Fruitlets, So Cute
You know how most people are around babies or puppies or kittens? You know: the gushing, the tickling under the chin, the can’t-stop-looking at the absolutely adorable tiny-ness? That’s me around baby fruits.
Zestar fruitlet in the south section of the orchard
While blossoms are beautiful, it’s always the miniature fruits that get me; and this year we’re monitoring them especially closely to see exactly how many apples, pears, and plums we might have come harvest time.
Pear-let from one of our "mystery" pears
We’re still estimating a 90% loss, but we’re so thankful for the fruit we still have. As a bonus, it looks like we’ll have small quantities of many varieties which, to us, is preferable to larger quantities of fewer varieties.
Ginger gold applet in the orchard's central section
No surprise: no sooner did the fruitlets start growing than their first insect pest, the plum curculio (PC), started making her presence known too. See that little crescent-shaped scar on the plumlet below? That’s the PC momma doing her work, laying eggs in tiny fruits.
PC Damage on a Plumlet
Don’t let the idea of egg-laying insects gross you out. Most growing fruit crushes the tiny PC egg and the eggs that remain viable cause the fruit to drop from the tree.
In a big surprise, we’re still seeing some young blossoms on trees. The photos didn’t turn out, but I saw two blossoms, both at the pink stage, on a Connell Red and a Honeycrisp. What an odd year. If we remain hail- and frost-free, we could have an apple harvest from early August through November.
Plumlets, So Cute
It’s too early to see any little applets on the apple trees, but the plums that were pollinated (and weren’t killed by the cold) have started to grow. While I love the blossoms, I love the fruitlets even more!
One little plumlet emerging
In the photo above, you can see one little plumlet emerging: it’s green and looks hard and shiny, almost like it’s being unwrapped from a papery covering.
In the photo below, you can see two little plumlets being “unwrapped.” If the plumlets are difficult to see in either photo, click on the photo to get to a larger version of it.
Plumlets
These pictures are of Underwood plums, which are our earliest ripening plums.
A Novel Use for Tea Bags
We’ve lived here at the orchard for fewer than two years and as with any old-but-new-to-you residence, there were a number of projects we’ve had to take on, a couple of those relating to bats. Ugh.
Roxy, our feline bat catcher, was doing a fine job but we preferred that she not have to catch any bats at all, so the first job in 2010 was to get the bats out of the house’s attic. Mike was able to do that with relative ease considering all of the horror stories we’ve read about the difficulty getting rid of bats. After figuring out where the bats were getting in, he installed a few exit tubes and the bats were gone by the end of the first summer we were here. Mission accomplished, and on to the barn.
As you can imagine, a big gappy, drafty barn presents a bit more of a challenge. The bats — and the pigeons — were used to easy entrance to the barn courtesy of a garage-door sized opening that opened right up to the hay loft. After Mike picked off the easy targets, he logged many hours watching bats exit and enter and sealed off openings one by one. Midway through 2011, he conceded defeat and figured that mother bats were birthing their babies, so he gave the bats an easy opening and pledged to give it another try in 2012.
This year, Mike added another weapon to his arsenal: a bat house. Although there are plenty of trees around here for bats to live in, he wanted to give them an easy substitute for the barn so he built a bat house and installed it on the south side of the barn above the opening they previously used.
A new home for the bats
The bats haven’t adopted it yet, but it’s early and Mike’s gotten real down and dirty in an attempt to induce them into a new home by pre-scenting it with their own guano. He read that bats might ignore a house made for them unless they’re drawn to it, so he filled some disposable tea bags with guano, wet them down, and stapled them to the bat house. Yes, kind of gross. I will probably never look at TeaSource’s Breakfast Assam, which I use with their Chai blend, in the same way.
Tea bags, put to a novel use
In the meantime, Mike’s back to dusk and dawn bat duty in an attempt to further seal up entrances to the hayloft.
The bat box, mounted on the south side of the barn.
With all of the ponds and wetlands here, we love the bats for their effects on the mosquito population — we just don’t love them in the barn.
