peaches – Star Field Farm

Plum tree, coated in white

In the six years we’ve been at StarField, we’ve harvested a scant handful of plums. The trees set flowers, get visited by a ton of pollinators, make fruitlets, and then sometime in June – just when we’re thinking of all the plums we’re going to get to eat, the tree decides life as a fruit produces is just too stressful and drops nearly all of its plums.

So I moved on. Focused all my love and care on the peach trees. *They* gave me bountiful harvests each August and the plums? Well, I labeled them prima donnas.

And then earlier this year, we had a brutal February deep freeze. Peaches set their flower buds early and without a coating of snow to insulate them, they all died.

Peach branches in a canning jar vase on the dining room table. — Peach branches putting out only leaves

There will be no peaches in New England this year.

:sob:

So, I turned my attention back to the plums. While there was some fear that *all* stone fruit would be affected by the February freeze, our plum trees actually set a ton of flower buds. Which meant I had to figure out how to shepherd a crop to ripening.

And no, my plum trees are not prima donnas, they have the dreaded plum curculio. My first salvo in the battle against the destructive beetles is a coating spray of surround – a finely milled kaolin (clay) that acts as an irritant to the beetles and discourages them from laying their eggs.

Gray-haired woman in overalls stands on the front porch with her hands out. She is dotted in white clay.

It’s a bit fiddly to use – it can clog up sprayers, gets all over – and it needs to be sprayed frequently through the season, especially if rain washes off the protection. But it’s not an insecticide and isn’t harmful to pollinators.

So we’ll see.

The slow march of construction time

We’re closing in on the end of June and we have little progress on the build to show for it. Some of the delay has been because of the unusually wet spring we had in New England. It’s hard to move dirt when it turns into mud in the torrential downpours. Part because of communication lags between the excavation phase and the foundation phase. Part because this is a small project compared with the larger commercial projects our contractors also are responsible for, so when the choice is between pouring concrete for a large building or a subdivision versus our garage project, it’s not hard to see why we’re still without a foundation.

But we have footings, and we’ve heard from the builder that the foundation will start to be poured tomorrow. Keeping fingers crossed.

The other way of measuring time is by watching the seasons progress. When be first bought StarField Farm, it was deep winter, full of stillness and silence.

Now, we revel in the sounds of birdsong, wind rustling in the trees, the brook gurgling over rocks, frogs and crickets in the evening.

And everything is green.

Summer green

The peaches on our 3 trees are getting noticeably larger each time we spend a weekend here. They are now about 1 and 1/2 inches in diameter. The last weekend we were here, they were about half that size. That was the day I culled about 25% of the fruit on the trees, lest the weight of the peaches bring the limbs down.

These were the peaches we culled from the trees. :sob:

Last night, just as I was remarking to Neil that I was disappointed that I hadn’t seen fireflies, they started sparking in the low light of dusk. We watched from the back porch as the fireflies were replaced by the distant wink of stars overhead. I think we even saw the ISS zip by.