Bottled up this years honey harvest from our one hive. 17 pounds. Not the best year we've had but considering all the rain this summer it's probably not a bad amount. Also we had the hive "split" this spring. The hive produced a new queen and the old queen took about half of the hive's bees and left to find a new home. So it took awhile for the hive to produce more worker bees to get it up to full production.
With many of my apple trees starting their 4th and 5th year of growth I am seeing many more fruit spurs. This is where the blossom will bloom and hopefully an apple will form. Then all the apple has to do is survive the weather, disease, and insects and I will have fruit to taste this summer and fall. Without the 20+ sprayings with pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides that commercial orchards adhere to any apples I produce will indeed be survivors. But from the start one of my main goals in growing apple trees was to find varieties which could produce fruit with little maintenance. Varieties that can not do this will be replaced with varieties that do produce fruit with minimum care.
The fruit spurs pictured are on a Swiss Limbertwig which originated with early Swiss settlers in the Cumberland mountains.
Some sort of fungi growing on a bird box made for an interesting picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment