Bees

I captured the first swarm of the year that I have heard of happening.  My feelers are out in as many places as I could put them to notify people that I wanted a swarm.  The hive that produced the first swarm is in the perfect location to collect warmth against a stone wall in a well protected back yard.  They were very docile because the swarm was only a couple of hours old and full of honey, warm, and with no hive to protect.  Having landed on a loquat branch about 3 feet off the ground it was a simple procedure to capture them just by clipping enough leaves off the branch until they had all dropped into the hive sitting on a table below them.  The hive had seven foundations (this allowed room for the leaf drop and bees) in it that had been used by a previous colony so once they were in they had no desire to flee and set up pheromone producing bees immediately to signal all their bees that a home had been found.  It was the first time I had collected a hive so I was glad it was a very fresh swarm (a wet swarm) and everything fell into place so easily.  

It was my first time to collect a swarm but I came prepared with two sizes of ladder, loppers, rope, toothpaste, plastic card, cell phone, and all the clothing that a rational, well-read person would wear (all white, baggy, sealed at wrists/ankles) with rubber banding at ankles/wrists and a bee hat.  The reception box was roped shut and the entry blocked once the bees were inside for safe transportation.  Looked like I knew what I was doing, anyway.  It was fun. The main things to remember are to have a calm demeanor and know what you are going to do next no matter which way the situation progresses.  (Running away screaming is not one of them.)  

"What happens if..."  This should be going through your head at each point of possible divergence in probable activity.  Choke points...

Rain total to date:  17.5 inches.  Average rainfall is about 30 inches.  Official rain season ends June 30.  Usual rain season is from early October to the end of March.

Dormant Oil Spray

If you have had problems with aphids or scale the prior year, you may want to apply a dormant oil spray to fruit trees.  Now is the time to apply it for apple trees and pear trees.  Pick a day when the sun is out and the weather is warm so all the eggs and overwintering adults you are trying to kill will be respirating at maximum potential.  They smother better that way.  If you are growing nectarines, which are already blooming by now, you have to apply in early January before they flower and include lime sulphur and a copper containing Bordeaux to kill the inevitable fungus that attacks them, Taphrina deformans (peach leaf curl).  But you have to spray anywhere the rain can splash a fungal spore onto the tree, too.  Some people put paper down under the tree to keep spores for splashing out of the dirt.  It's a mess and it never worked completely even though I was meticulous about it.  I gave up on nectarines.  The fruit is too attractive to all the animals and fighting the fungus got old.  Besides that, we could never figure out what to do with them besides pies, canning and eating out of hand.  In addition, the fruit is a mess to deal with compared with anything else.  The tree was very agressive and grew too fast, second only to the kiwi in growth rate so that was not a plus.  In the end, it made good wood for the smoker.  It was an education for a few years.  Ours grew true from a discarded seed.  

Apples, of course, won't breed true to the parent from seed.  That's why the apple represented democracy and the people in colonial America to the early colonists (E Pluribus Unum, from many one).  Each seed was unique in quality although still an apple variety of some sort.  To become a "millionaire" in the colonies was to find a good tasting apple from a random seed that everyone would want to have for themselves(from many one).  Because the seeds won't run true, everyone would have to take a twig (scion) from your tree to propagate (graft onto their tree) themselves.  Colonists could charge what the market would pay for a good apple or scion and make their fortune.  The Northwest territory was settled using apple tree plantings and this is where Johnny got his fame peddling apple seed and scions to the settlers along the Ohio River so they could provide proof of occupation and working of land claims by having an apple orchard of a size regulated by the government.  Apples were the only way to make alcohol for yourself and a good way to add value to your crop.  George Washinton did it every year at Mount Vernon.  But I digress...(See:  The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollen)

Comice and Asian pear trees.  Today is the day the first flowers appeared.  I usually time the dormant spray to this.  However, having had no problems last year I will not apply it.  The spray also kills the overwintering stages of beneficial insects and mites.  I like to keep any beneficial organism be it nematode, fungus, collembola, insect, mite, bird, mammal, etc., around as much as is possible.  They make a huge difference in the amount of work you have to do to control pests.  

Rain total for last four days:  1.5 inches.

Total for the season is 17 inches.

Spring is almost here

The Equinox cannot be far behind when the Mandarins are all ready to harvest and the Blueberries are flowering. 

Top pics: Juicing in process.  Mandarin/bronze fennel ahi marinade, left, with finished juice.  Fegs ready to yield 2.5 qts juice.

Over the past week:

Raspberry shoots have come out of the ground in profusion and leaves are coming out on old canes.

Sangiovese (main component of chianti) grape vines pushed leaves.

