING THROUGH THE “BABY” YEARS:

• Caring for new trees through each of their second through fifth seasons can be tricky. Inevitably some don’t make it through weather, water, and wildlife variability. Those that do make receive lots and lots of tender care though.
  
• Shaping the trees to catch the maximum amount of sunlight, to create a strong structure which will support future growth, and which will maximize our ability to pick the fruit is called training. These young years are all about feeding and training!
  
• Weeding around the trunks so the mice don’t get in and girdle the tender young trees is key to their surviving the winters. So is keeping our human presence evident so deer don’t try to rub their itchy antlers on the young trees as they pass the velvet stage – that can decimate many young trees.
  
• Irrigating is of course always a thing. Getting a Goldilocks amount (not too little, not too much) throughout their young lives does a lot to influence how they grow.
• Pest and disease management is also very important. We want our trees to grow with bark intact! We are spraying them with minerals and biological compounds to prevent pests and disease which might shorten their lives.

STAGE 3: GROWING FOR HARVEST:

• Now pruning is not so much about training the tree into a strong and productive shape, it is about keeping new branches growing which will have fruit buds on them for the next year ortwo. Growing great fruit takes seasonal pruning of each and every tree.
  
• Running wind machines to stave off frost in the spring, means we’ve got temperature sensors with alarms stationed throughout the orchard. As spring progresses, the fruit buds get more and more sensitive to temperature. That means there is never a single set temperature which is “too cold”. The threshold is a moving target. Research stations help with monitoring the stages of the buds and share that information with growers. When we think temperatures might be approaching a dangerous level of cold (this happens usually in the middle of the night) and conditions are right (cloud cover with no wind) we can zoom around the orchard turning on wind machines to stir the air and hopefully get the coldest air off the ground level. Those machines run on propane-powered old truck engines. As the local propane companies are getting bought up by national chains, it’s getting trIrrigating has to wait until the freezes have passed, since we don’t want to flood the lines only to have the water in them freeze and create cracks or leaks. Then we keep water coming to the trees on rotation until our season’s water is all gone. How much water we have varies year to year depending on snow pack, soil moisture, and summer rainfall.
  
• Blossom and fruit thinning is also part of each spring and early summer. The goal is to give each tree only as many little fruits as it can support. We thin each tree by hand!
  
• Pest and disease management is very similar to Stage 2, except we are now also addinickier to make sure we get the tanks refilled immediately. Since cold nights often come in sets, that can be a little nerve wracking!
  g in netting for our apple trees. These are giant rolls of loose-weave fabric we drape over the trees, securing the net below the branches. They have drastically reduces insect damage, and also reduced overall heat stress on the apple trees, resulting in big beautiful fruit!
  
• Finally, picking. When a block is ripe, the scent is the first indication. It is mouthwatering! We turn the whole crew’s labor to picking a section of the orchard when it’s ripe. Usually it takes us 2-3 runs down an orchard section since not everything ripens at once, even within a single variety.
  It takes more folks to sort and pack that fruit into boxes. Finally we get to Fridays, bringing it all that’s ripe and ready to markets – right to you!

ABOUT THE TREE VARIETIES

We have been able to replant about 10+ acres’ worth of peaches (about 9 acres total lived), and to nurture the 11 acres of our other young trees. We are at Stage 2! Your support is helping us take care of those trees until they bear fruit. Words can’t describe how much your contributions touch our hearts. Thank you!

Our fresh organic fruit is also available year-round online in the forms of:
Jams or Jellies, Fruit Butters, Applesauces, Dried Fruits, & Artisan Gift Packs.

Shirley’s hands are at the root of everything we are as a family and as a farm. We are sad to share the news that she passed away this January. Her consistent message of, “Be who you are” shared her soul. She brought heart and vitality to everything she did, a part of farm operations throughout the entirety of her life.

She’d joke and smile while pitting prunes or taking grapes off the stem even in the years when her sight had faded to seeing only blurs of light. In her last days she told us over and over again, “Don’t be sad. Be happy. I’ve had a beautiful life and I’ve been lucky. I’m ready. Don’t be sad. If you feel a breeze on your cheek maybe that’ll be me. I’ll get to be part of everything.” She has been part of so much. It’s kind of lovely that her greatest sense of peace came from the idea of getting to be part of even more of everything.

Shirley Phillips Ela passed away at age 98 on January 18, 2023. She passed away in a sunny
room of her own home overlooking the orchards, surrounded by family and in the tender,
thoughtful care of Hope West Hospice. She was born July 15, 1924, the third of four children of Nelson N. and Lois Burns Phillips. Her husband of 70 years, Judge William M. Ela, predeceased her in 2016. She is survived by her children, Beth Wilkens (Jeffrey) of Rochester, NY, Wendell (Karen Kerr) of Perth, Australia, Thomas of Grand Junction, Daniel Schultz-Ela (Lynea) of Hotchkiss, and Steven (Regan Choi) of Hotchkiss, seven grandchildren, and seven great grandchildren. Two sisters and her brother, Dean Phillips (Irene), predeceased her.

She attended grade school in Clifton, and graduated valedictorian of Grand Junction High School in 1941. During World War II she was a volunteer Red Cross nurse’s aid at St. Mary’s Hospital, earned her A.A. at Mesa Junior College, and worked in engineering at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle before returning to finish her B.A. at University of Colorado. Upon her marriage, they moved to Cambridge, MA where she worked as a professional typist supporting Bill as he earned his law degree at Harvard. They returned to Grand Junction in 1949, where she played French Horn in the symphony, received the Lioness of the Year Award, and was a charter member of the League of Women Voters. She was President of the Mesa County Community Foundation, served on the Colorado State Water Quality Control Commission, was a board member of the Western Colorado Community Foundation, helped expand Hope West to Delta County, and was a long-time member of PEO and Reviewers Club.

Her life was deeply rooted in fruit farming. She worked closely with her father and brother with family orchards near Clifton until 1996 when Bill and Shirley moved to newly purchased orchards near Hotchkiss, where she and her son built Ela Family Farms until her passing.

She  was passionate to the end about agriculture and the land, and in 2010 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Horticulture from the Western Colorado Horticultural Society.

In her inimitable fashion, she wrote for her own obituary, “She cared deeply about her family, but could also be a pain in the neck and hard taskmaster, worked her children too hard, bossed her husband around, and liked to argue too much at times. So, generally, good life and good riddance.” Notwithstanding her own words, she will be greatly missed.

Here is a link to a StoryCorp interview with Shirley, Steve, and Bill from 2009.

Shirley Ela, Wiliam Ela, and Steve Ela

Toast in the Orchard with Shirley Ela and her sons, Dan (left) and Tom (right)

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Though it will be a few years before we can fully fill in the gaps left by the more than 20 acres of trees which died from the October 2020 radical freeze, we are building back bit by bit.

In 2021 we were able to replace almost 7 acres of peach trees which had been lost and they grew with gusto. So many of you lent support both financially and emotionally – there’s no way to fully convey what a difference you all have made to us with your ongoing recognition and support. We are enduringly grateful to be part of such a connected community.

In the spring of 2022 we replanted another 6 acres of new peach trees. Thank you to everyone who has helped us on this journey! They look beautiful!

Full Pear Bin in the Orchard

As you all know, peak fruit season is already very busy on the farm, but last week was a notable scramble. Everyone on the farm went out to pick regardless of their usual job description, and put in extra hours to pick fruit before the freeze. We unfortunately only had time for getting to the bottom half of many of our trees.

All that effort paid off though. Our cooler is loaded with pears. We have apple favorites including Goldrush & Empire for CSAs.

Elephant Heart Plum

We also saved some our plum favorites including Italian and Elephant Heart, and many of our specialty Heirloom varieties like Esopus Spitzenburg, Pitmaston Pineapple, and Cox’s Orange Pippin. Amazingly, there were even some small blocks of trees whose apples made it through the freeze! (If they are close to mature and the natural sugar content is high, that lowers the freezing point of the juice in the apple.)

Frozen Braeburn Apple

Harrow Sweet Pear

Sadly the Braeburns and Fujis did not survive the cold. Being late season apples in an already late- maturing season, in that early freeze their sugar content just wasn’t high enough to see them through.

As they freeze, the cells can rupture and we’re left with  apple skins, filled with juice hanging on the tree. Over the course of this week they have oozed apple sap and become self-fermenting juice on the trees. As they wither and fall, at least it will be a nutrient return to the soil!

Spiced Pear Old Fashioned

It is with a heavy heart that we are sharing this news.

Do you remember as kids we used to hide and then jump out at someone just to scare the tar out of them? Sometimes they laughed and sometimes they weren’t so happy… 

Well, Mother Nature likes to do that to us. She jumps out at us and sometimes we come out laughing, wondering how we got through a cold night. Sometimes Mother Nature exerts the upper hand and we aren’t so happy. This is one of those times.

Last October we had the coldest night we have ever seen in October. The temperature bottomed out at three degrees.  Before that, our October temperatures had been unseasonably warm. Our trees had no chance to get used to the cold or to harden off. The sudden freeze took them by surprise. Mother Nature’s jump scare got them. The immediate effect was seeing dead leaves hanging on the branches, denying the trees their normal chance to move nutrients from the leaves to the tree. But the full impact wasn’t obvious at first. Deep damage takes time to show, so we waited, hoping for the best, scared to know what might be the worst.

Steve & Will Ela heading out into the orchards to look at freeze damage.

Gathering up our determination, we finally walked around last week and looked at the fruit buds and the trees. It was a devastating walk.

From what we can tell, our three acres of mature cherry trees are completely dead. Our four acres of one year old peach trees are dead or severely injured. Same for two year old peach trees. Our three year old peach trees, that are just starting to fruit, are hurt but maybe alive. Older peach trees are alive, but most branches smaller than your thumb are dead. We are likely to lose many mature plum trees. Pear trees are alive with some possible viable fruit buds, but many buds are dead. Apple trees are alive and some seem to have viable buds.

Clipping the smallest branches first, working ever lower on the tree hoping to find live wood.

We are concerned. All the surviving trees have been stressed and will be extra vulnerable to diseases. Spring freezes and any drought this summer will stress them further. For stone fruits our normal pruning will be completely different and very sad this year.

Our crop for this coming summer is drastically reduced.  How many peaches will we pick from the older damaged trees?  Pears were badly hurt but maybe some will fruit? Can we keep our fingers crossed for apples? And, we still have to navigate our “normal” frost season meaning more of any currently surviving buds may die.

Shirley Ela, 96, walks 1/4 mile through the orchard to get to the farm office most days. She said that there was a similar fall freeze with similar fruit damage in 1962. This is what perseverance looks like.

You are our community, understanding that extreme crop years like this are part of the bumpy farming road. You all know the many benefits of eating locally grown food, and you’re likely among the folks who dedicate a portion of your food dollars to this. 

So, that’s the hard news.

We are asking you to extend the dynamic flexibility you’ve always shown, and do three things:

1) Consider participating in the farm in new ways – looking for the bright side of having more time when there’s little fruit to harvest we are offering a bunch of virtual learning and on-farm experiences this year including:
Lunch with a Farmer Live Question & Answer
Custom Individualized Tours/Experiences
Adopt a Tree (or Three!)

2) Join us when you can at farmers markets this year. We will still be bringing whatever fruit makes it to bloom and then through spring frosts.

3) Hold your breath with us, ready to jump into CSAs again next year. Because of our deep uncertainty about the crop, we are not confident that we can fulfill CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and so are not going to be offering fruit shares this year.

We want to honor your part in our farm.
We hope you will understand. Sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we cry. We hope you will stay with us for a better year. 

We love apples. Our kids eat scads of them – Gala, Golden Supreme, Jonagold, Esopus Spitzenburg, Goldrush, Pitmaston’s Pineapple – and even more. We play in the orchards and even among the bins of fresh-picked apples, sample variety tastes at farmers’ markets for everyone who’s even mildly adventuresome, and think these apples actually do taste different, and better, than what almost everyone thinks when they hear “apple” these days.

So check this out. What a delight! Even more reason to enjoy fresh, organic, Colorado grown apples 🙂
Another Reason to Eat Organic — Organic Apples Contain More Diverse, Healthier Bacteria than Conventional
“Healthy, diverse colonies of gut bacteria can help prevent and treat many common diseases, and research on mice has linked improved gut health to protection against some cancers.”

Apples at market this weekend? Gala! And for CSA members,  Golden Supreme. Sneak peek to the next week? Possibilities include: Macintosh, Jonathan, and Swiss Gourmet. Also coming to market this weekend: late season Peaches, Black Amber and Fortune Plums, Bartlett Pears, and Heirloom Tomatoes!

Sample apples for tasting at a farmers’ market.

(more…)

What a fabulous farm tour weekend! The weather couldn’t have been more beautiful, the food was exquisite, and the company was thoroughly enjoyable. Such a group of interesting people!  Thank you to everyone who added their voices and their interests.  Long standing friends, new friends, people from nearby, and people from as far away as Portland Oregon joined us in a supremely fresh locavores’ feast created by the dynamic Forage Sisters.

Saturday we visited a neighboring winery, a distillery, and a farmstead cheese maker, then dined in the orchard.  Folks camping in the orchard stayed late for S’mores around a campfire.  Sunday morning was bright and clear for the tour of our farm. There were fabulously insightful questions! Folks aged 2 to well-experienced in life walked with us seeing everything about how the fruit is grown, and the part each person plays in making the farm an organic whole.

For everyone who didn’t make it out this year, we hope you’ll have the opportunity to join us in a year to come. Enjoy a few pictures!

Whether the weather is good 😉 WOW – it’s still snowing on the hills right above us – what a spring! Last year all the snow and runoff were completely gone from even the tops of the peaks by now. We were already heading into short water rations and biting our nails. Such a different scene surrounds us this season. Flowers are blooming in rare profusion. The trees are taking full advantage of all these storms. Spring temperatures have turned out benign and fruit is clustered so densely on the trees we are having to thin it! You can experience that fruit from two sides – the farm (seeing) and the CSA (eating). Jump into Summer with us! Farm Tour 2019 June 8-9 Curious? Would you like to see all that fruit & beauty? Come to our annual farm tour on the weekend of June 8-9. Our walk around, ask questions, see how we do things, free farm tour starts at 10 a.m. on the 9th. If you have ever wondered how fruit gets from bloom to what you buy at the markets, we cover all that. We walk and talk and look at pruning, grafting, thinning, cover crops, pest control, fertility, picking, packing, and whatever else comes to mind. Best of all, we make it a weekend excursion by combining our farm tour with other free tours of wineries, a cheesery, and distillery. And, to top it off, we are offering dinner and lunch in our orchard (paid RSVP required). Plus the North Fork Valley is part of the Colorado Creative Corridor, we have great dark skies for star viewing at night, and we are right next to the North Rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

CSA pick-of-the-week fruit shares! This is also the time of year to sign up for our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares. We have our Peak Season and Canning shares open for purchase now and will soon be opening our Early Season shares. CSA members pay now and then receive fruit each week (Peak and Early Season shares) at one of our farmers markets. We give you the pick of the crop for that week – while what we deliver varies from year to year, a list of what we expect to deliver is given on our website for each delivery site. We will have our shares available for purchase until June 15. Spring Renewal Things are crazy busy for our crew on the farm. Rhubarb season is winding down, heirloom tomatoes are in the process of being transplanted and every other spare moment is dedicated to getting the crop properly thinned. And, we just redesigned our website, so check out our new look. We hope to see you on the farm tour or at the markets!

photo credit Brigid McAuliffe

 

Please bear with us if we are a little slow, and feel free to reach out to us with questions using

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stormy orchard, wind machine, snowy peaks

Tour group in orchard-mountians (2)

New apple Varieties in the Southeastern part of Ela Family Farms

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Ela Family Farms winter orchard - solar panels - wind machines - mountains

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Did you know? Fruit trees go dormant – kind of like hibernating – in the cold of winter. Just like people, some trees are more tolerant of cold and some less so. That tolerance manifests as resistance to freeze injury. Uncertainty begins when warmer weather starts to set in with spring. Blossoms begin to swell and expand as the trees wake. The more the buds develop, the less cold-tolerant they become. It’s never the same from week to week nor from variety to variety, but the temperatures which will kill the buds (and therefore the fruit!) becomes uppermost in our minds this time of year! Cold nights are when we give thanks to the great sentinels you’ll see standing guard over the orchards: the wind machines.

