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By ESTHER SMITH
News staff writer
May 31, 2006
Spring and harvest times are an
orchardist’s busiest times, but right now work is steady and things
are going right along.
“We’re always cutting grass and looking
for gophers and insects,” Parkdale orchardist Jim Donnelly says.
“Right now we’re checking codling moth traps to see what kind of
problems could be developing.”
It’s early in the season, but Donnelly
is generally pleased. He expects about an average crop this year,
though he adds that the “June drop” hasn’t occurred yet. When the
weather turns warmer a portion of the fruit will drop, and at that
point a grower will have a better idea what kind of year it’s going to
be.
Jeff McNerney, a grower who also works
for Chamberlin Distributing, thinks that this spring has been the best
spring for growers he can remember in a long time.
“We had good pollination weather, we
didn’t have any rain during petal fall so the pears are fairly ‘clean’
(free of russet markings),” he says.
From what McNerney’s seen so far, crops
— both pears and cherries — look to be average in the lower valley and
fairly heavy in the upper valley.
This year, Donnelly had a helicopter
spray pheromones into his orchard, a first for him.
“I’ve heard good things about it, so I
decided to give it a try,” he says. “You saturate your orchard with
this pheromone and it confuses the moths so that they don’t mate.”
He has started thinning a couple of his pear varieties, including
Crimson, then later it will be Bartletts.
“We’ll have to thin hard this year because California has a big crop,”
Donnelly says. “So we’ll need to thin more so that the pears will be
larger.”
Right now he’s done with cover sprays, and after the June drop he’ll
need to fertilize.
“I’ll see what kind of crop I have and depending on how big it is I
may put on calcium nitrate — if the crop is heavy I don’t want them to
go hungry,” he says. |
