Food Gardening To-Dos for the 1st day of Summer

Loads of baby apples…but most will have to go!

When you’re raising food, May can feel like a busy time: weeding, sowing, weed-whacking…But June, whew! Your food garden is at warp speed!

Here in the Foothills, there was snow last week in our neighborhood, covering the highest peak we see from our front yard. 

At our place, it was 48 degrees in the daytime and pouring rain. Night temps were even colder.

Naturally, the weeds were thriving. So more weeding chores, but it was too rainy to get out and get to work.

Now, in these “Junuary” spells (as cold June weather is called around here), cool weather crops will generally do okay. But when it comes to warm weather crops…well, any seed I set in the ground would have simply disappeared. 

Then finally, this week the weather got the memo that it’s summer! In this brief window of 80 degree daytime highs, I’ve been pulling off winter mulch and prepping beds. I’m just winding up planting less hardy crops while the soil is warm: tomato starts, as well as cucumbers, zucchini, and winter squash seeds. 

Once the seeds germinate, they will be okay with a bit more cool weather.

Apple tree maintenance:

Meanwhile, everything else needs your attention! For instance, do you have apple trees?

If so, it’s an optimal time to check on your fruits. This spring, we had fruit set on steroids, where every fruit cluster has four or five fruits, so no time to waste!

To give each fruit the chance to develop into a full-size, healthy apples, it’s a good idea to check your fruiting clusters. When your fruits are about the diameter of a quarter, time to thin! 

Generally, you want to identify the most robust fruit in the cluster, then remove the others. Then, once you’ve thinned your clusters, check the distance between each fruit. Ideally, there should be about 5 inches between fruits. 

If you haven’t been hanging out in your orchard for a while, you may want to check for caterpillar nests too. 

Here in the Pacific Northwest, tent caterpillars are the scourge of home apple growers. My husband John found one nest in two of our apples trees a couple of weeks ago. It was lucky timing: the caterpillars were getting ready to migrate from the nests to devour the leaves.

Happily, he only found the two—but a neighbor had a bad infestation in the wild apples trees on his property line. John and I went out in the pouring rain and cut out the nests—there must have been at least 30 of them—and had an extra benefit! We ended up meeting the neighbor for the first time! 

And if you’re interested in learning all about tent caterpillars… Well, I’ve been through the wringer with those monsters, and I actually wrote a short ebook about them! And it’s free at my website! Just scroll down to “More Free Short Reads.”

In other fruit news…Blueberries:

June is a great time to check for “mummies.” At this point, the healthy blueberries are still green. But any purple ones need to be removed: they’re afflicted with a fungus, called “mummyberry.” Which basically destroys the berry. 

I’ve found that picking off these purple guys, keeps the fungus from spreading throughout the shrub. 

Garlic:

Pointy tips are where the seeds are developing!

If you’re growing hardneck garlic (it has a woody stem in the middle of the bulb), I recommend checking for seed stalks. 

The stalks are called “scapes”—the garlic plant will send up a sturdy shoot from the middle of the leaves, with swelling tip: the bud is a future flower, which will produce seeds. 

These scapes will take the plant’s energy away from the bulb, resulting in smaller bulbs. So time to cut off the stalk! 

Some folks like to use the scapes in cooking, but they seem a little tough to me. 

There’s more about growing garlic and maintaining your orchard in my freebie gardening guide, Little Farm in the Garden…

It’s free on all ebook stores like Amazon, Kobo or Apple and other online retailers!

Orchard Management, Part 2

Lots of bushy growth from late pruning

As I mentioned last week, John and I have slacked off on proper orchard care the last few years.

I’m not sure how it happened—sure, the weather didn’t always cooperate, and there were the usual family commitments, chicken care, or a million other chores that took precedence. But the fact remains, our apple trees were neglected.

We’d gotten behindhand in two basic ways: pruning and thinning.

Pruning is essential. Apple trees in our climate grow an insane amount each year; lots of our trees grow five or six feet each, with lots of bushy interior growth. Yearly pruning helps open up the middle of the tree—much easier when it comes to picking, for sure!

Pruning ideally should take place during the dormant season, when the tree hasn’t yet started its spring growth—in our area, February is recommended.

The problem is, we’ve gotten a fair number of northeasters in February, making it a challenge for even the hardiest of gardeners to get into the orchard!

But we can’t use wintry weather as an excuse. John and I have often not gotten around to pruning until as late as April. Or even May. And one spring, I think it was three years ago, we didn’t prune at all. The trees turned into monsters! And were that much harder to manage the following year.

Anyway, when you prune a tree in mid- to late spring, it only encourages the tree to grow even more. And you wind up with a bushy tree that is putting its energy into producing leaves, not high-quality fruit.

Pruning, as it happens, works in concert with thinning.  A bigger tree produces more blossoms, which in turn means more potential fruit. A smaller, neatly trimmed tree will naturally have less fruit set.

But you’ll still need to thin. Without it, you’ll generally wind up with a tree that will overbear one year, and the next, produce little or no fruit at all.

Thinning also will help you have larger, healthier fruit, instead of the smaller, even stunted fruit that you’ll often find on an overbearing tree. John and I have also erred in thinning way too late, in mid-summer instead of early June, when the tree has already put oodles of energy into hundreds of apples, instead of dozens.

The rule of thumb: thin your apples to keep about 5 inches between fruits. Apple trees will often set fruit in multiple clusters of three, four, five or even more apples per fruit spur. So make sure to select the most vigorous little fruit in the cluster, and remove the others.

Given this neglect, John and I have often wound up with overgrown, overbearing trees. Which has led me to suspect it may have something to do with our apple maggot problem. It seems to me that with less fruit to attract the maggot flies, Berryridge Farm won’t be such a target-rich environment.

As an aside, the same goes for the neighborhood bears! Without so much fruit at our place, maybe they’ll be less tempted to break down the fences and go on an eating binge.

Back to apple maggot: the photo below was taken the first year we found the damage. At the time, I thought it was terrible! Come to find out, these bits of brown were minor--many of our apples will now have brown tracks and some mushiness all the way through the interior. 

One chore you can do to help this fall: go through your orchard and pick up all the little fruits any tree dropped over the summer. That means less food for the maggot larvae that are living on the ground below the tree.

Years ago, I read about protecting your apples from this pest by diligently enclosing each and every apple in a Ziploc bag. At the time, I sorta cringed. All that plastic! All that time!

But as much as I don’t want to go the plastic route, I’m ready. It’ll certainly save money on buying nematodes. And maybe we’ll be able to reuse the bags.

To sum up, for our nine apple trees, here’s our plan for 2023:

1^st: We’ll prune in February, as orchardists recommend, to maintain smaller, less bushy trees.

2^nd : We’re going to take a pass on nematodes this fall. It’s been too dry to apply them, and soon it’ll be too cold. We’ll apply them only in spring and see how it goes.

3^rd : We’ll thin the fruit early—when the fruits are the diameter of a quarter—to give the tree a chance to put its energy into producing larger fruits, in smaller numbers.

Then we’ll bite the bullet and get out the Ziplocs!

Under New Management

William’s Pride apples, an early season variety

Orchard management, that is.

To be truthful, John and I haven’t been on top of our fruit tree care the last few years. 

But given this fall’s disappointing harvest, we’re resolved to step up our orchard game: getting back to basics and trying some new methods. The goal is to save time and even more importantly, money!

Our orchard story: For about six or seven years, John and I were happily raising loads of apples organically. We didn’t use sprays, fungicides or pesticides of any kind, not even any compounds that are approved for organic growing. 

It was wonderful to share beautiful, organic apples with everyone we knew. Including my sister's three horses!

Then the apple maggot pestilence found Berryridge Farm. If you haven’t heard of apple maggot, it’s a pest that ruins apples. The flies lay eggs on the outside of the developing fruit in the spring. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which bores into the apples and leaves nasty brown tracks inside.

And at our place, despite our healthy-looking trees, the last five years or so it’s been one crummy harvest after another. The apples don’t look all that bad, dimpled with innocuous-looking little dots. Yet inside the apple, leading from each dot, lies yucky brown disaster. 

John and I tend to be glass half-full kind of food gardeners. No matter how poorly a crop turns out, we’ve always figured, “there’s always next year.”

But I’m losing hope with our mid-season apple trees.

What’s kept us in the apple game at all is that we have a couple of early apple varieties that are not affected by the maggot. I imagine the young apples are already developed enough—perhaps past a certain vulnerability—by the time the apple maggot flies start laying eggs. 

But our later-season apples, especially the yummiest variety at our place, the Honeycrisp…well, Blech!

For sure, hard-won wisdom has taught us not to pick an apple and just bite into it! We’ve learned to cut into every apple first and inspect it for damage. But for us, it's getting really old, producing only a couple of edible apples out of a tree full of them.

After two years of increasingly gross fruit, John and I heard about treating apple maggot with nematodes: ground-living microscopic organisms that, as we understand it, bore into the apple maggot larvae and devour them from the inside out.  

Given the cost, I wish you could just find these “insect-pathogenic” nematodes in nature, but you order them from gardening supply outfits. And although they come in a small packet of powdery-looking material, the powder contains “live” critters that you need to keep refrigerated. 

You mix the powder with water, and apply to the ground under the apple tree, in spring and fall. For our nine apple trees, a supply of nematodes runs about $45 with shipping. Doing the math for a twice-yearly application, that’s 90 bucks.

John and I were really optimistic—and we’ve been dedicated to the spring and fall nematode program ever since. And yet…

We’ve been using nematodes for three or four years, hundreds of dollars spent on nematodes, without a huge improvement in these infestations. And quite frankly, the financial outlay is starting to get to me!

Now, as I’ve talked about before, John and I long ago gave up on trying to get our food gardening efforts to pay for themselves. Meaning, investing so many dollars into producing certain fruits and vegetables, to save a commensurate amount at the grocery store.

Case in point: giving our hens insanely expensive organic feed, to produce eggs that will never pay for themselves…even when you factor in the fun of keeping hens at your place, and the pleasure of eating healthy, homegrown eggs.

Or buying seven organic tomato plants at $5.99 per pot—I think they went up to $6.99 this year—when in a chilly summer, your $42 investment has given you a couple dozen tomatoes. But there comes a point when you get the feeling that doing this year after year isn’t just impractical. It’s sorta…dumb.

Here’s the deal: I’m quite sure we have NOT gotten $90 worth of halfway decent apples each year since we started using nematodes. So I am ready, as the old saying goes, to stop throwing good money after bad. 

John and I are determined to soldier on growing apples…but we’ve decided to get back to basics, as I mentioned above. And pursue strategies that are cheaper than imported nematodes to manage our orchard. I’ll share next week, for my regular Thursday post!