These fabulous creations can stir the cold air which has settled to ground level with the somewhat warmer air which has risen. Running, they sound like an invading fleet of helicopters which never lands. They can change the air temperature at tree level as much as 3°– 4°F. That might sound small, until you realize that even a hundredth of a degree can be the difference between the freezing death or life of a fruit bud.

Winter time is here ~ snow is on the peaks, we are able to cross country ski around the orchards, and temps have dipped into the negative numbers at night!

What else are we doing, you might wonder?

We’re making dried fruit, cider, applesauce, and fruit butters. We keep the ingredients simple – our organic fruit & no sugar added to anything except the jams/jellies.

We’re pruning! Thanks hardy crew! Every tree is getting a hand-pruning. At the start of the New Year, we’ve trimmed all the pear trees (about 9 1/2 acres!) and are almost through a dense stand of Gala apples (about 5 acres). Only about 65 acres of peaches, plums, cherries, and other apples to go!

Paperwork & number crunching. Sigh. Of course we’re doing the elaborate crop tracking, market figures, compliance and other paperwork there isn’t time for the rest of the year.

Our goal is living and working together, sustainably. As always, we guarantee everything we sell so if we don’t hit the mark on something, please let us know.

Ela Family Farms has been awarded Gold Status by the Colorado State Environmental Leadership Program for our efforts in community, land, air, and water stewardship. As part of those actions, we make every effort to reuse materials, and we invite your participation! We hope that you, like we, can continue by using simply good boxes (new or not).

Sometimes it is really hard to wait, but the wait has been worth it.  After starting, then stopping, then hemming and hawing, sweet cherry harvest began in earnest ten days ago.  It is tricky to decide when cherries are ripe.  As they ripen, cherries first turn a straw color, then a pink, then a red, and finally a deep, mahogany purple.  The color purple is when they finally go from good to really good.

So many cherries in the stores are disappointing because they are picked red and not purple.  They look enticing, but are not really flavorful.

You bite them and there is just slightly sweet flatness.  As they get temptingly close to being ready, it is easy to go out in the orchard and start eating.  I think, “that was pretty good, we should start now!”  But, pretty good isn’t the same as really good.  Given that we don’t have cherries all that often – really good is what we want.  And, that change from red to purple is the change from pretty good to really good.

Some of these cherries are deep red and a few are purple.  When I was looking at them on the tree, they all appeared purple.  We started to pick.  And after looking at them in the box, the hemming and hawing started…  Red, not all purple.  I was worrying that waiting would let the birds eat that much more of our crop.  I also didn’t want to get behind and suddenly have overripe cherries.  Yet, I just wasn’t satisfied with the overall flavor and color of what I was seeing in the box.  My crew foreman was watching me scuff my feet, bob my head back and forth, open my mouth to say something and then close it.  What was the right choice?  Then Mother Nature helped me out.  In the middle of all that hemming and hawing, it started to rain.  Picking in the rain is miserable.  We would wait.

It turned out to be a good choice.  The difference between that Friday and the next Monday was notable.  The color had deepened and the flavor had intensified.  Rather than looking in a box and wondering, I was looking in the box and liking what I saw.

We have been picking fast and furious and will have lots of cherries at the farmers markets this coming weekend.  Purple is flavor and sweet lusciousness.  Red was almost but not quite.  I eat enough cherries in the field that I purposely don’t keep them in the house since I would founder on them.The question now isn’t whether they are good or really good – it is how to stop eating them once I’ve started!

We are going to raise our hands in the air and say it loud and clear – We support the Bee Cause!  Why?  Because!

• Because bees are the quiet workers on the farm.  Without their work to pollinate apple, cherry, pear and plum flowers we would not get to enjoy many of the fruits we love.
• Because we know they pollinate the flowers of other plants and are a crucial part of our ecosystem.
• Because we know that bee populations are threatened by genetic bottlenecks, new diseases and pests, and various chemicals.

We rent 40 hives every year to help pollinate our fruit blooms.  They arrive sometime in early April after a long drive from the almond orchards of California.  They stay until our last fruit blooms fade and then they are off to work other crops.  We could keep our own hives, but that is full-time job in itself.  I am content to have some one else worry about bee care while I take care of the trees themselves.

The interesting thing about fruit trees is that some are varieties are self fertile and some require cross pollination.  A self fertile blossom can pollinate itself and bees are less important.  Most peaches are self fertile, with the exception of one variety we grow, the JH Hale.  Hales require the pollen of another variety on their flowers to set fruit, while the others are fine just hanging out with themselves.  Some sweet cherries are self fertile, but many are not.  Apples, pears, and plums require bees to move pollen from one variety to another for them to set fruit.  We interplant different varieties of apples to make sure different pollens are easily available for the bees to move around.  Likewise our plum varieties are intermixed for the same reason.

Despite our support of bees, we thought we might have to picket the hives this spring.  You see, honeybees are prima donnas.  They don’t want to work if it is too cold, too windy, not sunny enough, or any number of other factors.  And this spring brought all those conditions – days of murky, rainy, cool weather while the fruit trees were in bloom.  I would wander by the hives and they would be quiet with nary a soul stirring and going out to do their pollination work.  That is when I started to think we were going to have to rally them with marches and motivational speeches.

Most years, the bees easily do their job and we don’t have to worry.  In other years, pollination can make a difference in crop load.  For example, in 2015, after our terrible night of frost, I went out and carefully looked at our apple blooms.  Most were killed by the cold, but occasionally there was a blossom that had survived.  The damage was sobering, but I thought we still might have enough blooms for a 20% crop.  Then we had two weeks of murky, wet, cold weather.  The bees holed up and by the time things warmed up the blooms were past.  When I looked for that 20% crop, it wasn’t there.  Why? I think those last remaining blooms that survived the frost didn’t get pollinated and did not set fruit.

This year we were having the same kind of wet, murky weather.  Fortunately, there were windows of a few hours of sunny warmth and in those windows the bees got out and did their work.  It looks like it was enough, but not perfect.  On some fruits that were in full bloom in the worst of the murky weather, there are blooms that did not get pollinated and are now falling off.  On the plums in this picture, the ones that are yellow or pale green were not pollinated and will soon be on the ground.  Those that have green stems and are larger are the ones that were pollinated and will be the crop for this year.  There are enough good ones for a full crop, but it illustrates how important those bees are to setting a crop.

This is also one reason I always hesitate to talk about what crop we have in the orchard until after the fruits actually start to grow and I know they are going to stick on the tree.

As I write this, our beekeeper just drove in to pick up the hives and take them off to other work.  We are thankful for what they did do for us this year.  To make sure that they are available in future years we are going to keep supporting the Bee Cause – because we depend on those hives and because we have lost so many wild bees to disease and environmental stress.

Get with the buzz and support efforts to help pollinators of all types.  They contribute to our well being in so many unseen ways!

The forsythia blooms give me the wake up call that the clock has ticked another bit closer to spring and the fruit trees blooming.

The end of March and the start of April always marks the start of new life on the farm.  And, the start of the worry of frost season

The feel of the farm air has changed from the continual chill of winter to the moist scents of spring.  Alfalfa and clovers are turning a welcome green in the cover crops.  The days are longer and with the time change, the long afternoon light is lingering rather than quickly disappearing as it does in winter.  The forsythia blooms give me the wake up call that the clock has ticked another bit closer to spring and the fruit trees blooming.

Our warm and storm free days of February and early March caused many people to ask me about what impact those temperatures would have on the fruit trees.  The easy answer was – I didn’t know.  We always have a warm spell in February and then winter returns.  But when it keeps on staying warm, like in 2015, it is a cause for worry.  This year it wasn’t as warm as 2015, but it did seem warmer than normal.  The lack of storms and snow in February made me worry simultaneously about water and spring coming on too quickly.

The plum buds broke out of their brown winter hunker to spread and show their green to catch the sun.

However, until the fruit buds actually started to visually change, it was hard to get a handle on how much effect those warm temperatures were having.

The fruit buds finally started to disclose what all those climate variables meant last week.  They had been quietly growing, but last week they started to really swell and give their first peak of greens and yellow on their sides. The plum buds broke out of their brown winter hunker to spread and show their green to catch the sun.  The scales on pear buds started to separate to expose their yellow sides.

With that information we could start to look at notes from past years and compare timelines.  Yes, we are earlier than “normal”, if there is such a thing.  But, compared to last year, we are well behind.

Now, keep in mind that last year was anything but normal. It was the earliest bloom I have ever recorded, breaking the previous record by six days.

The scales on pear buds started to separate to expose their yellow side

But it is still somehow comforting that despite the warm February, we are not sprinting ahead too fast.  The storms that moved in last week and this week have slowed things down.  As I look out the window at snow gently falling, it still seems like a good thing, despite all the other cues of spring.  So far the cooler temperatures haven’t been too cold for the stage the buds are at right now.  Every day that we are cool means bloom is going to be just a little bit later.  That somehow feels safer.

But soon, maybe in a week or ten days, I will be watching the forecasts like a hawk and cringing at predictions of subfreezing temperatures.  The frost alarms are already set and the propane tanks of the frost protecting wind machines are full.  As the fruit trees slowly wake up, we are preparing to take care of them and protect them as best we can.

Despite the worry, it is a beautiful time of year.  It is a joy to watch flowers emerge, to smell their sweet scents in the air and to be part of the annual ritual of spring.

The peach buds today look like this.

Last year they looked like this!

On a Friday afternoon when we should have coolers overflowing with apples and I should be trying to organize boxes and boxes of fruit to send to our various markets and wholesale accounts, it turns out that the farm is strangely quiet.  This year “A” is for absent, not apple.

Just to compare, this same weekend last year I was loading seven varieties of apples, plus pears, plums and apple cider for the markets.  This weekend I am bringing a total of 20 boxes of plums to sell and just enough fruit to cover our CSA shares.

We normally have all our coolers brimming with fruit and this year our big cooler (the one on the right) is not even turned on.  Our medium sized cooler is only part full with apples for processing.

That fruit for processing is to make apple sauce so that we can maintain our presence in stores throughout the winter and until we have another large apple crop.  And it was the need to make some apple sauce that governed one of my major decisions earlier this spring.

After the hard frost in April that killed most of the apple blooms, I had combed through the blooms and felt that we had just enough still alive to make a small crop – maybe 20% or so.  At the end of May, it came time to apply our first biological spray to control worms in the apples.  As I was driving up and down each apple row applying the spray, it become apparent that the weeks of wet and cool weather that followed bloom had stymied pollination and fruit set.  I was rapidly changing my outlook from a 20% crop to less than 5%.  Blank tree followed blank tree with an ocassional limb with some apples.

We have to spray the virus that controls worms weekly throughout the summer.  The material for each spray costs about $40/acre plus the time and equipment used to apply it.  I always figure if that spray saves us one box of fruit, then it is more than worth it to apply.  But this year, an acre that might normally have 300-500 boxes of fruit had 5-20.  In other words, there weren’t that many boxes of fruit to save and protect.  Our traps that monitor worm pressure were at zero, so we had very little pressure and we had already applied one season long control for worms in the form of mating disruption twist ties.

I was faced with the dilemma of spending lots of money, money we would not recover, in order to have more number one apples or taking a chance that our low population of worms and the control already applied would last for the summer.  I also knew that the virus was already in the population and that most likely we would not have many actual worms, just misshapen fruit from where the worm stings the apple as it takes its first bite before dying from the virus.

Normally I would always opt for the maximum control, but after hemming and hawing I decided to take a chance this summer.  I backed off the sprays.  I knew we had an out in that we could use that flavorful, but misshapen, fruit in apple sauce.

As we rapidly pick the small crop, the results of my decision are coming in.  About half the small crop of apples is misshapen, but those apples will be just enough to make the sauce we need to make it to next harvest.  It has meant fewer number one apples for markets, but that was probably going to be the reality anyhow.  When trees that should look like this:

look like this:

it makes it hard to pick much fruit.

Our Jonathan block that normally picks over a 1000 boxes picked just 60.  It would normally take a week to pick it and we finished in less than three hours.  Our Jonagolds that pick 750 boxes picked 10.  Maybe we should have bought our crew track shoes so they could run from tree to tree to find “the apple”.

While this year “A” stands for absent, we hope that next year it will once again stand for apple.  We enjoy bringing the mix of varieties and flavors to the markets and watching people try the various flavors that apples can encompass.  In the meantime, enjoy some apple sauce, try some jam, and horde that last jug of frozen cider in the back of the freezer.

Mother Nature has a serious case of the grumpies this year.  She has been kind to us for so many years, that I guess it is to be expected that she might get out of the wrong side of the bed at some point.  But it is starting to feel like she is dog piling things on.  Drought, deluge, frost, fireblight, deer, hail, and now this week – brown rot.  More on that in a minute, but first lets look back at the year.

From January until mid-April it looked like a drought similar to 2002.  We were ready to start irrigating in early April.  Then the switch flipped and it was the deluge of 2015 with snowpack increasing in May, rather than decreasing, and rain nearly every day for several months.  Of course, there was that little issue of the night in April that froze most of our fruit blooms, resulting in many trees looking like this before harvest – beautiful tree, no fruit.

Our peach crop is about 25% of normal, but our pear and apple crops are even worse – maybe 5% of normal.

Then a few weeks ago I walked out into our young block of Zestar! apples.  They had a nice little crop on them that I thought would be fun for all of you to try – except that the deer herd that has decided to call the orchard home ate most of them as they matured, along with parts of the trees.  And they didn’t share.

Have I mentioned the hail storm of several weeks ago?  If you see peaches like this, you can attribute it to the rain that had some sharp edges in it…

And now, brown rot.  The wet, humid year has led to this fungal disease that we have never seen in our orchard before.  I have heard of it and read about it, but our dry Colorado climate meant it was not something we worried about, until now.

All this week we have been getting reports from customers about peaches they bought not holding well and literally breaking down before their eyes.  These were the same peaches that looked perfectly wonderful when we packed them and sold them.  We’ve been scratching our heads trying to figure out what is going on since it happens so fast and is different than anything we have seen before.  We always guarantee our fruit and we will replace anything that is not how it should be, but it is still disheartening for our customers and us to get fruit that isn’t simply wonderful.  And especially to get fruit that turns into a brown glob almost overnight.

After lots of thought and discussion I finally realized we were seeing brown rot showing up in our orchard for the very first time in my life.  It is a fungus that thrives on warm, wet conditions.  Just like this year.  Not only can it cause good fruit in boxes to break down, it can actually cause fruit on the tree to break down as it is growing.

