What Happens In The Orchard

If anyone is following my posts in the ecoTrain community then you know that I have been working in the field for some time and recently picked potatoes. 😁
But you also know that there is no rest in gardening and farming.

Now I have time to arrange the orchard. It's from my mother, but because she's over eighty and can no longer work as she used to, then I help. As a field, the orchard is completely and 100% organic, we do not use artificial fertilizers to grow or destroy pests. I occasionally prune a branch and that's it. 😎

The orchard is still quite large, like a football field. It is quite old, some trees even over seventy years old, it would need to be rejuvenated but there is no time for that except for basic maintenance like mowing and the like. There are mostly apples and pears, they're very old trees and home-grown varieties, but there is also something else.

As can be seen from the photos, mowing is now topical. It took me about three afternoons to mow everything, but my lawnmower broke down and I had to replace one part ...

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As I mentioned in my field posts, this year is not a good harvest, there won't be much fruit in the orchard either. There have been no plums for a couple of years now because they've been attacked by a disease and it'll be necessary (when I'll have time ... if I deal less with the crypto 😎) to cut down all the plum trees and plant new ones ...

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The apples are still green and few. Last year we had over 600 kg of apples and we prepared homemade apple juice and vinegar. We won’t be doing it this year because there are so few apples. There will be some apples for the winter.

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There will be a few pears too. Old trees are and no longer bear so much fruit. The tallest tree in the orchard is a pear and is said to be over seventy years old. A couple of years ago the branches were breaking, there was so much fruit. This year, you have to look at where the fruit is.

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Maybe there will be some more grapes this year, I think. If the birds don't eat it :)

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There will be some kiwis too. Last year it was huge, this year it will be significantly less. It’s also one such cycle, good harvests are every couple of years, not every year.

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The last acquisition in an orchard is a fig planted by the late father, but so far we haven't tried the figs. There were a few last year but they all fell down. This year they ripened once before and fell down, and now one tree has borne fruit once more.
We'll see.