Time marches on and it is already April. I don't know where the time goes. We have been catching up on some maintenance and such lately. Jonathan and his dad, Chalmers, have been working on the coffee dryer to make it easier to run. We did some orchard maintenance as well. As I mentioned last update, we replaced all of the above-ground irrigation drip lines with a newer kind. The old ones were getting beat up by UV and feral pigs and were just too worn out to keep repairing. The new lines have high-tech drip emitters that are already embedded in the line every 12 inches and include check valves are are pressure-regulating. Cool stuff.
We were sad to learn that our Dosatron (the fertilizer injector we use to fertigate the orchard) has passed on. It was 13 years old and a discontinued model. It died a quiet death last Wednesday. So the new replacement Dosatron arrived this morning. We will be taking it out of the box and hooking it up, maybe this afternoon. Good thing we have a math major and two engineers here to calibrate it and determine the appropriate run times for the zones.
We had another minor bloom of Kona Snow last week. Quite a few of the trees are getting heavy already with green cherry. We really need to prune our monkey pod trees that are within the orchard but I'm not sure we will get that done this year. Coffee needs lots of sun to put on fruit, but also shade is good to keep the trees from drying out. The monkey pods are beautiful large trees that provide shade but right now ours are a bit thick and low. So a pruning to raise the canopy would be good. The coffee trees under the monkey pods are very healthy but don't produce much fruit if they are in shade all day long.
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