As I walk through the orchard, each tree has several peaches like this and others that are just the left over shell of what was a peach.  Each of these is spreading spores that can infect other peaches.  Those other peaches may or may not succumb to the fungus and that is what is giving us grey hair.

There are so many beautiful peaches that we can’t just walk away from the crop and throw up our hands.  Yet, we know a certain percentage may just fall apart in the box.  There is no way to tell which ones are fine and which ones will fall apart.  We are doing our best to toss anything that looks suspicious, but we know we won’t find every infected peach.  On the other hand, most of the peaches are fine and juicy and wonderful.

At this point in the season there is nothing we can really do – the controls for brown rot generally occur around bloom time and early summer.  We will certainly be applying those controls next year, but for now please bear with us.  Let us know if you get something that isn’t right.  We will always make things good with you.  And understand that this is completely new learning curve for us.  A learning curve we are trying to figure out from the bottom of a dog pile…

When the last few things have happened I have just started to shake my head and smile.  Of course Mother Nature would throw something else at us.  My hope?  That Mother Nature can just vent and get this all out of her system this year.  Better these problems on a small crop than a big one.  Maybe she can have a good cry at the end of the season and wake up seeing the world a little rosier for next year.  Meanwhile, thank you for your support and feedback – we appreciate everyone we sell fruit to and will continue to strive to do our best, even when Mother Nature is grumpy.

On the day that we are starting to pick our peaches, I am finally sitting down to write the story of this spring.  This year, 2015, has everyone around here shaking their heads and muttering that we have never seen a year like it.  Yet, as they tasted the first ripe peaches of the year, the kids had juice running down their chins and smiles on their faces.  They proclaimed them delicious and asked for more.

I have thought about how to write the story of this spring many times, but was never quite sure I would be writing the right thing.  There have been so many uncertainties – I was afraid of either being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic.  They each have their pitfalls, so instead I kept waiting, trying to figure things out.  I kept thinking that in another week things would be clearer.  And then in another week, and another, and now it is mid-July and I am still scratching my head.  My lack of posts reflects that confusion – when I go silent, it is because I don’t know what to say.

The storms of April were hard on the fruit blooms this year.  We were squeaking by until, in the middle of April, we had one night that was particularly crippling.  The forecast was for right at freezing, but instead the temperature dropped quickly after dusk.  By 9 p.m. that night I was already turning on wind machines as temperatures fell below critical values.  A cloud bank was hanging out to the west and I kept hoping it would move in to help moderate the temperatures.  But, all night, it just hung out there and did not move.  By 3 a.m. we were at 24 degrees and there we sat for the rest of the night.  It was not until noon that we finally crawled above freezing.  From our charts, the temperature for a 90% kill on blooms is 26 degrees for a duration of less than an hour.

That one night killed a large portion of our crop.  I could still find a few good fruit buds, but not many.  Then the cool, wet spring that followed limited pollination of what buds were left.  We had rain nearly every day for a month and half.  We went from being bone dry and looking at a nerve wracking drought year in early April, to amazing amounts of rain and a snow pack that actually increased in May.  Crazy.

I waited to see what fruit would set and what would grow.  Since we only need less than 10% of the fruit buds on a tree for a full crop (we have to thin that much in a non-frost year!), it is very hard to sort through all the dead fruit buds to see what percent are still alive.  But as the first of June came and went, it became apparent that many trees had no fruit on them at all.

My current assessment is that we have about a 25% crop of peaches, and less than a 5% crop of plums, pears, and apples.  Within that 25% crop of peaches we have some varieties that have nearly a full crop and other varieties that have hardly any.  It makes crop estimates and labor estimates nearly impossible to predict.  Then, while we bloomed extremely early and expected harvest to start early, all the wet, cool weather delayed maturation, adding another unknown to the equation.  So, in addition to not really knowing how much fruit we would have, I couldn’t guess as to when harvest might start.

But, it started today and we will bring you what we have.  We have always said that we only sell what we grow, and that remains true. On some weekends we will have plenty of fruit.  On other weekends, we will run out early.  As we move into pear and apple seasons, we will most certainly come up short.  Our late season Fuji and Braeburn apples are nearly nonexistent and we have shifted our CSA shares around to reflect what we do and do not have.  We planted extra heirloom tomatoes so that we could make sure to have something at our markets.

We know these years happen and expect them.  My grandfather always figured one year in ten was a bad one and our last 15% crop year was in 1999.  So, it wasn’t a question of if, but when.  We recite the farmer’s mantra of “it will be better next year”, every day as we continue to water and tend our trees.

We appreciate your support and your business over the years and hope that you will bear with us through this year.  The Palisade area escaped the frosts and has a nice peach crop this year, but nearly every grower in our area took a hard hit – many worse than us.  We will do our best to bring you the best of what we have and we will still look forward to seeing you at the markets.

Savor the peaches we do have.  Let them put a smile on your face.  I, as a fruit grower, vow to discard the silent treatment and will do my best to keep you updated weekly as we move through this season.

With all the technology that surrounds us these days, it has become common to back things up in the cloud.  We do that here on the farm to protect our important data. But some nights we prefer to rely on good old fashioned Mother Nature to back us up as we try protect our tender fruit blooms from frost.  And clouds, real clouds, not those virtual clouds, can make a huge difference.

The best way to describe why clouds make a difference at night is the same as when we all go to bed in the winter.  We can lie on top of the covers and we get chilled, if not downright cold.  Why?  Because we are radiating our body heat away from us and there is nothing to stop the loss.  If the air around us is cold, we get cold.  But crawl under a soft down comforter and we warm up right away.  That comforter reflects and traps our body heat and helps to keep us warm.

On a cold, clear night those tender fruit blossoms are in the same predicament.  They are lying out there on top of the covers and they are radiating heat to outer space.  There is nothing between them and the black, frigid depths of the universe and their temperature drops.  If the air around them is warm, then they can stay warm by getting heat from that air, but if that air mass is cold, then they can freeze.  Brrrrrr.  It gives me chills to even think about it.

With our wind machines we try to mix warm air that has risen above the trees with the cold, dense air that has settled around the blooms.  We are attempting to keep those blooms warm with that warmer air.  But a wind machine isn’t a down comforter.  And it can only do so much.

This is where  clouds make a difference.  As they move over the trees, they act like that comforter.  They trap the heat that the blooms and the ground are giving off and reflect that heat back down.  They help to keep the trees all snuggly and warm.

This may seem pretty esoteric.  How can a cloud really do that?  It doesn’t envelop the trees like a comforter.  But on a cold clear night I have watched temperatures jump by six degrees within minutes as the edge of a cloud moves overhead.  And that is real.  And crucial on a cold night.

I was up babysitting trees this past Wednesday night.  At dusk the sky cleared, the wind settled, and the temperatures plummeted as cold air settled in around the trees.  During the day we were at 60 degrees, but by 10 p.m. the temperatures had dropped to 26-28 degrees around the trees – temperatures that will freeze those tender buds.  I was scrambling to turn on wind machines to mix the warm air above into that cold air.  The machines were helping, but it looked like it would be a long night.   It would be nine hours before the light of sun warmed things up again and stopped that heat loss to outer space.

And then a cloud bank appeared to the west and started to move overhead.  In a matter of ten minutes the temperatures rebounded to 36-38 degrees.  Well above that feared freezing mark and well above what our wind machines were gaining.  I paused in my scramble to turn on machines and as the clouds thickened, I reversed direction and started to turn off machines that were no longer needed.  Those clouds stayed over us all night and kept temperatures above freezing until right at dawn.  As they left, I turned wind machines back on as temperatures dropped back into the high 20’s.  But we only needed them for less than an hour and the buds seemed to have made it through another nail biting night.

Thank you to those down comforter clouds for backing us up in such a real way.  We will keep our important data in the cloud, but our most important things, our blooms, we will hope to keep warm under the cloud.

It is the start of the spring whether season – the time of year where for two months we wonder whether we will make it through spring frosts with a good crop or whether we will have to tighten our belts and make it through a frost year, the time of year where the fate of the fruit year is in Mother Natures climatic hands. And this year the whether season has started very early. Instead of two months of wondering about the weather, we will have nearly three. We normally don’t worry about cold and frosts until the end of March. But this years warm January and February temperatures have advanced the trees. The flower buds have started to swell well before we would normally think of them getting excited about spring.

After all the weeks of abnormally warm temperatures, ten days ago the forecast was for one night of below normal temperatures. Those tender buds were swelling and used to the tropics and suddenly a forecast of 9 degrees for the night was going to drop artic cold on them.

Frost years will happen and have happened and we have survived them more than once. But it is hard to walk out the door every day for a summer and fall and look at beautiful trees devoid of fruit. It is hard to irrigate and control pests and grow cover crops when you know that every dollar spent is a dollar that won’t be made back that year. Yet if you don’t do those things, then the next year’s crop won’t be good either. Trees are perennials and how we treat them this year affects next years crop and even the next several years’ crops. If we were to ignore the basic needs of our trees for a year, it would take years for them to recover.   That means that even in the no fruit frost years, we take the same care of the trees as we would in a good year – pruning, irrigating, keeping insects and diseases in control, mowing cover crops, and fertilizing.

Before that predicted cold night last week all the growers were looking at each other and asking how much cold can the fruit buds handle?  We ran temperature and hardiness models, we had charts from past freeze chamber research tests, and we had experience, but this early in the year all those things have wide error ranges. The recent warm temperatures tend to make the buds more sensitive, but their early stage of development (just barely swelling) means they can be pretty tough. Even with years and years of experience and research charts to back us up, the answer was that no one really knew what temperatures might cause harm. And not knowing and guessing makes for lots of gray hair and time thinking about all the what ifs.

To help answer some of the questions, one of my friends and the owner of a business who sells us supplies went and cut peach branches from the higher and lower elevation farms. He wrote a check to the local research center to have them test those buds in a freeze chamber and see at what temperatures they showed injury. He did this just so all of us could have actual, not speculative, information. We could use those numbers to decide if we would need to run our wind machines for the first time of the season. We expected to have the results the afternoon before the forecasted freeze.

We prepared our wind machines hoping that we would not yet need them so early in the season. And all the growers waited for the actual data to come in to decide at what temperature to set our alarms. The early afternoon turned to mid-afternoon and still no word on the data. Then it came out that the testing could not be completed until the next morning. The data would be no help for the coming night. So, only after the fact would we know what the critical temperatures were for the buds – we would be able to look back and say, we should have rather than looking forward and saying we need to.

With no hard data available, guesswork had to be turned into a decision. I looked at all the models, factored in my experience, and then threw in a healthy dose of why would I take a chance. It would be terrible to look back and say I wish I had done something. Then I threw in a little gamblers attitude and came up with a temperature at which we would start our machines.

We did run our wind machines that night – we set our alarms for 15 degrees which we hit to at 3:30 a.m. We weren’t the only ones running our machines that night. Several of our neighbors joined us in the late night/early morning frost fight. Why take a chance…

And when the data came in from the actual freeze chamber tests the next morning, it turned out the buds were tougher than we had guessed. We probably didn’t need to turn our machines on until 11 or 12 degrees – temperatures we didn’t hit until right at dawn.

But the whether we will have a crop season has started and it will continue until the end of May. I won’t travel far from the farm for the rest of the frost season, because you just never know when the forecast will be right and when it will be wrong. We can’t beat Mother Nature, but we will do all we can to mitigate the upcoming cold nights. We are keeping our fingers crossed that Mother Nature will treat us well. We hope that all that finger crossing will lead to delight in branches laden with fruits and the joy of bringing boxes and boxes of fruit to the markets this fall.

It feels like we’ve been waiting all winter for winter to arrive.  We’re still waiting, by the way. Its been close to 4 weeks since we’ve had any snow on the ground around the farm and very little if any snow has graced the sky in any measurable amount since early January.  With statewide snowpack at 72% of normal we are hoping for big, wet storms that typically grace Colorado in March and April.

The extended warm temperatures and little moisture are the talk of the town in this small agricultural valley that pays attention to the weather more than the average Joe. This is a valley that has a local newspaper that writes about the weather everyday. While we typically have warm spell in January and February, this prolonged warm weather has many growers watching the forecast and hoping that storm system—any storm system, will head our way with much-needed cooler temperatures and moisture.

When I asked Steve how he’s feeling about the warm weather, he said, “…it’s certainly disconcerting, but I can’t do anything about it. I’m guessing that any warm day is a day towards bloom.  But I don’t know. I could worry myself to death, but I can’t change it”. Steve’s sentiments are echoed by many around here and many of us are waiting for this “seemingly interminable stretch of dry weather” to end. (Thanks to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center for this gem of a quote).

So what does that mean, in reality? It means that the trees may be moving towards bloom. It means that trees could bloom earlier in the season and while this would be early, Steve says that this wouldn’t be “…off the charts early”.  But still early.  On the edge of the chart early.  The biggest concern is knowing that these warm temperatures won’t last and it will become cold again. No matter what at our elevation, 5800 feet, there is always a frost.  Is it better to have a frost early in the season or late, after you’ve spent thousands of dollars in propane? What if the Grand Mesa continues to receive little snow and we don’t have enough water for the trees? What water will we triage to which trees?  And while much of farming can spent in the “what if’s?”, the reality is we have no control at all over what the weather does or will bring.

When I sat down to write this blog 30 minutes ago, it was sunny.  Now, there is a blustery wind with snowflakes blowing sideways.  It’s enough of a welcome sight that I get a hug from our daughter, “Just because it’s snowing”. Let’s hope the snow, colder weather and hugs last~all winter long and help to put things back to normal.  And when the cold really does leave for spring to come, that it stays away until next winter.

Our crew of 4 guys has been busily pruning since November.  Every tree gets pruned every year, a process that takes five to six months, depending on how many staff we have during the winter. While it doesn’t take that long to prune an individual tree, pruning 35,000 individual trees takes all winter, one tree at a time, row by row.

Pruning is the start of another cycle of fruit production on the farm since it is through pruning that we work to have the trees capture as much sunlight as possible and to have fruit throughout the tree. We can also use pruning to adjust the crop load so that the trees don’t overproduce fruit.

Just like the differences in kids from the same family, every variety of apples, pears, peaches and cherries are similar but different. They all have slightly different growth habits, fruiting types and personalities. Stocky, lanky, big, small, quick and slow growing, wanting to fruit or not, and some are just downright stubborn. A good pruner has a big goal in mind as they approach the tree, but then adjusts what gets pruned to the idiosyncrasies of that variety or even that tree. So, much of the work is repetitious, but each tree needs to be thought about individually in order to do a good job.

The quiet days in the orchard are punctuated by the engine noise of the tractor, the din of the compressor and the “pffff” of the pneumatic pruning shears throughout the rows of fruit. Some of the smaller trees—short with small diameter wood will be pruned with hand shears, but all other trees will be pruned with the air shears. This process is more efficient and allows for much of the pruning to be completed from the ground.  Ladders are still used with the air shears, but with a pruning shear that reaches five to six feet high, much of the ladder use is left for the very top of the trees.

Every crew member has a spool that he is attached to as he walks and prunes down the row. The spool unwinds with each step.

One person will prune on one side of the tree with another person prunes the other side. This makes pruning the tree quicker and allows for less ladder moving.

The long arm of the pruning shear (4-5 feet long) allows for much of the pruning to be completed from the ground.

You can see the pneumatic line from the spool attached to the line of the pruning shear.

Currently, we are pruning the apples, after starting with pears last fall. By spring, our crew will finish with plums, cherries and peaches. After four months of snipping branches, and 35,000 trees later, they are usually quite ready to put down the shears and move onto other work! Of course, the next job in a good year is thinning – nearly every tree. 1, 2, 3…35,000.

