|
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had a fair amount of rain this year! The rain is great, and we are incredibly thankful. However, it also delayed a lot of critical farm activities for our row crop friends and made it difficult to find a window of dryness to plant our new almond orchard. That said, a window of sunshine with just the right amount of wind to dry out the soil came the last week of February, and we pounced on it. For the last year and a half, we worked with our team and contracted teams to implement whole orchard recycling practices to cut, chip, and re-incorporate our 65-year-old walnut trees back into the ground, prep the ground by discing and hand removing roots, plant a cover crop, and install a new irrigation system in our 80-acre “Home Ranch.” All this work was in preparation for a new almond orchard that we finally planted in late February. We could not have completed this without the tremendous efforts of our farm team and the nursery team that planted 11,000 trees in one day! Half of the acreage is planted in a self-pollinating variety to decrease our dependence on honeybees. Check back in about five years to try our first harvest of almonds!
|
