Sac Valley Orchards

Franz Niederholzer, UCCE Farm Advisor, Colusa, Sutter, Yuba Counites Bottom line: In many prune orchards in the Yuba City/Gridley area, it looks like a decent to good crop set, but early bloom + warm post-bloom weather may deliver: early reference date (April 13-16 this year?) a relatively poor fruit sizing year (early thinning, where needed, should improve final dried fruit ...

Curt Pierce, Irrigation and Water Resources Advisor, Glenn, Tehama, Colusa, and Shasta Counties If you are using a pressure chamber or FloraPulse sensors to manage your prune irrigation, you may be interested in our new online tool for stem water potential (SWP) measurements. Tables have been developed and published by UC to determine baseline SWP values, which ...

Domena A. Agyeman, UCCE Agricultural Economic Advisor; Butte, Glenn, and Tehama Counties Becky Wheeler-Dykes, UCCE Orchard Systems Advisor; Glenn, Tehama and Colusa Counties Cropload management is one of the most important practices in prune production. Timely and appropriate (fruit per tree) thinning can improve fruit size, enhance quality, increase market price, and ultimately boost grower return. However, with ...

Clarissa Reyes, Orchard Systems Advisor, Sutter, Yuba, Butte and Placer counties Peach harvest can be predicted fairly accurately by the temperatures in the first 30 days following bloom. Other factors such as weather near harvest, soil, tree nutrition, and water status can also have some effect on harvest date. On average, we accumulate about 6,000 growing degree ...

Jaime Ott, UCCE Tehama, Shasta Glenn, Butte Counties Given the early bloom and leaf-out of our walnuts this year, spring rain will put us at risk of blight. At the time of writing, we are already past catkin expansion and into leafout in the orchards I monitor. This would be a year to have started your blight ...