The heavy spring snow has Annapolis Valley apple and grape growers in a race against time to stave off serious crop damage.

“We’re all having difficulties getting into our orchards because of the deep snow, and we’re all falling behind in our pruning,” Andy Parker of CAP Farms Inc. in Grafton said in an interview Tuesday.

Pruning is a critical annual component of apple production and some of it happens during the winter months and in the early weeks of spring, so growers can maximize crop production.

However, the inability to prune effectively this season because of the snow has an ominous backdrop in the fire blight bacteria.

The president of the Nova Scotia Fruit Growers’ Association said apple producers are scrambling against time and the deep snow to get as much pruning done as possible before the middle of May and trees begin to blossom.

Don’t be surprised to see some apple producers making their way through their orchards on snowshoes pruning the tops of their trees.

Some apple growers and their pruners will get into the orchards on snowshoes for an initial sweep, targeting the treetops, and then make a second pass to get the lower portions of the trees as the snow melts.

A similar story was heard from Gerry Chute, a Bear River-area grape grower with about eight hectares of white and red grapes under cultivation.

“We normally would be doing full pruning during February and March, and the deep snow means bringing in labour to help condense this to a shorter period of time,” said Chute, president of the Grape Growers Association of Nova Scotia.

He said workers with grape-pruning experience can be hard to find and the process must be completed so the vines can be attached to wires before they start to bud.

It’s difficult to prune vines buried under heavy snow. Chute said most grape growers, like most other people in agriculture, are optimistic by nature.

Source - http://www.freshplaza.com/