Double tasking today: partly watching the rain advance on laptop radar, then getting up to watch it plinking into the frying pan we set on the deck to feed cats and measure rainfall.
It could rain all day and rain all night and it would not be enough to bring the well up enough that we could actually water the vegetables … except from the ponds, which are only slightly more than mere wetland now, and I don’t know if much less than a week of rain would be enough to get the orchard through a good fruiting.
It is a good thing we have social security and egg money, because …. after several years of disasterous late freezes… if we were depending on produce from our hundred trees, we would have been eating bark.
Then this season, we had the early warm temperatures again, but (so far) no freeze, although … with the present administration of climate … a freeze could happen anytime.
We had so many blooming Pear trees this season that I was afraid there would be more fruit than I could tend to; but I have only found a dozen or so trees that will have a full crop that I will need to thin and harvest.
I leave a few of the natural trees to grow tall in the steeple form that allows them to come up above the brush and pollinate the others through the wind.
But that didn’t suffice. It seems we really need another agent of pollination.
I saw a couple of honey bees when the Horse Chestnuts were flowering, which is not the swarm we need to do the job.but they are non native anyway; they are commonly trucked up here from florida, like other migrant laborers in season. We do have neighbors with their own hives, but we should be able to depend on our native bees anyway, even if they can’t be enslaved and don’t look like Disney cartoon characters.
So have the native American bees all been pushed to reservations, or what?
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