A day’s work is done…

As the land on the farm was cleared in the teens and twenties, loads of basalt rock was removed and constructed into a stone wall that lines the perimeter of our farm. About six or seven years ago, Steve thought it would be a nice tradition to line the rock wall with luminaries on Christmas Eve. What began with ten to fifteen luminaries has grown into a tradition of one hundred luminaries lining a portion of the wall.

An operation of making candles over our wood stove begins in November. Friends and family give us lots of leftover candle wax throughout the year.

We’ve found that empty Brown Cow and Mountain High yogurt containers work the best. Thank-you Brown Cow.

Here are some candles, ready to go.

Steve and our kids have mastered folding down 100 paper sacks,

which are then delivered through the window to be filled with sand from the sandbox (ever so careful to avoid the cat poo…).

When the sun is setting, the four of us bundle up and light the luminaries, illuminating the rock wall around the farm and in so doing, spreading a little holiday cheer among our corner of Rogers Mesa.

Happy Holidays to all from Ela Family Farms.

Every morning and every evening we see the sunrise and the sunset. We change clocks to try to best use the daylight. We comment on cloudy versus sunny days. And especially in Colorado we feel warm (even on relatively cold temperature days) when the sun is out, and chilly when it isn’t. We live by the sun.

On a farm the sun means even more – our trees are able to capture sunlight and turn it into energy and at the end of that process into fruit! A pretty amazing feat if you think about it. We spend all winter pruning the trees to maximize the amount of sun they can capture. It doesn’t really matter what tree training system we use, if it makes sense from a sun interception standpoint, it will be a good system. In many ways our farm is ultimately run and powered by the sun. Except for the part of the farm powered by electricity.

Even with all these acres of trees harvesting sun and turning it into fruit, we still need electricity to run coolers and packing lines, lights and fans, apple sauce machines and computers. As an organic farm that strives to minimize off-farm inputs and to maximize the things that our farm system can generate, it bothers us that we keep buying electricity from off-farm sources. We have roof areas that could be harvesting sunlight, but aren’t. Yet, just as it costs money for trees, it costs money to utilize that roof area to generate electricity. Each year there have been other priorities – trucks, sheds, tractors, trees, wind machines, and irrigation piping to name a few. There are always things that need monetary input and the rooftops kept getting pushed down the list, along with that vacation to Fiji.

Well, this year we are finally using some of those rooftops. A crew has been installing photovoltaic panels on top of our packing shed and, just like our trees, they will soon be harvesting sun to power our farm. We aren’t able to afford enough to power the whole farm yet, but this is a start. These panels will generate about a third of the power our coolers and machines consume – a step in the right direction. They feed directly into our farm power system so in times of the year where our power needs are low, they might generate more power than we need and the electric meter will run backwards. In the fall when our power needs are high, they will reduce the amount of power we buy from the electric company.

Brad Burritt, owner of Empowered Energy Systems LLC and his crew installed these panels over the past week.

It feels good to finally be closing another circle in what we believe it means to be sustainable and organic farmers. It isn’t just about growing fruit, but also how we grow that fruit and how we take care of our farm and the environment around us. In our minds generating our own electricity is one step toward true sustainability, just as is growing cover crops for fertility, encouraging beneficial insects for pest control, or using water efficient irrigation methods. So, now we have another reason to like these warm Colorado sunny days. The trees will be storing up energy to grow fruit and our electric bill will be lower. That vacation to Fiji? Well, it got bumped down the list again…

Here is Ela Family Farms World HQ for assembling gift packs. This is the basement of our old packing shed, which looks and feels a little like a stone bomb shelter.  It’s about forty degrees down here—nice in July, a little nippy on the toes in November.

We assemble our gift packs ourselves. This involves taping lots of boxes,

We rotate our stock of boxes—even with cardboard.

bribing our kids to punch out these dye cut foam inserts (we pay them by the box—most of the time),

You can see how these foam inserts are scored in the photo on the left

labeling the boxes,

ending up with a nice stack of boxes. We sent out an order this past week of over sixty boxes of apples so it’s nice to have a good tall stack ready to go (which we did not!).

These boxes are ready to go with the foam inserts already in them

Next, we load the boxes with whatever fruit our customer has ordered.  At this time of year, we are sending out Fuji and Braeburn apples as well as our artisan processed items such as applesauce, jams, fruit butters and dried fruit.

One of the trickiest parts of sending out gift packs is making sure that the correct fruit goes with the correct card to the correct person.  It doesn’t sound terribly complicated, but if we are interrupted while we are putting these gift packs together, or if we leave and them come back to them, it’s amazing how easy it is to make a mistake.  There has been more than once when we thought we were sending peaches to Jane Doe in Kansas City and John Doe in Portland received them!

The gift packs have to be ready by a certain time for UPS to pick them up.  During the height of the fruit season, we’ve had a our UPS guy helping us label the boxes so that we could get them out on his truck.  Gift pack sales drop once the fresh fruit season is over, though we still have orders coming in weekly for the holiday season.  If you are looking for a great local product to send to friends or family this holiday season, check out our website and get your order in.  And we promise that the gift will go to the correct person with the correct card.

Here are the hands whom pick for us all season. Here are the hands that prune during the cold winter months and thin every single tree all spring and summer long.

Here are the hands that in July, started picking Bing, Skeena and Sweetheart cherries. Then picked Earlistar, Rising Star, Blazingstar, PF-7 and PF-7A peaches.

Here are the hands that pick Redhaven, Newhaven, Rosa, Starfire, Suncrest, Coralstar, Blushing Star, Glowingstar, and Allstar peaches, Sansa, Zestar!, Alkmene, Gala, and Golden Supreme apples all through the dog days of August and early September.

Here are the hands that pick Shiro, Santa Rosa, Friar, Black Amber, Fortune plums and Bartlett pears.  Hear are the hands that pick Jonathan, Swiss Gourmet, Macintosh, Jonagold, Honeycrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Esopus Spitzenburg, Freyburg, Karminjen Sonneville apples, Cresthaven, JH Hale and O’Henry peaches.

Here are the hands that continue to pick through the cool fall mornings with gloves and warm hats waiting for the sun to stream through the trees, dry the dew or rain, and warm your bones. Stanley, Italian and Elephant Heart plums. Harrow Sweet pears, then Pitmaston Pineapple, Hubbardson’s Nonesuch, Empire, Golden Delicious apples in September and early October.

Now it’s the end October and your hands felt every fruit of the Fuji’s, Granny Smith, Braeburn and Goldrush apples.  They have picked the last few of the Comice, Bosc and Asian pears.  For four months these hands picked heirloom tomatoes.

So on this last day of harvest, we thank each and every one of these forty hands. We could not do what we do without you. We hope to see you next year.

At this time of year where the nights are crisp and the days warm, many people will ask us about the danger of apples freezing on the trees.  We have had a mild fall this year and have not yet had a hard freeze–below 28 degrees or so.  We have had some frosty nights and our basil and cucumbers have definitely lost the garden battle, but we’ve yet to have a cold, cold night as we often do in October.

Apples have lots of sugar in them (which is why we like them) and depending on the variety, an apple will withstand differing degrees of cold temperatures. The skin on an apple can freeze and the apple will still be fine to pick.  When this happens, we have to let the skin thaw before we pick them, otherwise they’ll be bruised and not so visually appealing. On these mornings, our crew will wait until the temperatures have warmed up and then they will pick. However, if an apple freezes to the core, the apple is toast.  The apple cannot be salvaged, even for cider.  As Steve says, “…it’s a packet of juice hanging on a stem on the tree”. Think of how a tomato on the vine freezes in your garden–or your neighbor’s garden–it’s only mushy and yucky and really only good for playing garden baseball.  The same goes for apples that are frozen to the core.

If the nighttime temperatures hover around 26 degrees, that’s when we get nervous.  Steve has run wind machines in the fall to keep the apples from freezing to the core.  In years past, even I have been out with a picking sack in the almost-dark trying to get as many apples off the tree as we could before a hard freeze. When I’m out there picking, those are desperate times, indeed.

We have a handful of varieties to pick before we will be finished for the season.  Those are: Braeburns, Fuji, Granny Smith and Gold Rush.  They are varieties that are hardier than say a Jonathon, but we are still keeping an eye on the temperatures at night, just to make sure we aren’t freezing our final varieties.  As I said earlier, we’ve had nice fall weather, without a hard frost yet.  Things could change in the next week–it only takes one night.  But we are feeling good about getting the last apples picked without having to dodge Mother Nature too much. And then we can call this fresh fruit season a wrap.

Low floating clouds, rain and the changing of leaves have my taste buds yearning for
tastes of fall; squash, pumpkin, and plums. Though we begin harvesting plums while it’s still high summer, I really start to eat them now. Our Italian plums are sweet and an enticing blue while our Elephant Heart plums are luscious deep red, full of sweet juice. Both are perfect for this fall recipe.

As much as I love to eat several plums in one sitting, I’m also a big fan of cooking and baking with them.  The recipe that follows is one that I grew up with. You need a good number of plums (Italian plums are my favorite for this dish) and a couple of hours.  This is the perfect sweet, warm dish to make on a fall day when the rain is coming down and you just want to settle into the warmth of your home.  As there is rain in the forecast this weekend, I’ll be making this and sharing it with friends who are having their end-of-the season CSA potluck.

This is a German recipe that both my Oma and Mom made. This is a fun recipe as the steam from the cooked plums is what cooks the dough. Your kitchen will smell great and everyone will be tempted to remove the lid from the plums while the dough is steaming. Don’t do this as the dough will sink!

Steamed Sweet Dampfknudeln
8 C halved and seeded plums

Place plums in a deep cooking pot.  Add 3/C water.  If the plums are tart, add 1/4C granulated sugar.  Cook the plums over low heat on your stove.  Stir frequently so they do not burn.  Once the plums begin to soften and break up, remove them from heat until your dough is ready to be placed into the plums and steamed.

Scald 1/2 C milk

In a mixing bowl combine:
1 package yeast
2 T warm water (110-115 degrees)
Let stand 5-10 minutes

Add to the yeast mixture once the yeast has proofed:
1/4 C butter (softened)
1/3 C sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Immediately pour scalded milk over ingredients in the bowl. When lukewarm, blend in, beating until smooth:
1 C flour
2 beaten eggs
Beat the above ingredients until smooth, then add
2-2 1/2 C flour
Mix this until you have a soft dough, then turn our into a lightly floured surface and let rest for 5-10 minutes.
Knead for 5-8 minutes then form the dough into a large ball and place in a greased deep bowl. Cover and let stand in a warm place until the dough has doubled.

Punch down dough, turn out onto a lightly floured surface.  Shape the dough into balls about 1 inch in diameter. Cover with a towel and let rise on a cookie sheet until balls are doubled.

Return the plums to a low simmer, then add the dough balls (Dampfknudeln).  Cover with a lid and steam for 30 minutes.  Take care to not heat the plums at too high of heat, or you’ll burn the plums onto the bottom of your pot (I do this every single time I make this).

After 30 minutes, remove the plums and Dampfknudeln from heat and serve into bowls.  Enjoy all the work you have put into the fantastic fall dish!

Guten Appetite.

We have the best intentions of writing a weekly blog about life on the farm.  Sometimes though, the needs of the farm interfere with those intentions.  Or…sometimes we’re just unmotivated.  Or tired.  Or can’t see the trees through the forest.

That’s when it’s really nice–no, not nice–awesome, to awaken to a sunrise like this

Seeing this our your window, kind of puts things in perspective.  When the semi-truck goes kaput at 3:30 a.m. on I-70 above Denver full of fruit for weekend markets, when we have to resend 60 gift packs to Texas because a hurricane impeded their delivery, when there has been so much rain that just-picked peaches mold in the box, when our dog snatches the UPS drivers wallet out of his UPS truck, it’s a wonderful thing to see the sun rise again, and believe that maybe the day in front of us will be just a little bit better.

Of all the fruit we grow here on the farm, my favorite to look at on the trees are plums. The tree branches get so loaded that they literally bend to the ground. A beautiful cascade of fruit. When our kids were smaller, they would have limbo contests under the Shiro plums.  We called it the “Shiro Limbo”.

This season, many of our plums were lost to frost during the spring.  Those that remain however, are ripening with some already getting picked and sent over to the markets on the Front Range. These Shiros (the yellow one’s) are too small for picking.  In retrospect, we should have thinned these. Perhaps next year…

We do have an enormous crop of Italians plums or prunes (if that’s how you like to call them). They are ripening beautifully, their bold purple hue popping against the green leaves. I am looking forward to making stewed Italian plums with Dampfnudeln–a favorite Bavarian dish that is exquisite in the fall time. Yum is on the horizon. For now however, I am more than content with a peach–or three!

As our crew is wrapping up picking our cherry crop, I am reminded at the amazing flavor and taste of this tiny fruit. We have 3 varieties of cherries: Bings, Skeena and Sweethearts.  They ripen and are picked in that order.  This is the first year we’ve had a crop of Sweethearts as they’ve either been frozen out or the birds have eaten the few we had.

One of the big challenges of cherries (besides them actually making it through spring frost) is knowing when to pick them.  We want a cherry that hangs on the tree, ripening and getting the most of the sweet flavor we love.  The challenge is the longer we wait to pick them, the more of a heyday the birds have eating those ripening delectable bites. Robins, sparrows, finches LOVE cherries and will eat, eat, eat.  There’s a saying in the fruit business that goes, “If you have 100% cherry crop, the birds will eat 10%.  If you have a 10% crop, the birds will eat 100%”.  We find that to be true.  This year we’ve had a small crop and are walking the line of keeping the cherries on the tree to ripen, versus the birds eating what we have. Another factor in waiting to pick cherries is rain.  While we want and need the moisture, a ripe cherry will split if it rains.  And customers do not want a cherry with a split down the middle!

Picking cherries is time-consuming as the cherry has to be picked by the stem, not the fruit.  This makes for slower picking–it’s much faster to grab the cherry and pull.  But then the stem is left on the tree and people prefer cherries with stems–green one’s at that! There can be significant variation in ripeness on a tree and our crew looks for a dark mahogany color.  If we have a tote full of cherries that are light-colored, we can bet that they will not taste like much.

Lastly, cherries have to be kept cold.  Our crew picks them in the morning when it’s cooler and they are refrigerated immediately.  This helps maintain the sweet flavor and keeps the stems green.  Cherries are so perishable!  That’s why it’s best to just go straight out into the orchard, climb a tree and eat them right away.  We find that a 12 year old up a cherry tree keeps the birds away as well…

This leaf is not what we want to see on our apple trees.  Or our pear trees or crabapples, for that matter. As the seasons of the farm roll through, we find ourselves in the season of fire blight, which begins during bloom time and goes through June. Fire blight is a fast moving, destructive bacteria that will leave trees with cankered branches that must be cut out with the hopes of saving the remainder of the tree.

Steve says that he has fought with fire blight most of his life.  He remembers cutting out branches of pear trees when he was a kid on his family’s orchard in Grand Junction. Fire blight looks like a fire has singed branches and leaves throughout the orchard.  I can look out the window at our trees right now and see branches that are brown, withered and dying. The infections we see in the trees now actually began during bloom.  Fire blight is sort of like human Staph infection.  The bacteria can hang out on the bark of the tree or on your skin and are harmless.  But give them an entry point such as the nectaries of the flower or a skin wound and the results can be deadly.  Once the bacteria are inside the tree, there is nothing that can be done since it is darn hard to get a tree to take any internal medicine.  Try telling a tree to take two aspirin and call in the morning?  At least with Staph, people can take antibiotics.

