Your favorite horticulturist is back with another Orchard Update! Do you ever wonder what apples look like in the early stages of development? In one of our Yakima apple orchards, Dave Gleason illustrates how trees progress from bloom to bud to fruit. At this time of year, the priority is assessing development and mitigating risks in the orchard to harvest the highest-quality crop possible come fall. Weather, water, and pests can all be factors.
Dave moves on to explain the science of apple clusters and their journey to harvest. Apples cluster in groups of five or six naturally, but the goal is to reduce that to one apple in order to increase size. Each cluster has a dominant bloom called the king bloom, this one is generally the dominant apple that survives as the smaller fruit begins to fall away. If the apples don’t fall away naturally, we step in to thin the crop. These are the activities happening in Superfresh orchards right now!
The fruit changes daily, and we are eager to see the development of our 2024 crops in the coming weeks and months! Check back in next month for your Orchard Update fix and see what’s new at Superfresh Growers.
