Beltane Garlic Moon
Still bagging apples, plums and pears, too. This seems like a lot of work, but for our size orchard it makes sense. Whether you could scale it up to commercial orchards I don’t know. Would depend on access to cheap, competent help at the right time of year. The rewards are certainly there. A fruit crop without the worms that come from insects depositing eggs on the fruit’s surface or under its skin. In a bad year the difference between a decent crop and almost no crop would be the bags.
Each year the land and the plants speak to the gardener. So a key part of gardening, even critical, is listening skill. If you don’t hear the news that there is not enough light here, no matter how many7 times you plan the zinnias in the shade you will be disappointed. If the stunted growth and yellowed leaves of a vegetable doesn’t tell you the soil needs amending, you will not have good vegetable crops. If wormy fruit doesn’t tell you you need to do something, you’ll have poor apple and pear and plum crops each year.
Kate takes care of another form of communication: weeds. Weeds are just a plant out of 
place so there’s nothing inherently wrong with them. You just don’t want them there. Usually natives or imported exotics, weeds are plants that have found what I call a happy home, a place where they can thrive. That means weeds can crowd out, out feed, sometimes frankly poison plants you want to grown.
Often vegetables and flowers we want to grow are not native to our region, may not even be native to our gardening zone. Any pressure on their growth makes them more vulnerable to weed competition. So often time the gardener is in the peculiar position of championing plants that may not want to grow in your particular garden while trying to eliminate those that are perfectly happy there. Some times you can use natives, many only use natives these days, and they make gardening much simpler. Since they grow like weeds.