Blueberry varieties are moving.  Earlyblue and Blueray are pushing leaf past the bud.  Bluecrop is beginning to leaf out but no flowers.  Oneal and the Yard Sale Unknown have foliage and are in full flower.  Southmoon has foliage and is now beginning its flowering.  Only the Herbert is sitting silent and bare.  

  

Fourth pic:  chickens fenced with mandarin tree (click on pic to enlarge it)

Stripped one mandarin tree and juiced the crop.  Yield is at least 40 pounds (conservative estimate) of fruit for the tree this year.  100 pieces pulled form the tree without calyx equaled 7.5 pounds.  Tree size is six by six by six feet and is pruned about 1.5 feet off the ground at the drip line and looks like a miniature maple tree.  Twenty pounds of fruit was juiced to yield 5 quarts.  After peeling, fegs were put through a Champion juicer.  

The mandarin/bronze fennel leaf marinade for the ahi was spectacular.  Marinated the ahi for a few hours, turning it occasionally because the juice tends to separate, then cooked it in a stove top smoker with hickory chips for 15 minutes.  A few minutes on high and the rest on low flame.  Highly recommended.

 

Snails make fungal infection of the fruit common.  Keeping the snails out of the tree usually just involves triple banding the trunk with thin copper strips about 1/4 inch wide for each band.  I had tree leaf/oxalis leaf(ground "weeds") connections at the drip line of the tree this year, a mistake.  Also had oxalis touching the trunk above the copper banding.  If snails can climb above the bands using the ground cover, the copper banding cannot work.  I now have to spray the tree with high pressure water to knock off the snails then the chickens are in a tractor (a movable enclosure) under the tree to finish the job until the ground cover is gone.  Should take about a week with only two chickens.  Should have done this before the snails got into the tree, of course, but I got lazy and rationalized it looked so picturesque with the yellow flowers beneath it.  Not so much, now.  Tossing some scratch (cracked corn) in with the chickens keeps them digging up the greens otherwise they just stand there looking at you and thinking about escape.

Rain Total

Rain over the past four days is 1.75 inches.

Total for the season is 15.50 inches.

Average for the entire season is 30 inches.

Water emergency declared today by California.  Individual urban water users urged to immediately decrease useage by 20%.  Mandatory conservation may be needed. 

The following article includes a list of crops grown and the percent of total US production that comes from California:  California Declares Drought Emergency

Chicken Info

As usual, the chickens began laying precisely on Valentines Day.  It is rarely later at latitude, 37 degrees north.  They are tied to the hours of darkness they receive and it has to be pretty cold and rainy for an extended period of time to delay that.  Biorhythms make them do it.  That's why commercial growers keep the lights on 12/12 imitating midsummer.  That keeps them laying year 'round until they wear out in two years then off to the compost heap or processing into chicken food although beef is the usual ingredient in commercial hen feed.  Cross feeding includes less problematic micro-organisms so hens go to cows and cows go to hens feed, usually.  

The history of the chicken industry in California is quite an interesting read.  It was the get-rich-quick scheme for the common man of its day (early 1900's if memory serves me but it often does not) like houses were recently.  That economy collapsed, too, of course, as everyone piled into it, leaving personal anguish, debris, and indebtedness behind.  Humans and their foibles...  Anyway, Santa Cruz, CA, was a center of that movement and, up until quite recently, properties with chicken coops were very common.  They have since been turned into condos because the properties necessary for raising chickens were relatively large.  I lived in one that was barely converted to human habitation when I first came to the area in 1981.  It was pretty cold during the winter but the price was right for a U. C. Cooperative Extension employee doing research on brussels sprouts and strawberry IPM.

Our hens are old and need replacing.  However, they are on social security (assuming SS is what the gov't has told us it is and it is not bankrupt like the largest banks in the world) because they don't produce like younger hens.  They will continue into old age scattering their 17 pounds per year of feces per bird  about the yard.  We will be getting a new crop of "peepers" soon which we will raise inside until they can integrate with the older hens without being eaten by them or the neighborhood cats.  That process is really cute as long as you keep their cage clean otherwise it gets old very quickly.  The old ones will be relegated to composting and providing the occasional egg while giving lessons for the new arrivals about hawks and cats.  By the way, if one of the little ones does get hit by a cat, we have found that a liberal application of sugar on the wound, assuming you can recover the victim, is very good at stopping any infection that may occur.  It certainly saved one of our chicks that was taken by a cat but saved by the wife in an extraordinary feat of fence leaping and running down of the cat.  I am still astounded by the memory as, I can only assume, was the cat.  I imagine the cat was very surprised at the vigor of the approach since it dropped the chick rather quickly.  I was so amazed at the wife's effort and I still am amazed at it.  (Years later she attempted the same rescue for a large orb weaving spider we had adopted as a pet and named Agatha that was taken by a Townsends Warbler outside our picture window in full view of both of us.  The spider had dared come out during daylight and that was its undoing.  That attempted saving was not so successful as flight is a cutoff for us as rescuers.)  In addition, it gave me the wonderful opportunity to try the sugar-on-wound trial about which I had just read as the chick had at least an inch long cut on its body from being dragged through a hole in the fence.  You don't come across that sort of opportunity readily so I seized it and it worked admirably.

