4-H is fun!!

Our older children are involved in 4-H clubs. Sometimes I wonder if they are involved in too many.

This Saturday they have an apple club meeting. I am the leader for this club. Wonder why? Could it be because we have 200 acres of apples....hmmm. This will be our second meeting. The first meeting was a tour of the Norfolk Fruit Growers Association packing facility. It is a huge storage and packing facility where our apples and about 30 other farmers apples go to be stored and packed. It is a co-operative. They pack 1/3 of all Ontarios apples and ship apples all over the world. Our largest customer is England.

For our second meeting the kids will be collecting spur samples from the apple trees. Spurs are the first blossoms and leaves that come out in the spring. We will then look at these under the microscope for the eggs of the Tentiform Leafminer. They are an indirect apple pest that are scouted for at this time of the year. The Tentiform Leafminer is an indirect pest because when the egg hatches the larvae tunnels into the leaf and first feeds on the sap in the leaf. As they grow they then feed on the inner tissue of the leaf. This damage reduces the amount of photosynthesis that occurs and thus can result in smaller fruit size. The kids should find this very interesting. It's neat just to look under the microscope at anything.

Tomorrow night Bobby and Princess Weaha have a 4-H pumpkin meeting. Everything they do will be pumpkin. For the achievement they have to enter something pumpkin in the Caledonia Fair.

In two weeks they have conflicting meetings. They have a Llama and calf club meeting on the same night. We'll probably opt to go to the calf club meeting. It is closer to home.

And so the fun begins.