As you can see SnoTober was not kind to the trees on our farm. Almost everything we've planted is the past 14 years is broken, cracked or crushed, the weight of 18 inches of heavy snow was just to much for the leaf laden trees and shrubs, this was an odd snow not the heavy/wet as we've seen in the past this snow was sticky/wet snow. At one point Saturday night I went out to look around and looked up at the telephone wire, it was six inches in diameter with snow the entire three hundred foot length, this stuff stuck to everything. The orchards are crushed, we lost 5 complete trees, and numerous branches out of the small orchard, we'll probably end up with four maybe five survivors. Eight brush piles now line the side yard waiting spring, we cut up quite a bit of the apple trunks for firewood, so it wasn't a complete loss.
The Santa Rosa plums seem to have come through OK, the Blueberries are now upright since the snow melted.
While we do occasionally get a good crop of apples mostly they're there for the wildlife because we don't spray them anymore. The apples tend to have a few bugs and are generally pretty gnarly looking. We've had turkeys, come through, the Robins seem to like them as well in the fall and lots of deer that scavenge the grounds for the drops. Then today we're taking down tree after tree and I see this huge almost perfect apple sitting there on the ground. It's mine!
The Bittersweet is spectacular this year this is growing up the back side of the small orchard.
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