Early Spring at the Cidery
It's hard to believe almost an entire summer break has passed already. Since this all began we've found new ways to celebrate birthdays and milestones, pivot our business, reach our customers and today we mark the end of the first long weekend of the summer in this new reality.
Normally we'd have seen many of you at market and then tried to sneak in a hike or some time by the bay. But this hardly felt like a normal May 24th weekend did it?
We’ll admit we're a little sore from a whirlwind of spring tree digging and garden planting. The forecast is looking like summer is on its way, so it was a mad rush this week to get everything into the ground before the rain last night. But we did it.
Bring on the sunshine.
2020 definitely seems like the year of adjustment. The original plan was to plant out our cider orchard this coming fall, but unfortunately we lost most of the cider apple trees we had grafted in our nursery this spring. Remember that one last storm late March? It left us with 40+ inches of snow, and in this particular corner the gusts piled over 4ft of the white stuff (to just above the tree guards), making a perfect dining table for the hungry rabbits to munch their way right around each and almost every tree.
With girdling like this there's little hope left for these whips, as the roots have no means to send energy and nutrients up through the bark to keep the tree alive. We hope we'll be able to salvage the root stocks, by trimming the dead trunk above and re-grafting this summer if the root is showing signs of life. Stay tuned.
In the meantime we've discovered hundreds of root suckers growing in our old/wild pear and plum orchards. These are very old trees and they're particularly sensitive to wind damage, which we tend to get a lot of! We lost a number of older limbs in the pear orchard last year, and this spring hundreds of baby trees have shot up from the roots of the trees.
The pure tenacity of these trees to keep growing and fruiting for the generations to come is something we find inspiring. And in the spirit of working with what we've got, we've dug and transplanted a few dozen so far, and will keep the experiment growing this season. We can never make enough of our Wild Perry and we know you've been waiting for our next release, it's coming!