Gravensteins Ready!

Red Gravenstein will be ready next week!!  

They make GREAT pies, or for anything else you bake!   

We have half of a row available so if they are a must have to you, don't wait too long!  I will post on the blog when they are all gone.

The rest of the apples look great so far but they are not ready yet.

Summer harvest for the rest of our crops is in full swing.  We have had several pickings off our blueberry fields already and are just about done with our grass seed harvest. 

 Corn is growing.  It is a few feet high by now.

 Wheat harvest is coming up real soon!

 Above is Radish for seed.  It still needs to dry out before we can harvest it.

 Putting up a fence along our blueberries so we don't have to worry about plummeting over the edge into the road.

Silas and Erin in the wheat.  It is crazy to think almost this time last year, he was only just being born!

 Keeping it real:  Spending an hour unplugging the combine.  Sometimes if the swather leaves a big pile of grass, then the middle does not dry out  and it doesn't go through the combine well.  And this is what happens!  No fear though, it is all ready to go now!

 One of the earlier posts, I showed how we grafted a different variety of apple on the base of a tree.  Here is the result several months later.  It is growing well!  Next year this tree will hold Honeycrisp.

 The Honeycrisp are still ripening but they are loaded this year!  Below shows a picture of how many apples we pulled off earlier this spring (called Thinning).  We really put some effort into thinning this year so the apples should be bigger than years before!

Watering away!

See you all soon!

Spring has arrived

 Our little helper doing some work in the office :)  He is 8 months old now!

Bee pollinating our blueberries!  That is what we like to see.

Bloom stage.

Bloom stage in apples.  Very pretty sight when you see the whole orchard!

We grow spinach for the seed.  Here we are getting the planter all set up.

View looking back.

Changing tires on our sprayer.  Have multiple tires for multiple kinds of jobs.  These tires are for wet conditions!

Some of our random equipment we are hard at work using.  

 Trying to get crops planted in between the rain breaks.  Always a challenge.  Gotta keep life interesting I guess!

Grafting

We decided to chop up the Cameo variety of apples and instead make the trees produce Honeycrisp apples!  We took shoots from the Honeycrisp trees and grafted them into the trunk of the old Cameo trees. 

Here is the grafts up close.  Then we painted on some grafting wax to keep away water and air.  Now we wait for some activity!

 

 We also did the same thing to some old Red Delicious tree.  If the grafts take, then we will have 4 additional Jonathon trees!

 

This is Terry standing in the field where we grew the flower seed.  All the red are tiny flower seeds sprouting.  It is all from back in the late summer when we cut the flowers and laid them into rows(called swathing). The flower seed shattered.  It shows how much seed you can lose when you are harvesting!

This is a wheat field.  The picture above is where the geese didn't feed.  They must have been scared of the wheel line!

This picture is where they DID feed.  Can you see the difference??

Salem Harvest came today!

We had a big harvest today but there are lots of apples left I am told. So we are changing our mind about this Saturday being the last to come pick! We will stay open until the weather turns nasty.

Here is what was going on today:

Since it was nearing the end of the year and the weather is sure to turn to rainy and cold, we had Salem Harvest come out and pick some of our apples. It was a great turnout!
I've included some pictures of the day!

How it works is that each person that signs up with Salem Harvest gets to keep half of what they pick and the other half is donated to the Marion Polk Food Share. I guess they harvest all kinds of crops.

Here is the check in line. Everyone has already signed up ahead of time and only those people are let in the field. Salem Harvests coordinates it all!

So many apples were picked that all the bins were filled by the first round of pickers! There were 2 sessions and they still had the 2nd to go!


Loading up the truck!

Happy picker :)

And a great helper!

Thank you!

Thank you so much for all who came out this year!  It was a good year for apples and for that we are thankful!  It was fun to see all the families with kids, people from out of town and for some people it was their first time!  What fun!

Pink Lady is ready!

Pink Lady apples are ready!!  They are the last apple to ripen in our orchard so come get them!
  We still have almost ALL the varieties of apples that can still be picked.  Although the Gala apples are fewer in number and the Honey crisp are nearly gone.
    If you still want a Winter supply of apples, please come get them within the next two weeks.
We should have a good apple supply until the middle of the month at least.............

We also have WE-PICK buckets of apples available for $10 each.  Just call and say what varieties you'd like and how many and we can pick them for you.  Or we will also have a selection in front of the office ready.
Great option for if it's cold and rainy, or if you're unable to get around easily.

Still plenty of apples on the farm available for picking!!!!!

Pink Lady apples are ready!!  They are the last apple to ripen in our orchard so come get them!
  We still have almost ALL the varieties of apples that can still be picked.  Although the Gala apples are fewer in number and the Honey crisp are nearly gone.
    If you still want a Winter supply of apples, please come get them within the next two weeks.
We should have a good apple supply until the middle of the month at least.............