The severity of a fire blight infection is influenced by moisture (dew or rain) and warmth during bloom.  When a blossom opens up and is fresh, a wetting event such as rain or dew can move the bacteria down into the floral nectaries, one of the few places they can gain access to the inside of the tree.  Then, if the temperatures are warm, the bacteria can multiply and reach a critical level where they move into the sap of the tree.  If there are warm temperatures or no moisture or moisture and cool temperatures, there is no problem.  But, when the combination hits, trouble looms.  During bloom, Steve watches for these wetting events and monitors temperatures, checking for possible infection periods.  It is a beautiful time of year, but stressful due to frost and these possible infections.

Above: Jonathon trees with the branches cut out to eliminate fire blight

Conventional growers can use antibiotics on their trees right at the time of infection to kill the bacteria and keep them from entering the sap. Organic growers are not able to use antibiotics as these materials are no longer approved by the National Organic Standards Board. To prevent infections, we attempt to keep the overall amount of bacteria in the orchard low by spraying other materials like copper and lime sulfur.  Then we apply a preventative yeast spray which can populate the nectaries.  The yeast will fill the niche of the nectaries where the bacteria likes to be and keeps the bacteria out. One variable in using the yeast for fire blight control is when we spray lime sulphur (a thinning spray), it can kill the yeast, so the sequence of applications is important. Another difficulty in managing fire blight is the time of year when infections occur. Steve is generally up to his eyeballs in planting, getting water in for irrigating, fertilizing and applying other sprays.  Spring is just plain busy on the farm and fire blight becomes another crisis to manage.

The hardest thing with blight is that it can kill the tree.  Many other things in the orchard hurt the crop, but leave the tree there for another year.  Not so with blight.  Orchardists and researchers have spent entire careers trying to eliminate or control fire blight, yet after all that research, once it is in the tree there is not much that can be done.  Steve likes to say that fire blight is akin to Civil War battlefield medicine. If a soldier gets shot in the foot, he’ll have to have his leg amputated at the knee or hip to save himself. Subtley is not an issue.  Fire blight is the same.  Once we see an infection in a tree, it’s already too late.  We have to “amputate” the limb 2-3 feet below where the infected branches are since the bacteria move ahead of the visible symptoms.

Some apple varieties are less susceptible to blight than others.  Unfortunately, many of the varieties you all love to eat are susceptible – Gala, Honeycrisp, Jonagold, Fuji, Esopus Spitzenberg… We have a block of Jonathon trees right now that are twenty-one years old that are dessimated due to fire blight.  Our crew is in the process of cutting out years and years of growth in these trees to save them. After each cut they have to disinfect the saws and shears so they don’t accidentally spread the bacteria with the tools.  It is pretty depressing to have an old block of trees where years of watering, pruning, fertilizing and picking have gone into them, only to have two-thirds of the tree cut out due to fire blight.  And even then, not being sure whether that will be enough.

Leaves on the right infected with fire blight

Some years of the blight are worse than others, this year is worse.  Steve didn’t see an obvious infection period at bloom and thought we were safe.  Then a few weeks ago he started seeing leaves curl up and got a sinking feeling.  As I was out in the orchard taking photos of the trees with our daughter the other day and talking about fire blight, she looked at me and said, “Mom, I’m going inside. Seeing all these sick trees makes me sad”.

Agreed. So in parting, here is our dog, who was happily tromping about the fire blighted trees, looking for someone to play with. Thank goodness for dogs.

Today is the last day of school here in Delta County, and close to the end of harvesting wild asparagus–or “ditch weed” as it was called in our families growing up. Picking wild asparagus around the farm is a sure sign of spring. As the days warm up however, the random asparagus stands around the farm start to bolt and our weeks of eating fresh asparagus come to a close.

The growth of wild asparagus is a hallmark of early spring around the farm. We start searching out this succulent perennial plant weeks before we find the first one. Our kids have developed a keen eye for finding asparagus amidst the weeds. While most of the asparagus grows around the perimeter of the farm, water from micro sprinklers moisten the soil just enough that we find small stands of asparagus among the rows of trees.

Two nights ago, we had a predicted low of 28 degrees. This is cold for fruit buds but even more so for the 1000 or so tomato plants that had wintered in a greenhouse and were suddenly planted into two of our hoop houses that day. The predicted low earlier in the day was 30-32 degrees. That low dropped after the tomato plants were in the ground. Of course.

Steve asked a produce-grower friend if we should cover the tomatoes that night he wisely said, “Well yes, I would cover them if they were mine”.  This conversation happened at the 7:00 p.m. soccer game and with those words, the mellow evening in our near future  started to take on a different tone. On the 25 minute drive home from the game, we told our son that we’d need his help covering the tomatoes.  He was mildly enthusiastic in his reply until we returned home and he saw that his younger sister was sitting in her pajamas reading a book.

“Well, how come Adair doesn’t have to help,” he said.

“Because it’s 8:30, she’s in her pajamas and it’s her bedtime,” I said.

“But I haven’t even had dinner,” said Will.

“Neither have we,” I said as I ate cold noodles out of the pot on the stove.

“Here’s a fork,” I offered him as he hungrily growled down cold bow-tie pasta, changed out of his cleats and put on his nice Nike basketball shoes.

Minutes later, Steve, Will and I were driving out to the hoop houses along with the row cover to cover up the tomatoes.  The process of covering tomatoes goes more smoothly the more people you have.  The row cover is not heavy, though cumbersome due to its width, which is 45 feet across and 100 feet in length.  It’s kind of like a tea towel on steroids. Did I mention that it was dark by this time?

There we were, pulling the row cover up and over the tomatoes, trying not to crush them as we sheltered them for the night ahead.  The tomato rows were wet and muddy from being watered in after they were planted.  This resulted in me getting stuck almost to my knee in mud which required Will’s assistance to dislodge me from my mucky place among the tomatoes.  The effort of becoming unstuck, unrolling yards and yards of fabric and attempting to do this all rather quickly warmed up our bodies in the cold of the hoop house.  At one point I looked up at the sky through the plastic covering the hoops, and could see the sliver of a new moon and bright stars above.  It was beautiful even with sweat dripping down my back.

We lost between 30-40% of the tomatoes that were covered that night.  Many more plants would have been lost had we not spent the hour it took to protect those rows of tomatoes.  More importantly however, was our son’s comment as we returned to the house,

“Well, that was a good hour of work”, he said.  All griping from earlier, forgotten. These are some of the family moments that I appreciate that come from living on a farm.  Sometimes–a lot of time–you have to do something you don’t want to do.  You’re tired, hungry and cold.  You don’t want to go out into the cold again but you need to.  It is a choice, a rather simple one at that.  You spend an hour, or three, putting some muscle into increasing the odds that the crop you just planted will live.  What a great lesson for a 12 year-old to learn, all on his own.

A number of people have asked us if the warmer weather we’ve had is a problem for the trees. As in, will the trees bloom early if this warmth continues? This is a great question and what follows is a primer on degree days or, What Makes A Fruit Tree Happy.

Most fruit trees need a certain amount of chilling units during the winter before they progress into bloom at spring. I kind of think of this as the “dormancy” time for a tree.  They’re just kind of hanging out, soaking up the moisture of the rain or snow, looking at their neighbors and hoping their bark isn’t eaten by errant deer or hungry mice. The trees need to “bank” a certain amount of chilling units.  There are models we can follow to tell us how many chilling units peaches and apples have accumulated, but since we can’t control the weather, these models mostly act as a guide.  Researchers have shown that the highest (or fastest) temperature to accumulate chilling units is between 40-43 degrees.  Ironically, it’s not necessarily the coldest temperature that wins the race –when it drops below the 20’s, the trees stop accumulating chilling units and just hunker down and wait.  It is sort of like how the highest risk of hypothermia is in the 40’s.  You don’t think it is that cold except that you are thoroughly chilled.  When it is colder, you dress for it rather than ignoring how chilly it is.  This is why you’ll see peach trees growing in some Mediterranean climates like Turkey where the temperatures will fall to around the 40 degree mark in winter but not below freezing.

So, until trees get enough chilling units, they ignore warm days.  It may be warm, even hot, but they are still in the “I need chilly” mode.  But, once they have gotten their set number of chilling units in, the gloves come off and they are rarin’ to go for spring.  Each day that it is warm, they put “warm units” or degree days in the bank towards bloom.  This is a bank where there are no withdrawals.  Cold days only mean they don’t accumulate more warm units.  You don’t subtract,  just delay.  Generally our trees finish accumulating their chilling units sometime in late January to mid-February.  So, now, every warm day is a  day closer to bloom.

Peaches need fewer chilling units than do apples.  Where we’ve had a couple of weeks of warmer temperatures (which is typical for this time of year), the peach buds swell slightly.  If the temperatures cool towards a more winter-like pattern toward the end of March, this would be ideal since it delays bloom towards later in the season.  If it continues to warm as it has and doesn’t cool,  the blooms will have a free-for-all and will swell and begin to open, sensing warm weather that really won’t be here until mid-May. Then we will play cat-and-mouse with blooms beginning to open, cold nights (under 30) and running wind machines to mitigate the damage of frost on blooms.  Do you ever wonder why Steve has grey hair?  It is this cat and mouse game that controls our destiny for the year.

Once the trees have bloomed, we can also use temperatures to calculate degree days that predict harvest and to monitor insect development.  The photo shows a device we use to take temperatures and calculate how insects are developing.  Insects are cold-blooded and develop based on temperatures.  We enter the temperatures the bugs develop between and the device calculates where in their life cycle they are at.  Degree days can tell us when codling moth and twig borer will begin to fly, and even worse, mate.  That informs us when we need to begin our monitoring programs to see how many of those insects are in our orchards and then if we need to spray to supplement the control supplied by our good insects (lady bugs, lacewings, Dareocris, etc.)

For the time being, we aren’t too concerned about the warmer days.  In fact, from a human point of view, the warm sun and mild temperature is most welcome. However, if there isn’t a cool-down of temperatures within the next several weeks, we will be singing a different tune.  We have lived in Colorado long enough to know that warm temperatures don’t stay from the middle of March into June.  Once those buds move towards bloom, there is no turning back the clock, even when the Weather Service says it is going to cold again.  We can’t predict what Mother Nature will do, but we would sure like to know!  As always, stay tuned to see what Mother Nature has in store for her next chapter.

I spend a lot of time exercising in the orchard.  I go for runs, I weave my mountain bike in and out of small peach trees, I do boot camp workouts and I take our dog for walks in the dark through the tree rows.  My absolute favorite though, is cross-country skiing in the orchard.  In fact, I would rather ski in the orchard than eat peaches in the orchard.  I love orchard skiing that much.

During a good winter of snow, I can ski in the orchard 4-6 times.  My skiing goes in fits and spurts, depending on how much snow we have.  We’ve been blessed with a good 8-10 inches in the last week and I’ve been tooling around as much as I can.  Mind you, this is a different type of skiing than being on a groomed track somewhere.  Orchard skiing involves old skies that can smash through grass, the occasional hill of mud and numerous rocks that haven’t quite been covered.

It’s a quiet, peaceful way of exercising and something I wish I could do year ’round. I had planned on hitting the groomed trails up on the Grand Mesa today, but the highway is closed for avalanche control. Wonderful, for now I can go ski in the orchard without feeling compelled to ski quickly or particularly well.  Just one of the benefits of having a 100 acre yard in the winter time.

There is a belief among people that there’s not much to do around the farm during winter. While it is a slower time for us, there is still plenty to do.  The bulk of winter activity revolves around catching up on book work, Steve attending meetings and of course, pruning.

The primary goal of pruning is to manage sunlight on the tree. Trees are solar collectors and pruning helps manage where the sun is collected, which in turn dictates the crop load (in addition to water and weather). We have about 35,000 trees, and every single one of them must be pruned.  Every tree, every year. This is a job that takes 5 months to complete for a crew of three to four people.  Our guys start pruning in late November, after irrigation lines have been put to rest and the farm cleaned up. They prune five days a week, eight hours a day.  It is not a job for the weary as the majority of the work is atop a ladder, holding pruning shears above one’s head in cold weather. It’s fun to do for about four hours.  After that, it becomes hard work.

We start with pruning pears, then work through apples, cherries, plums, and finally peaches.  Why this order?  There are several reasons, the first of which is the potential for winter damage.  All our trees naturally go dormant and develop hardiness as fall and winter progress. Pears and apples are very hardy, meaning that they go into dormancy quickly and can survive very low winter temperatures.  Ever stop to think why pears and apples are grown in the upper Midwest, but not peaches?  That is the reason – peaches die in those super cold temperatures they have.   When we prune trees, we wake them up a bit.  They lose some of that hardiness and are more susceptible to cold temperatures for a while.  Pears and apples are so tough, that even though they “wake up” a bit, they are still very resistant to cold.  Peaches, not so much.  So, we let them sleep until the warmer temperatures of spring.

Secondly, depending on the time of year you prune a tree, you get a different growth response.  A cut made on an apple or pear in winter will cause a vigorous response – regrowth of new, succulent limbs.  That same cut made after they start to green up, will cause a much calmer response.  That cut made in the summer may cause no response.  Just like teenagers, trees operate on hormones and those cuts cause different hormone responses at different times.  Generally, we want a vigorous response, so we prune apple and pear trees in the winter.  But, if we have trees that are too vigorous, we will wait.  Peaches don’t show this same marked response difference, so we can wait and prune them later, when we can see those swelling buds. Then we can use our pruning to adjust the potential crop on the trees.

For all the science, pruning is still an art form.  You would think that after thousands of years of pruning trees, that people would finally have it down.  But, ask any grower about how they prune and you will likely get a different answer from each person.  All trees are not alike and each variety behaves differently as well.  Throw in the fact that all growers have their own little quirks, and, art emerges over science.   Besides, every grower needs some coffee time with other growers to talk about something – they might as well argue and debate over pruning rather than politics.  But, pruning is safer and unlike politics, you have something to show for it at the end of the day!

During the first week of January, Steve and I headed to Portland where Steve attended the Orchard Pest and Disease and Management Conference (affectionately known as “the bug meeting”).  Steve has gone to this conference as long as I have known him.  Yep,16-17 years worth of information and knowledge about bugs, or to give them a fair place in the crowd, “insects”. After a 16-year love affair with insects and having Steve return home, touting the marvels of Portland, it was high time for me to see what all the hubub was about.

There are a handful of devastating things that can radically alter an otherwise optimistic crop.  One is the weather (spring frost), another is labor (lack of it), the market (supply and demand) and then, there are insects. Beneficial insects that we like to see on the farm are: lacewings, Deraeocoris, Typhlodromus, praying mantis, and lady bugs.  Insects that we don’t like to see are: codling moth (known for their exceptional ability to make worms in apples), twig borer (known for their exceptional ability to make worms in peaches), peach tree borer (known for its exceptional ability to make worms in peach TREES), earwigs (known for its exceptional ability to make holes in ripe peaches).  There are also new invasive insects that have not yet found their way to Colorado. If and when they do, we need to learn how to manage those insects too.

