Tree Chilling Hours and a Bad Bug
We’re around 770 chilling hours this season — almost 100 more than last year at this time. We hope this means we get a good crop off our ~800 chilll hour apricot (it was our first fruit tree and we had no concept of chill hours; with the usual climate and especially with climate change we’re now focusing on <500 chill hour trees). I put compost around the new nectarine, the new asparagus bed, and on the edible garden in advance of last night's rain; the clay loam soil needs some organic matter. We got 0.5 inches of rain last night. Meanwhile, here is a photo of the larval form of a beetle eating our poor cherry tree’s sap wood. It was a few centimeters long. Reminds me of Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.