Every spare moment is spent thinning apples these days. Apples blossom in clusters, and despite a hard freeze locally we had very good pollination on most of the trees, so we have a great deal of work to do to get each cluster down to one apple. The pick-your-own varieties in particular fruit very heavily and need a lot of thinning. The apples are sizing up quickly this year, as the season still seems to be advanced compared to prior years. We will be watching for when our earliest variety becomes ripe so we can tell when our commercial varieties will be ready.

All of our biennial trees are fruiting this year, and since we have little to no scab in the orchard this year, even our macIntoshes are fruiting. So we have lots and lots of apples that look great at this point.

Lots of life in the trees as usual - lots of lady bugs and daddy long legs, as well as other spiders, and of course a chorus of birds all over in the orchard. We have one deer that visits regularly this year, nipping branches off the trees closest to the woods. No big deal, as long as the newest trees aren’t targeted too much (and he or she doesn’t start bringing friends).