But back to the bug meeting.  These meetings bring national and international researchers together to compare notes on good and bad bugs that affect fruit trees.  Rather than long lectures, each presenter gives a fifteen minute synopsis of their most current research – really the state of the art in fruit bugs.  Sometimes talks are controversial and researchers disagree with each other, sometimes they give each other a hard time, sometimes they cross their antennae and square off, but mostly it is a chance to share and collaborate, both in the meetings and over yeast fermented beverages and dinner.  And, geeky bug humor, oh my, probably not appropriate for the dinner table but certainly appropriate for the cocktails.

For Steve, this is a chance to learn the newest ideas in promoting all those good bugs and controlling those bad bugs that we see in our orchard system.  The challenge in an organic system is to minimize the bad bugs while protecting the beneficial ones.  Since Colorado is a relatively isolated fruit production area, it’s a way to shore up relationships that can be useful in the midst of the season when insect surprises pop up.  It is a chance to hob knob and speculate as to what the best organic pest management system might be for our area.  When Steve gives tours on the farm and says that our insect management programs rely on research from the last fifteen years, this is where he gets lots of that information.

Meanwhile, I was doing my own research. I was checking out Portland, spending as much time in Starbucks as I wanted, visiting Powell’s bookstore as long as I wanted, eating great food and taking in a little culture.  I was pleasantly rewarded with my endeavor of being a tourist-without-her-children-and-her-husband-in-a-meeting-all-day. Here’s what my research found: (1) Lots, and I mean lots of people smoke in Portland. Wow, it blew me away~felt like I was in Paris. (2) If you want cool vintage clothing stores, go to Portland (3) The official color spectrum of clothing in Portland are as follows… heather gray, charcoal, dorian and black.  In Colorado, our jackets are colorful–cobalt blue and chartreuse green down jackets (maybe it has something to do with the sky here???). Not so in Portland.  The people though unfazed by the dreary gray, were friendly, helpful and lovely.  The scene and aliveness that being in a city affords was a welcome change.

And nary a bug in sight.

I was out for a walk yesterday afternoon and saw this little vision flit off to my right. At first I thought it was a dog. With horns. Despite the beauty of this buck, my first inclination was to scare it away. Deer in the orchard are bad news. They eat branches and chew bark off the trees. They’ve been known to snap smaller fruit trees in two. One or two deer can damage a good number of trees during their little orchard run.

We have almost 2 miles of 8′ high deer fence around our entire farm. The fence is topped off with barbed wire, just to liven things up for jumping deer. Even with this, we often have deer in the orchard for days at a time during fall and winter. They’ll jump the fence, walk through a gate that has been left open or take the less Darwinian approach and stroll up our driveway. Yes, we do have a good solid fence around the perimeter of the farm, but having a wide open driveway is kind of like asking your teenage kid not to sneak out, then leaving a ladder by their window, the keys in the ignition, a full tank of gas and a $20 on the drivers seat with a note saying, “I’ll make sure a hot breakfast is waiting for you when you sneak back in”. True, we want the deer population to remain outside the farm but tend not to get too clanked when one or two breeze in for a reprieve from the mountains.  Or wherever they’re going.

It is a sight to marvel at though, walking on a quiet Friday evening, seeing the fauna and realizing what a beautiful place this farm is, the fall colors, the snow on the mountains and this buck, whom slowly walks away from me down the road.

We finished picking today. When I say “we”, I mean our crew.  The last of our Granny Smith apples were loaded into bins like the one in this photo and are now in our cooler, waiting to be packed on Monday.  The end of harvest is usually a quiet endeavor.  When I first lived here and experienced my first harvest season, I thought that the last apple picked, last ladder put away, last bin stacked would come with fireworks, hoots of joy and maybe even uncorking a little bubbly. Instead, the last apple picked happens on a Saturday morning, or late on a Tuesday afternoon or hurriedly before a freezing cold night.

What I realize now, is that the end of harvest comes with a quiet solitude.  With a cobalt blue sky, peach leaves turning green-gold, orchard grass matted underfoot and a few brave thistle weeds making their last presence known.  The end of harvest means our crew will leave within 48 hours, packing their few belongings and looking for work where the nights and days stay warm.  The end of harvest means giving the trees their last gulp of water before winter and draining the irrigation system.  It means picking up, cleaning up and clearing out.

There are bills to pay, expenses to count, food safety logs to record.  There are pallets to stack, cardboard to recycle and propane tanks to fill.  But for two or three days, there is a quiet peace and fulfillment that comes with knowing that we’ve made it through another fruit season.  It may not have been the best one, or the worst one but it’s another one for the books.  Another season we can say, “Do you remember in 2013 when the apples were so short?” Or, “…yeah, that’s the year we built the new shed”, or “Remember when you went to the markets that weekend and you had pneumonia?”

It’s remarkable to look back at what happens during the course of a year on a farm. Time to breathe a sigh and look ahead to what needs to happen to put everything to rest for a short time before it all begins anew.  And that time will be here before we know it.

Friday night we had our first frost of the season.  While this is always an event that I’m not quite ready for, it does allow for one of our favorite fall activities: Garden Baseball.

True, one can play garden baseball anytime of the summer, providing you have produce going to the birds (or raccoons), but once the produce has frozen in the garden, there’s a unique mushiness that not only is a little gross to touch, it’s really gross to pitch.  And even grosser to hit.

Tomatoes are the favorite.  Really messy to pitch, but they make a great satisfying “whhhaaacckk” when they’re hit.  Not to mention that everyone in a 15′ radius gets  sprayed with rotten tomato.  We also recommend bell peppers, tomatillos and lemon cucumbers (almost like batting the real thing).  Sunflower stalks make great bats.  In a pitch, you can use an old garden stake the one above.

Old grungy clothes are a must, because you never know when that tomato will split open upon impact and spray seeds and juice all over your clothes.

You just never know what fun Indian summer days can bring…

If you aren’t a farmer, or if you don’t work on a farm you may not know how much a farmer walks. Like all good modern farmers, we have an ATV or two, errant bicycles, tractors and several trucks to get us around our 100 acre orchard. At the end of the day however, it’s our feet–or Steve’s feet– that largely propel him around the farm.

And how much walking is that?  Well, who can say exactly, but the miles add up. It’s 100 yards from our house to the shed, 50 yards from the house to the office.  A walk to the orchard to check on the crew will incur a mile.  All of this walking happens multiple times a day, weeks upon weeks throughout the year.  Not given to wearing a pedometer on his waistband to keep track of the daily steps, Steve tends to know how much he’s walked based on his trusty Danner boots (see above photo).

For those of you who’ve not had the honor of purchasing Danner boots, you may be surprised at the hefty price tag that accompanies them.  That being said, these boots are well worth the money and miles they travel.  Hand crafted in Portland, Oregon the Danner Mountain Light II has become the boot of choice for Steve. He’s is now working through his fifth pair.  They keep fit his narrow foot, they keep his feet dry in the irrigation water, and they keep the cheat grass seeds that hook into everything, well, unable to hook into his socks.

Generally, Steve will wait to purchase a new pair until the leather has cracked, the tread has worn smooth and the heal has worn through the sole and ground itself into a cant. Then, he’ll continue to wear the old pair around until irrigation water or snow seeps into the Gore-Tex split open by the cracked leather or he needs more traction on snowy October roads as puts on truck chains.  The new Danner’s purchased after much contemplation will “go out on the town”–these are the one’s you may see him wearing at the farmers markets or to dinner at The Kitchen.

How long do these boots last?  The average Danner boot on Steve’s foot will last between two to three years.  Not bad, you may say.  My brother has this same pair of boots.  And he’s had them for fifteen years – at the rate he’s going they will last another fifteen.  True, my brother is not hanging off of a semi trailer unloading cases of fruit on his tiptoes.  Nor is he wearing his boots for 24 hours at a time. But if he were, he would pull his Danner boots out of the back of his tidy closet and put them on with a smile, knowing that these boots are the 2011 National Geographic Gear of the Year winner and …are Made for Walkin’.

Many people ask us, what makes your peaches so sweet and juicy?  The biggest reason we are able to bring authentic tree ripened fruit to our customers is that we don’t pick our fruit when it’s still green.

This peach if picked at this stage, might ripen, but would be flavorless and mealy.

This peach is beginning to ripen. The background color (the color on the back side of the peach opposite the reddest side) has broken from a greenish-yellow to more of a yellow-orange hue.  Our crew only picks the peaches when the background color breaks to this orangish color.  If they mistakenly pick a green peach, it gets thrown away because it will never be a great tasting peach.  Many things go into ripening the fruit~mostly heat and sun.

This peach is at a stage many people pick for shipping and sending to grocery stores.  It is  firm enough to withstand the jostling of being in a semi-trailer full of its brethren.  However, this still needs to ripen for at least 2-3 days before it’s eaten.  The background color is yellowish, but still has that green hue.  This peach will “keep” well.  But, peaches that look like this can be the kind we find in the grocery stores, take them home to eat and are disappointed because they don’t taste like anything.

Now these are the ripened beauties we love to see.  No hints of green, just beautiful orangish, yellow color.  The difference between these peaches and the one above can sometimes be two days on the tree, but if it is hot it they can sometimes change in an afternoon.  We pick each variety four to five times so that in each picking we can select only those peaches that are ready.

Once the peaches are this color, we sort them by softness.  Firm peaches go wholesale to stores or farm stands that buy our fruit to resell.  Many of those stores like to label where the peaches come from and they proudly put our name on the display.  They need a peach that, if kept cold, can store for a few days, is firm enough to be on the store shelf without bruising, but that will ripen perfectly once it is taken home by a customer.  Conversely, if the peaches are just starting to soften, we sort them for our farmers markets.  We can hand deliver those peaches to you and they don’t need to sit on a shelf.  They just need a home and to be eaten!

The Harvest Games have officially begun here at the farm.  Translation: We’ve started picking peaches.  With no cherries this year due to the crop being frozen out by spring frosts, peaches are the first crop that we’re picking.  The variety we’re picking now is called “Risingstar”.  This is a relatively new variety for us as we planted these trees nine years ago, knowing that we’d want an early season peach to sell at the farmers markets. It’s true that nine years doesn’t some seem “new”.  When it comes to growing tree fruit, planning ahead (sometimes a decade out) is essential.

It does feel a little strange picking peaches in July~not unlike going into the grocery store the day after Christmas and see Cadbury’s Easter candy. Nonetheless, as I do enjoy a Cadbury’s Easter egg in January, I really enjoy a peach in July. As we pick these early variety of peaches, we have one to two more weeks before the madness of harvest will  envelop us.  That means several more evenings of entertaining friends, going out for a hike or two and possibly even camping on the weekend.  Once we get into full-fledged harvest, those activities are off the table until November.  The flip side is that we’ll have a bounty of peaches, heirloom tomatoes, apples and pears for a good long while.

So here’s to peaches in July.  We’ll see what the Games bring this year!

Every year, we graft apple trees.  The reason for this is to change/add/increase a variety to our apple repetoire. Grafting is a quicker way to get apples into production than planting baby trees. This year we are grafting around 2000 apple trees. Esopus Spitzenberg will be grafted onto Jonagolds and Empire apples will be grafted onto Braeburns. Never fear, we still have other Jonagoldand Braeburn apples that we’ll bring to market.

Below is a tutorial on how we graft.

The trees we’ll be grafting onto have already been cut off to about five feet during the winter.  Steve then let’s the chainsaw rip and chops off the top 16-18″ of the tree. This is a little shocking to watch.

These little sticks are called “scion wood” and were collected in late February from Esopus Spitzenberg trees that we have in the orchard.  The scion wood is cut into a thin wedge which will be inserted between the bark and the cambian layer of the tree. It helps to wear a purple shirt.

Steve then takes a very sharp knife and cuts the bark to the cambian layer. The bark merely slips back and the scion wood wedge is inserted between the bark and heartwood. The cells from the existing tree will then knit with the cells of this little “branch” and it will start to grow. It is a simple yet fascinating process.Here are two little pieces of scion wood. In 3-4 years, they will produce Esopus Spitzenberg apples.Dessication is the biggest threat to scion wood taking hold and growing.  We want to minimize any air that can get into the cambian layer. If a piece of scion dries out, it will die and there goes your future apple-producing branch.  We wrap the bark and scion wood with electrical tape.Then, we insert grafting wax and press it into any holes that may let air reach the scion wood.We paint the tops of the scion wood and the top of the stump with latex paint.  Any color will do.

Then we wait for a year.

This is a successful graft done last May. Four pieces of scion wood were introduced into this Breaburn tree.  Now there are eight branches and leaves are budding out on this tree. In a couple of weeks, we’ll take these branches and braid them together for strength.

This tree was grafted about six years ago.  You can see how the braided branches have grown together.  This tree was a Golden Supreme tree and now produces Honeycrisp apples. Yum!

Grafting is kind of like surgery.  Without the scrubs or anesthesia.  It’s much cheaper, too.  And the view is better.  Plus, how many surgeons get to eat the fruits of their labor?

Fruit farms in our neck of the woods have their own season.  It’s called “frost season”, aptly named because this is the season when the temperatures warm up, the fruit buds begin to bloom and any night, freezing temperatures can eliminate a good portion of a fruit crop.  Frost season generally begins at the end of March and goes anywhere to mid to late May. We’ve had frost as late as Memorial Day, which happened to be…our wedding. In another town.  Fortunately, we had neighbors who promised to start our wind machines if needed that night since we were celebrating.

We have twelve wind machines spread throughout our 100 acre farm.  A wind machine is tall hulk of a metal tower, fifteen foot propeller and a Chevy propane fired industrial engine that lights up the night with noise and wind.  On a cold, clear night our earth is trying to heat outer space.  As it does so, warm air rises and cold air sinks, creating a temperature inversion.  That means it is warmer fifty feet above the ground than it is down at ground level.  The job of a wind machine is to mix that warm air down into the cold air around the fruit buds and keep those buds from freezing.  Now, when I say that machine mixes air, we mean it mixes air.  It can move a strong wind across nearly ten acres and sounds like a helicopter hovering over the house.

On a snowy, cloudy night no inversion develops and the machines sit quiet and ready in case the sky clears.  If it does, wind machines are profoundly helpful as they can raise the temperature around the trees from one to three degrees.  That can be the difference between having a crop of fruit or not. For the record: A tree with a 10% crop of fruit buds is what we want on the tree, otherwise there will be too many fruits and they will all be small.   Only 10% of the original buds will be enough fruit for a full crop.  However!  As farmers tend to not have much control in their work, they want to make sure that 10% is where they want it on the tree.  Not all at the top or all on one side as Mother Nature will dictate.  And, certainly not less than 10%.

When Steve and I were first dating, I was mystified with how all this worked (plus I was head over heels and couldn’t miss a MOMENT with him) so I would eagerly trundle out of bed in the middle of the night to help start the machines.  Now….things have changed ever so slightly.  Now I say, “I hope it goes well tonight” and promptly fall back asleep.  I do love awakening to the sound of the whack-whack-whack of the wind machines.  It feels like Steve is out there taking care of his babies. All 35,000 of them.

Wind machines are loud.  Have I already said this?  Loud as in…is this what it sounded like in Vietnam-loud?  As is, our son saying, ” I couldn’t sleep because of the wind machines last night” or as in our daughter saying, “I fell asleep once all the machines were on…the noise makes me feel peaceful”. As in, many of the neighbors saying, “So, you ran your wind machines last night”? As in, a silence that seems to throb through the earth when they are turned off.  Quickly to be replaced with the thought of, “I hope spending all this money on propane was worth it”.