I watched one of our hens kick the bucket a few years ago.  I was looking at it as it stood in the yard.  It was a Barred Rock.  Of a sudden, it said, "Bawk" and leaped into the air doing a back flip.  When it hit the ground it was dead as a rock, appropriately enough.  I stood amazed, guessing it was a heart attack at age 12 years.  I think that one was turned into apples, judging by its burial site, and good apples they are, too.

Pruning

Pruning is an art form.  It is vaguely akin to Bonsai, in some ways, but on a grand scale.

Absolutely everyone does it differently even if any two people have identical goals as their outcome.  So don't feel like you have to attain some sort of perfection when you do this.  That said, you can easily ruin a tree forever if you do it wrong.  Comfortable?  OK, let's dive right in.

Depending upon what kind of tree or bush you have, your plant will need different care in every way including pruning.  Blueberry bushes can get by with no pruning or just taking out any dead wood.  Alder trees need be pruned only to your taste as to what you want them to look like or the more practical aspect of whether you can get under them easily enough to harvest the raspberries you put there.  Apple trees...well, there are different approaches.  There is some new research out of Cornell University that shows an unpruned apple tree may produce a bigger crop than a pruned apple tree.  Masanobu Fukuoka of Japan came up with this idea during the middle of the last century so it is nothing new.  But the "quality" of the apple can be changed by judicious pruning.  So many choices, so few trees to test them on.

Pruning of apples can be done to strengthen the tree structure, make it easier to get inside to pick, keep it short enough to pick without using a ladder, be able to walk/work under it easily, make it look like a weeping willow to fit your yard motif, etc.  Everyone needs or wants something different from their trees.  

Here is one of the multitude of sites about pruning (half way down the page link below "irrigation") that shows some of the techniques: http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/garden/mg/fruit/irrigation.html

Making the pruning cut angled or flat.  Used to be an angled cut was all the rage now it has been shown that a flat cut is better for the tree.  It makes sense as less inner tree branch open to the air and microbes is best.  If you are removing anything larger than what a one hand pruner can manage, you must first make a cut on the underside of the branch opposite where you anticipate the main cut to end.  Without doing this, you can strip the bark for a long way and expose the tree to infection.  Losing a tree this way is sooo wrong.  

There is weak branching and strong branching.  The weak ones can split a tree down the middle, if left as one of the main "scaffold" branches when the tree is young.  This is a critical item to become familiar with and easily avoided.  Weak scaffold branches are sharply "V" shaped and must either be changed, if caught early, or strengthened, if caught late.  Early catching means you just cut one of the branches off and work from there with the other as the main support branch.  Late catching means you have to provide lateral supports via grafting which is far more difficult.  Go with the first option although the second is fun to do and rarely seen today.  The only place I have ever seen it, beside in my yard, and where I got the idea is in a hundred and thirty year old abandoned apple orchard in the hills above Corralitos, CA.  They had made three main scaffold branches in a "vase" pruning style coming off the trunk and each of the branches was grafted to the other about a foot and a half above the confluence with the trunk to form a triangle horizontal to the ground connecting the branches.  It was beautiful.  All the trees had it.

The trick to successful pruning is to be able to visualize how the tree will look in five years due to your pruning.  You need to know how the tree will grow as it matures so you must be able to look at pictures of the growth pattern of your variety of tree and how others have manipulated it.  Get online or to the library and look it up or visit an orchard and study the pruning marks and growth pattern.  All fruit tree varieties are slightly to completely different in growth patterns.  The devil is in the details and you will live with the outcome of your understanding of the details for years to come so spend some time with this aspect of growing fruit.  Everyone that passes will see what you have done and how well you understood what you did.  Spend some time on planning your pruning.  Sit with the tree and visualize where you want it to be in five years and where you may need to make the cuts to get it there.  There's no rush.  You can always do it next year or later in the summer.  It is easiest to do when all the leaves are on the ground.  Keep in mind, it is a bit difficult to watch the knowing look of a thoughtful pruner obviously trying not to say anything about your tree other than, "Oh my, um...what a...nice tree".

Hiring a pruner can be problematic unless that pruner comes highly recommended and even then I would want to see examples of their work.  I have seen ruined trees that the customers thought were done quite well and would happily recommend the pruner to others.  

Rain Total

Rain over the past 7 days is 6.75 inches.

Total for the season is 13.75 inches.  

Historical average for entire season, which ends June 30th, is 30 inches.

News today of water rationing in Los Angeles next summer.