When the tangerine trees blossom, what a farmer looks at first

Every year around this time, the tangerine trees bloom with white flowers. It's also a busy season, because this is when we need to spray machine oil emulsion and Bordeaux mixture.

Fruit we couldn't pick last year — no flowers this year

Trees that still had fruit we couldn't pick last year didn't flower this year. We're learning again, from experience, why it matters to carefully remove every tangerine at harvest time.

Looking at each tree differently

A lot of branches had also died, especially on trees with weak vigor. To try a method we'd come across in an agricultural course, we decided to use makgeolli (Korean rice wine) as a supplement (this isn't a generally recommended fertilizing method — just a personal attempt at the time). Seeing that last year's tangerines had generally grown larger, we also judged that the trees were fairly vigorous, so this year we decided to split our care between mainly microbial management and diluted fertilizer, depending on each tree's condition.

Spraying — when the blossoms open, and after they fall

When the trees bloom, we spray machine oil emulsion and Bordeaux mixture, and once the fruit has set and the flowers drop, we spray machine oil emulsion once more. When the fruit has grown enough, we plan to thin it as well.

A bird's nest we found while pruning

The nest we found while pruning had baby birds in it. We were worried because the mother bird was nowhere to be seen, but there wasn't much we could do.

Looking back now — this lesson, that "last year's care shows up in next year's flowering," led to our habit of recording each tree's condition year by year.