In a good year, we’ll run the wind machines four or five times. In one bad frost year, we ran them twenty-two nights in April and May.  Some years, we run them in the dead of winter because the temperatures are cold enough to kill even the dormant peach buds.  This was the case this winter.  So far this spring, Steve has run the machines four times.  Two weekends ago we had record-setting lows in the 10 degree region.  We continue to watch the weather forecast, stick close to home and hope we get more westerly fronts (those mean moisture) than arctic blasts from Canada (those mean brrrrrr). I’ll let you know how it turns out, and hope that we won’t be running wind machines on our anniversary.

Things are beginning to warm up here on the farm. The icicles are gone. Now that most of the snow has melted off the lawn, we can see the plastic, foil and coffee filters our dog has deposited over the last four months.  Our twelve wind machines have been serviced and are ready for frost season.  CSA information has been sent out and the Say’s Phoebe that nests under our dormer has returned. We are sweeping out coolers waiting for the arrival of new trees and scion weed is being cut for grafting. The quiet of winter is punctuated with the call of red winged black birds and early-rising roosters. Our kids are riding their bikes in shorts and flip flops and it seems the sap has ceased to run in our maple tree by the road. The quack grass is returning and the smell of smoke from burn piles is in the air.  We are keeping watch on the state snowpack level as we only sparingly had enough water for our trees last season. We are 77% of average for snowpack at the moment.  March tends to be the snowiest month in the high country in Colorado, so we are keeping our fingers crossed that more storms will blanket the mountains.
As for me, I’m not quite ready to let go of winter.  I enjoy the quietness that blankets the orchard and will miss the rhythm of snow, grayish light and absolute stillness.  Stillness rarely lasts on a farm for long.

This is a bit after the fact, but every so often I (Steve) get to post on the blog.  Now, it might be hard to believe this, but I wrote Santa Claus a letter this year asking for just one thing – a new orange tractor.  Some farmers are “brand loyal” and only buy one color of tractor.  We’ve never been that way and have had more of a nondenominational philosophy.  We have Old Green (John Deere), Old Blue (Ford), New Blue (Landini), and in the past have had a few Reds (Massey Ferguson).  It only seemed right to ask Santa for an Orange Kubota to round out the rainbow.

Given this cadre of tractors, why ask Santa for a new one?  Well, first the average age of our tractor fleet exceeds twenty years.  We don’t coddle our tractors and we expect them to work and work hard.  Most of all we need them to work when we need them.  When fields need tilled and planted, we need it done now.  When sprays need to be applied, timing is critical.  Then there is brush to chop, grass to mow, fruit to pick and things to move around.  Down time is expensive and frustrating.

To minimize downtime we try to do a lot of preventive tractor care in the winter.  Last year we took Old Green in for an annual checkup and got all the leaks, groans, aches and sparks fixed and overhauled.  So, imagine my distress when less than thirty hours of use later, the engine spun a main bearing, made unpleasant screeching noises, and up and died.  Down one tractor.  Then Old Blues’ brakes went out.  I grew up driving tractors without brakes and learned the fine art of dropping the rear implement as an anchor to stop when needed.  But, that probably isn’t so good for our employees or for the integrity of our buildings and trees.  Down two.  One left.  Fortunately New Blue helped pull us through despite several electrical and hydraulic issues.  We were able to lease another Blue from a neighbor to get through the season.  But with two tractors in the hospital I decided it was time to put pen to paper and write to Santa.

Imagine my delight on Christmas morning when I came down the stairs and there was an orange Christmas present under the tree.  I don’t know how Santa got that thing down the chimney with nary a scratch or broken hydraulic hose.  Then reality set in – how do we get this out the door?  Santa has his magic and I’ve read all those books, so why not try the same thing.  I put a finger beside my nose, winked, and out the door the tractor rose.  Wow!  That new tractor landed in our shed and has been used to push snow while the other tractors are going through rehab.  It starts when it is cold, everything works and it is fun to drive.  It’s real workout will start this spring with brush chopping, plowing the ground for the new 3000 trees, and spring sprays.  I’m looking forward to having a new color around.

This winter, Old Green is getting a “new” engine and Old Blue has new brakes. We are going to let New Orange shoulder the hard work and let the elder tractors do the easier things.  The best part?  As I am out plowing snow and the engine heats up, it has that new tractor smell!

Pruning has begun.  In truth, pruning began in November, about when the last apple was picked. We have about 35,000 trees on the farm and every tree has to be pruned every year. I believe there is a notion out there that fruit farmers have”down time” in the winter.  Compared with the barely managed chaos of harvest, winter does seem a little like “down time”.  However, pruning 35,000 trees takes time–and not much of that time can be “down” if we want to get our trees pruned before bloom time begins in the spring.

We have a crew of four guys this year who march out into the orchard no matter sun, rain, or snow, and prune for 8 hours a day.  I think of pruning as great training for lifting heavy boxes of fruit as most pruning is done above one’s head. I’m not sure our guys see it that way…

The goal of pruning is to maximize the amount of sun intercepted by the tree. Trees are handy in that they can convert sunlight into energy and then use that energy to produce fruit.  We think of our fruit trees as great solar collectors.  We prune to maximize the sunlight hitting all parts of the tree and also to balance the amount of fruit with the ability of the tree to hold all that fruit up.  We need young vigorous wood to grow fruit and old mature wood to hold up the tree.  Too much old wood and you create shade without enough fruiting area.  Too much young wood and the tree falls over.

Put another way, trees are kind of like people.  I think of young, new wood as Kindergartners;  they’re a little bit short and unfocused and have lots of energy.  They can be hard to manage, but without that wood in the tree, there is no youth that can later grow up.  As these branches get another year older, they become the young strapping kids that are strong and energetic and willing to take on the world.  Those are the limbs we want to grow fruit on.  Later, those strapping kids slow down (they also tend to get larger around the middle) and get aches and pains and don’t want to work so hard.  Now, this may be hard to hear for all us middle agers out there, but in a tree, those limbs get cut out so that new Kindergartners can regrow.  Take heart, however, we keep a few middle agers because they have the wisdom to support the rest of the tree.  Too much wisdom and there aren’t any young kids.  Too many young kids and there is just chaos.  Balance is always a good thing.

Just like people, every fruit and even every variety has their own personality.  Some trees are naturally tall and gangly, others short and compact and everything in between.  Trees have been pruned for thousands of years, but put any two growers together with a pair of shears and you will come up with two different opinions about how to raise those kids.  We all know the science, but raising kids is also an art where you respond to each different personality – that includes the character of the tree as well as the character of the grower!  We prune pears first, then apples, then we wrap up with cherries, plums and peaches.  By the time the end of pruning season, the weather will warm and spring bloom will be in our sights. Then it will be on to frost season~a time when all bets are off.  So the next time you’re walking into your office, or apartment or wherever you may be, just think…this could be you…and you’d have really strong shoulders…

Since my last post, I have ushered in a new year, lazed on the beach in Costa Rica, baked a lot of Christmas cookies and felt the cold settle in.  And my, has it ever settled.  Last night we had a low of -11 and a high of -1.  When you’re dealing with temperatures in the negatives, it just all feels well…cold. Steve ran our wind machines last night to keep the dormant peach fruit buds from winter-killing.  Translation: A man made effort to trick Mother Nature’s peach buds (this springs blossoms) from dying from the cold.  Running wind machines is a task usually left for spring bloom.  This year the task begins early.

It’s cold enough that my nose hairs freeze and I cough upon inhalation when I walk out the door.  It’s cold enough that I worry about our “girth-enhanced” Australian Shepherd being outside.  The water for the animals freezes within 5 minutes and the fruit cooler doors are frozen shut.  It’s warmer when I walk into our 15X20′ freezer than being outside. Thankfully, Steve got our 1920’s single-paned house windows covered a few days ago and while it has a  feel of the “Walton’s”, our upstairs is warmer.  Perhaps the “Walton’s” didn’t have plastic?  It’s cold enough that I’m pleading with my kids to wear socks to school and telling my son to pull up his jacket hood, hopeful that the word “frostbite” will provide some leverage.

At the moment, Steve is plowing the roads around the orchard so the propane truck can fill our 250 gallon propane tanks in case the wind machines need to be run again tonight.  Of course, plowing the roads meant starting the tractor.  When he started the tractor he realized that it was cold enough to make the diesel fuel turn from liquid to jello.  Tractors don’t do so well when run on jello diesel.  Did I mention the snow?  Yes, we have that, too.  If it’s going to be cold, I’m thankful there’s snow to go with it. At least the snow provides a sense of winter and the idea that we can ski, or make snowmen, or build ice forts.  None of which we are doing, by the way.  Because…my nose hairs are freezing.

It’s true.  I had all these grand expectations about how I was going to blog and blog and blog through the harvest season because there are so many things to write about.  Here it is, post election and I’ve not written for 2 months.  How did that happen?

Every year, the harvest season becomes a blur of chaos.  Of one crisis after another.  There’s one of the tractors breaking down, there’s the news that the processor who was making our applesauce let us know that they would no longer be making our applesauce.  Really?  That would have been nice to know in May, not September.  There’s the day where we run out of boxes, then the day where we ran out of staples to make the boxes, then the day we ran out of tape to make the boxes.  There’s the weeks of too much bruised fruit getting rejected on the receiving end.

There’s me getting West Nile virus, obliterating most of September.  There’s Steve holding down the farm, home and kids while I sleep, sleep, then sleep some more. There’s our dog, still stealing our Burmese staff’s food.  There’s the apple packing line breaking down in the middle of the day and the fruit gift packs sent to wrong addresses.  Amidst all this there are school lunches to make, soccer practice to drive to, dishwashers to empty and laundry to wash.

There are happy customers, and unhappy customers.  There’s happy staff, and unhappy staff.  There’s blazing sun and dripping rain, though entirely not enough rain.  There’s apples to pick and pick and pick…so many apples that we wonder if they will get picked before they freeze on the trees.  We barely make it, the final apples coming off the trees after several nights of 19 degrees.

And now…yes..what now?  Now we clean up and pick up.  We drain irrigation lines, plant crop covers in the tomato hoop houses and we start to breathe again. We go to school conferences and play games with our kids at night.  We go on vacation and learn to be a family again.  We catch up on sleep and spend more than 20 minutes making dinner. We look around at everything this small family farm does and slowly exhale.  We make plans of how to do it differently–better–next year.  With less stress, we hope.  We are grateful for the bounty of crop we had this year and hope that Mother Nature will be kind in her spring arrival.

Then, we go out to the cooler, fill up bags of plums, pears and apples, sit in front of the fire, and…eat.

We have finished picking peaches here, always a welcome day on the farm, celebrated with donuts for the crew and a collective sigh.  While peaches are great no doubt, they are persnickety, touchy and require great care. Now we are full swing in apples, apples, apples, pears, plums and heirloom tomatoes.
We grow twenty-two varieties of apples, approximately 30 acres (and somewhere around 18,000 apple trees, if you’re counting). We start picking our Gala apples around Labor Day–or earlier as Mother Nature requires–and pick strong until the end of October with Braeburns and Fujis.  Over the years, we started growing heirloom apple varieties, as customers have asked for them at our farmers markets.  If you aren’t familiar with some of the heirloom varieties, consider these: Ashmead’s Kernel, Karminjen Sonneville, Pitmaston Pineapple, and my favorite~ Esopus Spitzenburg.  Sometimes I think we grow these simply because their names are so fun to say!
I love apples.  I love how they look.  I love how they feel in your hand.  I love how they taste when you bite into one.  I love throwing the core into the orchard and I love smashing a big ol’ apple on the ground so my dog can eat it. I love making applesauce and apple cake and apple dumplings.  Don’t tell my husband this, but I love apples more than I love…peaches. I love that you can put an apple in a lunchbox and it doesn’t smash.  I love that you can put an apple in the front seat of the car in the heat All Day and it doesn’t ooze all over the seat. I love that kids can loose their teeth eating an apple.  The Tooth Fairy loves apple, too.
And how do they taste?  Oh My. I recently described a Gala apple as having hints of banana and pineapple to a friend. He’s a serious wine guy, so of course made the jump from how I was describing the taste of an apple, to the flavor of wine.  It got me thinking…how do you describe the taste of an apple? When I bite into a Gala, I taste fall, always.  A Gala to me, is a taste that epitomizes the waning of summer with the promise of a glorious fall. A Golden Supreme apple is like a soft taste of fresh cream with a hint of sweetness.  The tart of a Jonathon makes my mouth water and immediately I think of my Mom’s caramel apples. Sooooo good. And that Esopus Spitzenburg?  Like a spritz of tart on the front of your tongue, followed by honeyed sweet that sits in your mouth.  Speaking of honey, what about a HoneyCrisp?  The wonderful “new” apple that is turning people on to eating apples again. Now that’s an apple that tastes like honey.
So as you eat an apple this season, think about how it tastes and how you would describe it.  Let me know~ I’d love to hear!

There are many important farm implements, and at this time of year, perhaps none so important as a forklift.  And like one’s health, you don’t really appreciate how dear it is until it’s not working so well.
We use our forklift almost as much as we use oxygen around here.  It is not uncommon to move 20 pallets around (that’s about 36,000 pounds of fruit), 20 bins of fruit (another 16,000 pounds) and when the spirit is really moving us, our dog (not really, but what a great visual that is!). We use the forklift to load pallets into our semi, to move bins of fruit from our packing shed into our coolers, to move pallets of boxes around…you name it, if there’s heavy moving to do, the forklift is our Johnny On The Spot.  Imagine then, the challenges when the forklift is in the sick bay, as was the case last week.
I called Steve at noon on Wednesday, overall a pretty nutty day on the farm, and I thought that a little “How’s hump day going?” cheer might be just what was needed.  I was greeted with a litany of farm issues, the most notable being that “…the forklift left a trail of leaking goo on the ground, was over heating and could only be used for two minutes at a time and then had to cool off for an hour.” Which would be fine if it was say, December.  However at the height of harvest a leaking, overheating forklift may not be the worst thing, but it sure feels like it.
At dinner that night, we were doing our best to problem-solve the barely-working forklift.  Our son asked, “What about Bill and Linda?  Do they have a forklift?”
“No.”
“How about David.”
“No, He doesn’t have one either.”
“What about the Wilson’s?  Don’t they have one?”
“Who?  We are the only people on the mesa who have a forklift”, Steve says.
Our daughter says, “How about borrowing one from Delicious Orchards?”
“A great idea, however, they are fifteen miles away and I don’t think we’ll be driving a forklift down highway 92.”
“Well, it’s good we still have our old forklift”, says our son.
Silence.  And then Steve leaves for what seems like the fifth time since dinner to load up another pallet of fruit onto the semi in the two minutes before the forklift overheats.
The next morning, Steve goes out to find out if the old forklift, nicknamed The Orange Beast, is even a viable option.  There were good reasons it was retired in favor of the “new” lift.  The key is gone.  The battery is dead.  There are two flat tires.  Best of all, it’s buried beneath farm equipment that’s heavy enough to be moved with, you guessed it…a forklift. Seven hours later, the old orange forklift is puttering slowly, with hardly a clutch or steering, but oh-so-thankfully placing one bin of fruit at a time on the packing line.
Thank goodness for our local repairperson, Craig and his Dad (think ZZ Top lead singer and one of the Lawrence Welk guys).   They putter, tinker and diagnose a seized water pump on the forklift. Forty-eight hours later, the forklift is working, Old Orange is sitting in front of the packing shed where it will stay, and for a short while, one crisis is mitigated.

