How lucky we’ve been with such a dry start to the autumn. It’s our favourite time of year and it has been beautiful. Dry warm days and the handpickers are racing to keep ahead of the starlings! At this time of year huge flocks of the birds form and they love the fruit as it starts to get soft and a little overripe. They have been known to descend en masse and devour an entire crop.
The cider crop is looking good and with the dry weather all the work is getting done with the minimum of mess - a boon for pickers and processing alike.
Crop wise we are definitely down in volume. Sugar levels are up, as we predicted and the quality and ph levels are fine.
At this time of year we also like to see what kind of one year extension growth we have managed to achieve, because that is the future of our crop. The one year growth is looking reasonable. We probably left a little bit too much fruit on the younger trees, which hasn’t given us quite as much growth as we would have liked, but we’re hoping to put on a bit of a spurt in the spring.
We’re going to be experimenting with putting more nutrient on a little earlier in the season. We had a bit more scab than we would have liked, which is probably us being mean with the spraying, and we have a little bit of codling moth damage on the dessert fruit, but not anything excessive and no problem for juicing.
We have sent off our scab leaf samples for analysis and when we get the results back in a couple of weeks we will decide on our actions. Some people kill off all the leaves with a very heavy spraying regime, but we would prefer not to do that. Old traditional orchardmen put sheep into the orchards to eat all the leaves so there would be no carry over of spores to the next year. Depending on the results of the analysis we might do a little judicious spraying with copper - a little spraying, with a natural product, at the right time, can save you a fortune later.
