Market Farming

[Lucy Goodman-Owsley <goodows AT excite.com>]

>  
>  
>  Lucy and anyone else out there;
>  We're starting a similar project on trees that have been here for who
knows.
>  The homestead is 100 yrs. old.  I was told that to bring the trees back
to
>  take no more than a third.  We're starting to do that, but even still,
the
>  trees are way too high.  My question:  what did you do to bring the trees
>  back to production?  Our trees have actually produced very fine crops,
>  except for two pear trees (the rest of the pears did fine, don't know why
>  these didn't), it's just next to impossible to get to them.  I'm thinking
I
>  will have to be pretty severe for a couple of years.  Was that your
>  situation?
>  Thanks,
>  Michaele


When we got here themost of the trees were under 20 years old and not very
big though we have one that has its bottom branches starting at about 10'.
The pear trees are also quite high. One is about 40' at the top and the
other two are about 30'. The apple trees were in bad need of pruning to be
opened up and they had a lot of water sprouts too. the pears we have not
dona a lot of radical pruning too mostly just dead branches and sucker
growth.

The apples we have taken lots of limbs off over the past 5 years. we won't
take any more than 25% of the tree in any one year even though a couple have
had about 65% of the wood removed. 1 tree was about 5 yrs old when we moved
and has been the easist to deal with. Two trees we almost lost because some
genius planted a ceder tree right between two apples so that all were
touching-both of those trees are now recovering successfully from cedar
apple rust now that the ceder has been removed for 4 years.

I don't believe the trees were ever harvested and the apples were allowed to
fall and rot where they lay so we had lots of bug and disease problems in
the beginning and it was rare to get a decent apple with no blemishes. This
year about 45% of the crop was saleable which is good for organic
production, I have heard. Now we have few disease problems and the bug
problems are way down. We have some sawfly and curculio damage as well as
coddling moths but no longer on 95% of the crop.

The pears we do next to nothing to and get great harvests most years unless
they blossoms get frost killed. With pears harvest the fruit unripe and let
ripen in the cellar, this way they don't drop right before ripeness and get
eaten by bugs.

Note: my e-mail service I see has been delivering the same mail repeatedly
to this list. the service is having problems and one day I could not mail
out so i guess they are making up for it by repeatedly sending out the same
two documents over and over. see my name beside a topic you know you have
read before just delete it, it's a repeat. I believe the headings are
orchards.... and homemade fertilizers. sorry for any inconvience


Lucy Goodman-Owsley
Boulder Belt CSA
New Paris, OH
Website: http://www.angelfire.com/oh2/boulderbeltcsa
Organic Farming and Gardening Forum:
http://www.InsideTheWeb.com/mbs.cgi/mb135705
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