Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Remote pest monitoring

We like to think we are an early adapter to applications of technology on the farm. We have been using remote soil moisture tracking for more than eight years now, to make irrigation decisions. We combine it with data from our on-site weather station to calculate precise watering needs for each block of the orchard. We are currently experimenting with remote monitoring of pest insects (picture below). I will probably write a detailed post on this later.


Saturday, August 1, 2015

Orchard canopy closing in the space between rows

This is a patch of whitmore orchard that we planted about 7 years ago. The trees are so big already that the tree canopy is beginning to shade the row-space completely.




Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Candycot thinning

Here are some pre-thinning, thinning, and post-thinning pictures from the candycot orchard. Pre thinning counts average over thousands of fruit per tree! Post thinning, only hundreds of fruit remain per tree. If we don't do thinning, overcrowding results in inferior quality of fruit (small size, bruises, etc.).



Snow on the ground !?

I know it does look like it, but not really. It's "petal fall" stage of the almond bloom. These are pics from February.