strawberry12.gif (1415 bytes) Fresh News 2010, straight from the strawberry patch.

Thursday January 21, 2010 ---- Wow! what a beautiful couple of days! Lots of sunshine and mid 70's temperatures have kept me in a pretty good mood lately. We don't want to get carried away though, since we still have some winter to go we don't want the plants to be fooled that spring is here. it looks like we will be cooling off soon so I don't think there is too much to worry about. I was in the Strawberry patch today and noticed a good many live blooms amongst the 'Festival' and 'Sweet Charlie' plants. We will probably try to protect these blooms just to give us a few berries to put in the freezer before we officially open for picking. For sure we will be covering the entire Strawberry field with every impending freeze after February 1st. Hopefully the plants will begin blooming by mid February and we will start picking berries mid March. As every year before, the task at hand is to keep from being surprised by freezing weather. Covering the plants two weeks ago was good practice and prepares us to mobilize pretty quickly when needed. Barring mishaps, we should be able to cover the fields in about six or seven hours (it is not too hard to get the wife and kids to help when they understand their quality of life is at stake).
   The great peach tree replant has begun here. If you did not see it here before, almost all of the trees we planted last year died. Why? is stupidity a good excuse? I did not take care of the trees when they arrived - might have let them dry out before planting - planted them into the field too late - over fertilized them in mid summer - what was left by late summer was taken care of by the deer and drought. So, since my german wife is so stubborn and I just went along with her to keep from making waves (you believe me right?), we have started replanting the trees.
  Spring is just around the corner - get ready!

Friday January 15, 2010 ----  Looks like we made it through the 'big freeze' with minimal damage. We have two early Strawberry varieties that had blooms showing or about to show - those blooms were killed. Those blooms would have represented ripe berries in mid to late February which is a little earlier than we would like to start picking.  When we have berries that early it is hard to keep them protected from freezes, in past years we have picked during the day and had to cover at night - which gets old pretty fast. Anyway those early varieties only account for 5,000 of the 90,000 we have planted.  We took off the frost covers earlier this week in preparation for the rain we are getting now.  The warmer weather forcast for next week will be a tremendous help in getting the Strawberry plants moving. We want them to be actively growing and blooming about three weeks from now so now is the time to get them moving. If we have another cold spell we will cover up the plants again and leave it down for awhile.
    About 3000 of our recently planted onions froze. They will be easily replanted and in fact are half done.
    I don't think the older Blackberry canes were hurt but it looks like we might have some tip damage on the plants we planted last year.  It should not be enough to kill the entire plant so that is good.
    Overall we feel extremely blessed and are looking forward to a great upcoming Spring season.

Wednesday January 6, 2010 ----- Sounds like we have some cold weather coming. You might have heard on the news about the Florida Strawberry Growers being in a panic about the impending cold snap. We are not overly concerned here, so why the difference? The Florida growers are actively producing berries and we don't even have any blooms showing. Remember, at this time of the year, the plant of our main variety Chandler will withstand temperatures in the low teens without much damage. Just to be safe, we don't like them to see temps under 15. While the plant is fairly hardy, the blooms are not and will die at temps below freezing. Oddly enough we have noticed that the further along the actual berry is to being ripe, the lower the temps it can handle. Many times we have seen the blossoms get frozen while the berries did not. Regardless, for the Florida growers with blooms and berries alike, a few hours below 28 would be a huge hit to production. Since it takes about 30 days from bloom to fruit, they are looking at a month of little to no production if they cannot somehow protect their plants. We have covered most of our 6 acres with Frost Covers that should give us an added 5 to 8 degrees of protection. 6 acres is one thing but hundreds of acres is another, we wish the best to them. Of course there is nothing we can do about the weather, let's hope that it doesn't get down to 10 or lower.
    I've always heard that very low temps will kill some of the pests waiting to attack us in the Spring, that would be a good thing for sure.  The Blackberry canes are very dormant so I would not expect any damage on them.
    Since we have slowed down abit lately I have been able to spend some quality time in the goat pen. In late November we had 71 kids born and in December we had 11 from a embryo transfer 'flush' between our doe 'Purdy' and a buck named 'Status Quo'. Two of the eleven died upon arrival giving us nine live kids. Since we are striving to build the quality of our herd, we were after mostly females. Would'nt you know it, we ended up with seven bucks and two does. Oh well, two of the bucks are outstanding and might have a bright future.  The herd has been grazing in the 'Texas Maze' field for awhile now and have most of it eaten/trampled down.  Back when the Maze was still tall, we put feed out one day and went out to call the goats up to the barn. After a call or two, all of the goats appeared suddenly, running out of the Maze. It looked like 'Goats of the Corn!'.

For Fresh News from previous years, just click the link below:

Somewhere along the way we lost Fresh News 2000. I have some old pc's in the barn, maybe I can find it there.