Orchard
We’re finally eating our backyard Valencia oranges. Sooo good. 🍊🌳🌱
Our “Bacon” Avocado flower buds are developing nicely. Also, the fig is waking up. 🌱🌳
First apricot bloom. Hopefully, as in past years, far more will follow. Figure this flower puts pollinators on notice. 🌳🌱
This should be my last nectarine flower photo. This year. 🌳🌱
Easiest way to deal with (perhaps) hundreds of mandarins once ripe: juice them. These have brightened to very red-orange I wonder if they are closer to tangerines?
The nectarine is up and at ‘em with many glorious blooms. 🌱🌳
Pompasetting nectarine.
First bloom today of our nectarine! 🌳 🌱
Got a warm spell in California so now I expect the nectarine to bloom any day now. The local almond trees already have.🌳🌱
The Fantasia nectarine (planted Jan 2020) is still in swollen bud stage. Has been for days. It’s sooo close to blooming. Here’s hoping it’ll produce fruit for the first time this year!
Someday we’ll figure out how to make rice noodles right. Did a bunch of experiments today and almost got there. We just want perfect Drunken Noodles and Pad See Ew.
Got to make the rock rings around the citrus trees larger so drip emitters can be moved back for better root growth. Also may help with frost as the ground can now radiate heat up into the trees rather than be insulated by wood chips. Here’s before and after.
Close up of a Meyer Lemon still on the tree. 😋
Lemon grass is overwintering nicely. This time we dug up the plant to include roots. Last year we rooted a few stalks in water; here’s its progeny 👌 There’s another bunch of lemon grass outdoors. If it survives, that’ll be the second year overwintering outside in native soil. 🌱
We have a lot of citrus in the backyard: mandarins, Meyer lemons, and Valencias. This means it is time for Alton Brown’s Acid Jellies! We don’t coat them with sugar at the end of the cook as we’ve found the sugar is too hydrophilic in humid winters & the jellies get… damp. 🌱
Dutch baby for breakfast. It is really great with Meyer lemons (from the backyard tree; which is great as we can’t get Meyers in town).
Pruned the apricot today. I only kind of know what I’m doing. It looks about right to me. Every year I open it up a bit more and reduce its height. I let it get too big. Before and after.
House Sparrows frenetically bathing under the mandarin this morning.
Mandarins and Meyer Lemons are ripening nicely. Maybe one more month until the Mandarins are sweet enough.
The Results of the 2020 Home Orchard Fixed Daily Watering Experiment
This last orchard growing season, I watered using daily fixed schedules that took into account average daily evapotranspiration and estimated daily plant water use. I set up schedules for each month in the summer, since evapotranspiration and water usage changes significantly month to month. Previous years I had used a dynamic schedule determined by Rachio’s Flex Daily algorithm and Advanced Zone settings. The Flex algorithm greatly favors deep waterings and the interval is guided by daily estimated evapotranspiration. The trees often suffered on extreme California summer days under the Flex Daily algorithm — it watered too deeply and too infrequently so trees couldn’t get daily access to water with very high summer evapotranspiration rates. Flex does not account for extremely hot days where available water depletes, leaving trees struggling without water until the next day or longer. Fortunately, the Rachio irrigation controller makes it dead easy to create any number of watering schedules. The results of using fixed schedules tuned for each summer month this last growing season were pretty good. While the mandarins are undersized after the previous year’s bumper crop of well sized fruit, our Valencias and Meyer Lemons did great. The pineapple guavas also responded very well to daily watering with a surprising amount of growth. The avocados, while very finicky, did fine too. But it turns out no matter how much water they get, when temperatures go over 100 F their leaves scorch (so we had to rig up shade cloth over the young trees using ladders). Besides the avocados, the trees didn’t suffer greatly from heat stress with daily watering. I do wonder if the fixed daily waterings didn’t penetrate the soil deep enough, resulting in undersized mandarins, so next year I will try watering every other day and doubling the watering times. This should encourage deeper root development and perhaps provide more water to trees from throughout the soil column.
Scorched young avocado leaves despite daily watering:
