From the Fields - James Chinchiolo

By James Chinchiolo, San Joaquin County walnut and cherry farmer

With respect to walnuts, we are aggressively pruning. We lost several days of pruning because of all the rain this winter, so we’re pruning as quickly as possible. We want to get that done before the leaves come out. We’re also looking at applying copper for blight purposes. We’re thinking about our strategy and how we want to approach that spray.

I’m encouraged by the new leadership at the walnut marketing board. The walnut industry is trying to get walnuts into the produce area of the store as opposed to the baking area, making walnuts more accessible as a snack, adding flavors to them and making them a lot more convenient, a lot more attractive to a typical domestic consumer. We’re trying to grow our walnuts as efficiently as possible and looking forward to a brighter future and better returns to the grower.

At least with my cherries, the crop looks like it has a tremendous amount of potential this year. On some of my trees, the cherry has completely broken out of the bloom jacket. We can see the baby cherries; they’re like little green peas right now. I have some that are just entering into breaking out of the jacket. They’re sizing well, and there’s a lot of consistency throughout the orchard. We finished up our fungicide sprays, and we’re going into our petal-fall sprays. We have the risk of rain in front of us, as we do every year.

The storms that came through, I think they did a good job of flushing out the soil. They certainly helped bank water, getting it to deeper depths within our orchards, so that’s been positive. Because the winter was so cool, we accumulated plenty of chill portions. Last year was a disaster year because of frost, so coming off of that, our trees have a bunch of energy that they want to expend producing fruit.