Spring is here and soon we won’t be the only ones working hard in the orchard. Before the apples can start growing, the blossoms need to pollinated. In my last post we looked at a year in the orchard; this time we’re discussing the first step
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A year in the orchard
It has been a cold January; the coldest in decades. I have been waking up each morning to check the temperature sensors scattered throughout the different blocks of my orchard, hoping that it would be warm enough to work. Every day lost to the frigid weather
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Breathing new life into the orchard
On my farm we have a general policy to replant five percent of our farm every spring, which means that our oldest trees are only twenty years old. There are a couple of different factors behind why we do this. First, as trees age they suffer more from
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Adventures in Planting
Spring in the orchard is a stressful time of year, there are many jobs to do, things to fix, and not a lot of time to get it all done. One of the biggest jobs is planting, which has just finished for the year, so I
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Joel Carter: To earn a harvest boon, you must winter prune
It may surprise many to learn that winter is a very busy time of the year for orchardists. While our trees aren’t growing, the irrigation isn’t running, and we can’t break ground to plant trees, we have perhaps the single largest job of any successful orchard
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Introducing a familiar face (and name!) to the OSF team
Hello, my name is Joel Carter, and it’s my privilege to introduce myself as the newest member of the Okanagan Specialty Fruits team. Yes, I am the son of OSF founders Neal and Louisa Carter, and yes, I have the same name as current OSF employee
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