Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Here’s a follow-up post to one of my most popular from last winter, Our Little Orchard Story.

There’s been a lot of movement in the orchard, between the Apples, Grapes, the orchard floor, and mushrooms.

The Apples

The trees have of course grown more, and the Apple trees especially, continue to grow more. As predicted I do indeed have 4 different Apples fruiting out this year. One is the Red Sparkle, a Morden-developed early variety, which really needs to be eaten fresh off the tree, that comes with an amazing aroma. I have a Honeycrisp that has a few on them, so we’ll be able to taste-test those in a couple weeks. And one is my Norkent, my personal favourite crunchy and sweet-tart with a background pear flavour, fruiting two years in a row with beautiful fruit.

Lastly I have a Zestar fruiting this season, a University of Minnesota variety, that is beyond loaded. So loaded that the branches are bending under the weight! Despite me reducing each fruit cluster on all my trees to a single fruit, the Zestar is over-capacity. So here’s a new lesson for me this year: knowing what an overloaded tree looks like when the fruits are barely out of the flower stage so we don’t end up in this situation.

This tree has started dropping fruit in the wind, and I’ve been sampling it. While they’re still a couple weeks from ripening, they taste fantastic, and I’ll consider adding another Zestar or two in my orchard. The fruit is on the small side, but of course it is, how could such a young tree fill all those fruit? After harvest I’ll get a pre-winter foliar on them and hope this fruits next season but I won’t hold my breath.

The Wine Cap Mushrooms

Each Apple has a base of thick woodchip mulch, which I have innoculated with Wine Cap mushrooms. These delicious mushrooms are something I’ve been experimenting with for years now. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a method that allows a high level of production without much effort. I thought for sure with all the rain this season I would get a big flush and be able to bring to the Market.

While the Wine Caps slowly metabolize the wood chips, they are releasing nutrients that the tree can access. The trade-off is that wood chips take a long time to metabolize, unlike say, oat straw. The benefit here is these mushrooms will come back every season, and as I keep mulching the rest of the orchard, there will be many places these tasty mushrooms can fruit when the conditions for them are right.

The Orchard Floor

This is already established in the Apple zone, but I have seeded the floor of the orchard with a multi-mix grass, fescue and clover. It looks phenomenal. Knowing it is giving me massive biological benefits makes it even more phenomenal.

I have also now seeded the entire orchard with this mix. Unfortunately I seeded it the night of the crazy thunderstorms and tornadoes in June, and we got so much rain I was worried the seed just washed away. Pockets of it here and there grew out, but it was still mostly weeds. Now at this point, through repeated mowing, a lot of the weeds have died off and wouldn’t you know it, more and more of that grass and clover is establishing itself.

A few spot re-seeding next year and this will look amazing. It will also be great for the grapes, which can hopefully access the Nitrogen provided by the clovers as they will probably have a harder time in my soils. I won’t be giving the grapes wood chip mulches, and letting the clovers grow right up close into the root zone instead.

The Grapes

Yay they survived winter! Well all of them, except one. I’m taking the win on that! These have grown out nicely and I’ve had to stake them up to make sure we’re getting as much access to light as we can. I’m not super happy with these light-coloured leaves but hopefully I’ll be able to figure out what they’re missing so I can foliar feed them.

I’m sure the missing ingredient is something to do with my alkaline clay blocking the uptake of something for the grapes, maybe Iron. I see this in other pH sensitive crops like Strawberries. I’ll have to experiment with my foliars a bit more. This season, so far, they’ve received none. So we’ll consider this the control season.

The next step for these grapes is actually to build a trellis for them! These vines are going to go wild next year, and we really need to maximize the light intake, as well as making it extremely easy to apply foliar nutrition.

The Walnuts

A few years ago I planted some Walnut and Korean Pine trees as a sort of experiment. Turns out the Walnuts do great and the Korean Pines don’t like the clay. So in the coming years I’ll be doubling down on the Walnuts.

I mean I know they take a long time to grow and begin producing, but I can’t really imagine having buckets of walnuts! I mean, I can imagine, but when that day comes I’ll be smiling. I think we’re on year 4 with these here.

I’ll need to plant 10 or 20 more…where to plant them, I don’t know, but I’ll figure that part out when the little whips arrive next May! Until then I’ll be dreaming of bringing buckets of Walnuts to the Market…or to my hypothetical future farm store.

What’s next for the Orchard?

I’ll be ordering a bunch of things this fall to fill in some gaps. I have room for a couple semi-dwarf Apples, one or two more Plums, one Grape, a couple more Cherries, and three Pears. I’ll probably be ordering a bunch of Walnuts as well.

At this point in the Orchard’s life I kind of want to double down, and expand the Orchard at another site. It’s working very well and tasting fresh Manitoban fruit is all I really needed. Things like Apples and Pears also store well, so it could be possible to have fruit available through December. Knowing what varieties taste good, do well, and store well, are all part of this current orchard, or the “experimental orchard” as an extension of the “experimental no-till field.” As I learn how to manage these trees and vines and build out an irrigation system for them, I can set my sights on the second orchard, which would be optimized more for production.

This orchard thing is going to move way faster than I think! Looking forward to next year’s updates already.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice

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