I went smart!!!!

A couple of weeks ago my old phone died.....  and I got lured by the dark side, or I finally caught up with the rest of you?  Yup I got a smart phone and the best thing about it is there is always a camera in my pocket.  Over the past couple of weeks I've been taking some pics of Butternut Farm during the beautiful month of May.  I thought it would be fun to share some with whomever was interested in checking them out. 

Strawberry patch.  About the second week in May.  No flowers yet but they are soon to come.  From first flower to ripe fruit it takes about 1 month and our first flower emerged this year on May 14th.  So be ready in mid June for Pick Your Own Strawberries.  Any of you avid farmer Giff blog readers will remember a previous blog when I talked about how we applied the 500 +/- bales of straw to the patch around thanksgiving time.  Well in mid April we raked all that straw off the plants and they took off growing! 

A couple of things going on here.  First is the close up of the Blueberry bush in bloom.  Notice the bell shaped flowers all clustered together.  Each flower will turn into an individual blueberry!  Also more importantly going on here is the Bumble Bee.  Yup they are responsible for doing the lions share of the pollinating duties in our Pick Your Own Blueberry patch.   I like to think of them as the gentle giants of the pollinating world.   There are days when there will be three or four bees in each bush.  A really fascinating thing to see!

Mid may in the Apple Orchard!  This year was a "Snow Ball Bloom" as the saying goes.  The abundance of flower buds in early spring leads to what looks like a snow storm in the apple orchard during May.  These Pick Your Own apple trees are actually Honey Crisp.   Of all the flowers which are on these trees now during bloom I want only about 1 of 15 to actually turn into an apple and make it to harvest.  Any more than that and the trees will be overburdened leading to fruit quality issues and a tendency for the trees to go bi-annual and not create fruit buds for next years crop.  Fruit thinning, or culling the extra fruit, begins in early June!