Laura Gutile Madera County pistachio grower
I harvested my pistachios late. It was about a week off of normal. I finished in mid-Oc- tober. We haven’t gotten final reports yet, but on the preliminary reports, my insect damage was very low. I had a lot of closed shell, which is not real normal. But the quality looks pretty good. The yield was up a little bit from the year before. It was a decent year overall. We had very little pest pressure. We were able to do our orchard sanitation. The orchards around me were able to do their sanitation as well. We had very little navel orangeworm damage. We did do a couple of timed sprays. It seemed like the edges of my orchard were affected. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I’m lucky that I’m in an area where everyone practices orchard sanitation and does the mummy shakes and the shredding. Right now, we’re not doing much. We irrigated a little bit to give the trees a drink of water. Normally, we apply a foliar zinc, but this year we decided not to based on the cost. We’re getting together with our PCA and formulating a plan going into the next growing season. That involves soil samples, tissue samples and moisture levels. All that plays a part in how we do things nutrient-wise, foliar spray-wise or fertigation-wise. It’s been a wacky year. All the rain in early spring came at the worst times, like when everything was starting to wake up. Fortunately, our orchard can take water, and we weren’t flooded. Everybody is predicting an El Niño super-wet year, so it could be back-to-back wet years. Maybe we’ll get enough water, and we won’t have to irrigate at all. I was grateful for the rain and grateful for the farmers that were able to take the floodwaters to recharge systems and help the aquifer as a whole. But I found you can’t plan for rain.
Photo/Courtesy Laura Gutile
November 29, 2023 Ag Alert 5
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