From the Fields - Max Francesconi

By Max Francesconi, Sacramento County farmer

We’re about halfway through the first blooms of cherry season. We have early to late varieties, so we have cherries pretty much all season long. Our early stuff is about halfway through. The middle-season stuff is starting to bloom right now. Late-season varieties will be here in the next seven to 10 days. We’ll be monitoring that in the next week or so for bloom sprays and protection of the blooms.

We’re also going to start pruning our grapes next week. I know a lot of other farmers, especially in our area, have pretty much finished pruning, but we prune ours a little later in the season, after we chop up our cover crop within our grapes.

We’re also replanting trees that have died just to fill in the gaps within our cherry orchards and within some of our walnuts. We’re finishing up our winter projects before the season really gets going. Right now, we are working on a couple of the pumps we pulled. We got some of them redone. We’re reconfiguring our water situation because we are getting some harvest water, so we’re trying to retrofit our pumps for that.

We have our oats and wheat still growing. The oats get green chopped for silage. After the oats are chopped, we will either plant those in the corn for silage or dried beans. It has yet to be decided how much of each.