I believe that the best way to understand any type of agriculture is to live through an entire harvest season–lambing season or haying season or any agriculture season–all of it.  Not visit, or stop by for the afternoon, I mean live harvest for a season. Harvest for us is the intense, chaotic, frustrating, and sleepless time where we make our annual income in the period of three months.  Harvest is it’s own life force.  Harvest takes what you know to be your regular life, strips it away and leaves you with a hollow-eyed husband and millions of pounds of great tasting fruit in your coolers.  Or kitchens.  Or driveway, when the coolers and kitchens are brimming.
Take this week:  Harvest has been underway now for a good month.  The next couple of weeks however,  the peaches, plums, apples, pears ripen at the same time.  We had two weeks of busier than normal activity around here and were hoping (ha!) that things might back down a notch.  Then we had the unexpected visitor en route from the Telluride Mushroom Festival who needed a place to stay for a couple of nights.  Then we spilled a pallet of wholesale # 1 peaches (the cream of the crop) onto the ground and lost those boxes of fruit.  Yesterday the fork lift started behaving badly by overheating, which is not really something you’d sign of for when you’re moving thousands of pounds of fruit everyday. We have pallets of peaches going out on delivery trucks, customers coming by to purchase fruit, and a dog who jumps on everyone. We sent out a good number of peach gifts packs at the beginning of the week, which is great…but I missed the UPS delivery truck and ended up driving them 45 miles round trip to the nearest UPS store.  I could go on, but this is just a glance into the “romantic world of farming” as a friend tells me.
Now this is the lovely part of harvest: Peaches…more than we can eat, everywhere. Motivated staff who work as hard as we do, knowing that this is the time of year where everyone buckles down and puts their nose to the grindstone, as my Dad would say. Lovely, is sending my kids off on a bike ride through the orchard and them returning with a plum in their mouth, a peach in their hand, and an apple in their pocket.  Lovely, is Steve returning home from weekend markets with goodies from other growers with whom he trades.  Lovely, is November when we can look at the bounty of our harvest. And everything is quiet.

One of the first questions that we’ve been getting this season is, “How are things going with your water?”  There’s usually a look of concern on the face of the person asking because  there’s not much water anywhere in western Colorado this summer. A mild winter with very little early spring moisture led into a hot and dry summer.  In the last three weeks, we have received a bit of rainfall, though we are well behind previous years precipitation.  Lately, we have these threatening looking afternoon thunderheads roll through–that do nothing.  I have a family member who calls them “constipated thunderstorms” because the storms gets all backed up and then doesn’t do anything.  You get the idea…

We get our irrigation water from last winters’ snow pack on the Grand Mesa. In a nutshell, that water either runs down the creeks or is stored in reservoirs on the Grand Mesa that will be tapped into later in the summer.   In the spring we utilize the water that is naturally running down the creek.  When snowmelt ends and the creek drops, we change over to using our reservoir water.  Our ditch company diverts water from Leroux Creek and, after splitting off the water for other farms, it arrives on our doorstep.  There are at least twenty ditch systems in the North Fork Valley, some with better water rights than others.  Our ditch system is the Leroux Creek Waters Users, a system that has more senior rights than some of the other ditch systems in the valley.

We have been careful in our watering this season (as we usually are, however a year like this makes us juggle watering differently). With fruit trees, we don’t want to put all the water on them earlier in the season and short them in the fall. If trees aren’t watered well in the fall before we “put them to bed”, they’ll be dry, stressed and more likely to suffer winter damage (I think this is what happens to me?)  Conversely, the trees need sufficient water in the spring and summer to nourish a full crop. This year, even with being careful with water we’re using, we will likely run out in mid-September.  That means no more water in the ditches, no more water in the reservoirs.  Rain dance anyone?

We hope that with additional water we’ve leased, we will get through this dry season.  One of the reasons we lease this water every year is to cover ourselves during a year like this.  These long term leases are sort of like a water insurance policy.  We have so many friends who are growers around here–alfalfa, produce, flowers, animals–it’s not simply us. During a season like this, we gut it out, do the best we can, and see each other on the slopes during the winter!  And we hope it’ll be snowing A LOT.

As with most years, we meander through winter, marveling at the quiet and slower pace that winter brings to the farm.  We had a mild winter here, not as cold with less snow. We were still able to do some cross country skiing in the orchard, but the snowmen were fewer and the zero degree mornings rare.  Spring came in so quickly this year, that it seems we were all caught with our pants down, except our dog (which makes for much quicker entries into the pond). Some peach varieties bloomed 3 weeks earlier than last year, making us all feel very far behind with the work load and very vulnerable to cold, frosty nights.  The projects are stacking up; planting apples trees, planting tomatoes, finishing pruning, chopping brush, spraying, marking out the field to get the alfalfa seed in, putting in the new (bigger!) cooler, and hoping, hoping, hoping that Mother Nature is gracious and leaves the nighttime frosts in Canada!

Last week was a victory week as far as getting some things in the ground here on the farm.  After months of book work, pruning and jumping this way and that as spring arrives, we finally planted over 2300 tomatoes and about 800 trees. A group of 4-5 staff planted the tomatoes over 2 days, concentrating on planting in the morning when the plants do better in the cooler part of the day. We are excited about new varieties that we are planting this year: Prudence Purple, Pineapple, Black Krimm, Dr. Wyches, Rose de Burn, Goldie, Paul Robensen, Genovese and Sungold.

Steve and the crew planted the trees on Friday afternoon after all the field work and irrigation was ready to go.  Getting the trees in the ground is like the “icing on the cake”. You have to have all of the other pieces ready to go before actually getting the trees into the ground. What that means for us is this: removing the old trees from the block where we were planting, plowing the field, disking the field, digging the trench to tap into the irrigation  pipes to bring new lines into the rows where the trees will be, getting the irrigation lines in and working, lastly, planting.  The most important part of planting is ensuring that water will get to the trees within hours after they are in the ground. All systems were go and the trees were soaking happily with water within 3 hours of being planted.

So this morning I was getting ready to take my son and his friend on an excursion when I noticed our dog, Patches, with something akin to a small piece of plywood in his mouth.  As I got closer to Patches, I realized that he wasn’t chomping on plywood, rather he had a big piece of dried fish in his mouth.  Dried fish? I thought to myself–where would he have found dried fish????  I then saw that he had 3 pieces of large dried fish, not one.  With a slow awareness, I realized that Patches must have snagged the lunch of one of our workers.  At this point, my girlfriend says, “Well, I guess you’ll be buying someone some lunch today…”.

I know, who eats dried fish in Hotchkiss, you ask?  The story gets better because we have a handful of workers here on the farm from Myanmar.  Really.  As in, the former Burma. And yes…they eat dried fish (as does our Australian Shepherd).  I knew my morning excursion was now going to involve a trip to City Market, where I would find some fish. I don’t even like fish!  Don’t like it, don’t eat it and certainly don’t know how to cook it.  Peaches yes, fish no.  Twenty-five dollars later, I was heading back home, lighting up the grill and soliciting feedback on the best way to grill fish for that “Best Dried Fish Taste”.

Have I mentioned that I found a big ‘ol pile of fish drying on top of their car?  Maybe dogs and cats don’t jump on top of things in Myanmar?  Yes, so I did locate the source of Patches delight: a pile, and I do mean a pile of fish soaking up the sun, on top of a navy blue sedan.  Classic.  I rode out into the orchard (not on a white horse, rather my trusty Trek mountain bike) and looked for the staff who speaks a little English.  (It was at this point that I hopped off my bike, stepped in a hole and sprained my ankle, but that’s beside the point). I was able to marginally communicate the dog-ate-your-fish story and with a great deal of “no problem’s”, the fish was safely tucked back into their car. And the salmon and talapia that I grilled?  Well, I hope they enjoyed it.  If they didn’t, I know a dog who would…

Steve has had a few recent farm injuries that made me stop and say, “Hmmmm.” Except for the last one, which made me stop and say, “Hmmmm…let’s go to the clinic.”

The first, (and most classic in the manner it was treated) was a thumbnail smashing event that involved a tool and a tractor.  I was talking with Steve on the phone in the evening and he said, “I smashed my thumb with a hammer today, got a blood blister and had to drain it.”  So I’m thinking that he came into the house, found a needle, heated it over the gas stove to sterilize it, got it nice and hot and then drained the blood blister there in the comfort of the kitchen. But here’s what happened instead…Steve found a nail, heated it with a blow torch, then stuck the nail into his thumbnail, draining the blister and carrying on with the day.  (He did note that when he went mountain biking that evening, he couldn’t shift with his right thumb…).

Two days later, Steve was working on laying concrete for our new cooler.  I’m not exactly sure what happened next, only that he peered into a hole to see what was happening (safety glasses?  nah…who needs safety glasses??)  at which time, cement dust blew into his eyes, leaving them red, watering and thinking we’d need an opthamology visit for the next 36 hours. Ay yi yi.

Lastly, Steve and a couple of our guys were working hard to get our new cooler built.  The cooler is metal, fiberglass, etc. Steve managed to slice open his index finger with a nice serrated cut that left a two inch gash.  His wide-eyed staff graciously did the heavy lifting for the rest of the afternoon. When I came home that night and looked at the cut and said, “How about stitches?” he visibly paled and said that he would “…think about it.” The next day at noon, the sides of the cooler now up and placed, we made arrangements to go into our local medical clinic to get a professional once-over of Steve’s finger, and to his relief, that doctor stated, “Since its been over 24 hours, stitching isn’t recommended because of the risk of infection”.  I could see Steve do a little jig and we (I)went home with the confidence that Steve’s finger would be all right without being stitched up.

All of these incidences made me think: A farmer and his first aide treatment…Oh My!!

Last night my daughter and I went for a walk in the orchard, which is something we often do after dinner.  Walking through the rows of trees at the end of the day is a wonderful way to stretch our legs and catch up on the day.  Often we walk leisurely, not really having a plan on where we’re headed or which block of trees we’ll stumble into.

Last night however, we both made a bee-line for the block of cherries, a lovely block on the north end of the farm.  Our cherry trees tower above us, as they have been pruned and trellised to be narrow and tall.  This is the first year in a number of years that we have cherries, as the blooms so often freeze during the springtime.  So last night, we ambled through the trees, eating our way from one tree to another, having cherry pit spitting contests, and reveling in the fact that this year, we have cherries!

We have a saying on the farm that goes, “When the cherries come in”… and the rest if the phrase is never really finished.  It’s kind of like all of the hopes, dreams, realities and hard work on this place rest on these little red gems.  “When the cherries come in, we’ll have it made”.  “When the cherries come in, we’ll have a great year”. “When the cherries come in, all will be well”.

Well, whatever happens this season, I know that the cherries have come in, and it makes for a great dessert with my daughter in the orchard.

Among the many summer chores around the farm are those found in our own garden.  There is the expected hoeing, weeding, thinning and then the most disgusting; squash bug eradication. Our 11-year old son has been growing gourds for five years or so, which he then harvests and sells at our farmers markets in late fall. As any adult might expect, this is a great activity for him to learn about growing his own “crop”, tending and caring for it, and the end result of marketing, selling and putting some money in the bank. Where things falls short, at times, is the tending part.

One or two evenings a week, my son and I go out on Squash Bug Patrol. Squash bugs, as many of you may know, are gross little creatures that lay eggs on the underside of squash, gourd and pumpkin plants.  It’s a good day if all we find are the eggs, which are easy to smash and take off the leaves.  The bugs themselves are a dark-grey and flat, with a hard shell that scatter like wind when their prey (us!) approaches. The bugs are truly disgusting. I don’t know anyone who grows a garden in western Colorado who does not suffer from these scampering, copulating critters.  Squash bugs eat the blossoms that the plant produces.  This year, we have scads of squashbugs.  They are everywhere.  On a typical year, we find our first squash bugs towards the end of July.  This year, we found the first adults in June.  Ahhhhh!  This means many evenings of Patrol….many evenings of protest of “why do we have to do this?”…many evenings of dead larvae under your fingernails.

So my son and I were “on patrol” the other night, enjoying the summer evening and mindless banter between us.  I was smiling to myself as I listened to him sing songs from the Lion King and then the phrase, “Die bug die” as only an 11-year old can do. Because he’s a boy and because he’s 11, my son finds alternate ways of eliminating these bugs and this is what we’ve learned: Squash bugs do not float or swim, If you are brave enough to actually touch them and pull them off the leaves, they can’t move on their backs (this is handy as they are quick to bury under the stalk of the plant), Squash bugs smell when they are smashed with a hard object, Squash bugs often continue to move around after smashed with a hard object.  After 30-40 minutes of Eradication Patrol, smelling the putrid smell of dead bugs and being pretty grossed out in general my son said,
“You know Mom, these bugs have a little bit of zombie in them.  You try to kill them and they just keep going”. And I was laughing quietly at the wonderful comment he said because it really is true.

If you are at our farmers markets in the fall and happen to see our son selling his gourds,  please remember that there was lots of “Hakuna Matata” and lots of zombie that went into that crop!

This season here on the farm is the earliest season that we have ever had.  A mild winter and spring led to a summer that descended virtually over night. We are picking peaches a month earlier than we were last year.  Tomatoes are early, cherries were early, it seems that everything is early. There are good things that come from this (fresh fruit much earlier than we antipated~and that is never a bad thing!) and challenges along the way.  The biggest challenge we face right now is that we’ve essentially lost 3 weeks of work.  It’s kind of like half of June and July just never made it to the calendar.
The challenges of an early season plays out in how we prioritize what needs to happen on the farm.  Do we pick peaches today or do we thin apples? Do we split the crew so that half pick while half of them thin?  Do we weed the thigh-high weeds in the new table grapes, or do we thin apples? Do we prioritize the immediate needs (thinning this years’ crop) at the sake of the longer-term needs (grapes not growing because of the weeds)?   We are in the throws of building a new 30’X50’ cooler while picking, thinning and repairing irrigation lines.  In a “normal” year (“normal” is up for grabs when one farms), we would have finished building the cooler, then a crew would be thinning and picking would have followed.
Water is also a concern, as we had little moisture during the winter.  We were irrigating and getting as much water on our trees earlier this summer when the temperatures were warm, the trees and ground dry.  The recent cooler temperatures and afternoon rainstorms have been a welcome event.  We’ve been able to hoard some of our reservoir water which means we should not run out of water mid-September.  How much we water today affects how we’ll water in September.
Despite the numerous challenges that an early season provides, let’s be honest…it’s great having produce earlier than before. I’m not hearing anyone complaining about peaches and tomatoes in mid-July! We are enjoying wonderful meals either straight out of our garden or with produce from our veggie CSA partners.  Wherever you may be, I hope that you are, too!

A year ago I was busily working on fundraisers, supervising staff, going cross-eyed over budget spread sheets, and listening to the difficult tales of brave women and kids leaving abusive homes.  This morning, I was placing poly irrigation hoses under blackberries trying not to get whacked in the face with errant branches. It was a gorgeous sunny morning with birds and grasshoppers chirping.  What a difference a year can make.  Living on a farm gives me many opportunities, one of which is knowing that I can leave my job, and likely be employed by the person for whom I cook dinner and wash his diesel-smelling jeans. For years I have known that if I Just Couldn’t Do It Anymore (the hymn of many working mothers), I could beg Steve and offer to work on the grungiest task here on the farm.  So I took the leap and here I am.  I’ll be doing these blog entries a couple of times a week (which, IS NOT the grungiest task on the farm!)  If there’s anything that you want to know about life on the farm, please let me know. Until next time, enjoy the sounds of the birds and watch out for low flying branches…