Product Report - Phil Croy

Navel Oranges

Famous last words but I should have known that December would not be the end of the Navel season…… the last of the Barnfield variety were in fact packed on the 17th January 2018 bringing the season to a close...finally!!

As mentioned in the last issue of Fresh Focus once grower payments are finalised I will be calculating the End of Season reports and making the LRA payment.

Matt Carter is already looking at the 2018 Navel crop and commented that fruit size is looking a couple of weeks ahead of last season and that this will mean that the first GA applications are also likely be early.  Touch base with him on that front.

 

Valencia Oranges

We just scraped through the Xmas / New Year’s period on Loose fruit and still had a reasonable volume of smaller fruit remaining after slower than expected sales of pre-pack fruit.

With the re-gig in the pack house we have used some T1 Medium in Pre-pack bins to cover Loose sales until the line is back up and running, this will move through the remainder of the stock on hand pretty quickly.

 

Satsuma Mandarins

Since returning from my holidays I have started to get around a few blocks to get a handle on how well chemical thinning has worked and how the crop is looking for the up and coming season.

These pictures were taken at one block where they had a successful result from chemical thinning.  Now they have a crew working through the blocks breaking up any bunches of fruit and thinning out any tree’s that are still over loaded.

satsuma sizing

sats

Matt Carter and I will be out and about over the next 6-8 weeks in the usual build up for the up and coming Satsuma season.

I will attempt to get some information out of Northland in regards to how things are looking up there to date and will report back to growers in the near future.