Incredibly cute (and yet, no picture), plus a bit on thinning

It probably goes without saying that I am besotted by our mascot (a.k.a. The Hudson Valley's Handsomest Hound), but I just had to tell you that he is especially cute when he is enjoying fresh asparagus. It's hard to capture with a camera because I'm greedy enough that I never give him a whole stalk. He gets the bottom ends only and he chews them waaaaay back with his hind teeth. I have no idea why it's so cute. I'll have to figure out if I can take a video. I have to be able to post video when the apples are ripe, because another endearing thing Weasley does is fetch apples. He won't fetch anything else, though. And I swear we didn't train him to do that!

Okay, apologies for gushing over my dog. I got a little distracted by the tractor and sprayer out my window. I would imagine they're putting another (?) thinning agent on. I'll talk more about thinning in the next few days. This year, we're going to get into it MUCH earlier than we did last year. (I hope!) The fruit set this season is amazing (go bees!), and we hardly got hit by frost, which means there are entirely too many little fruitlets out there on the trees. The conventional response to too much fruit is to spray any number of chemicals that kills off the weaker buds. Obviously, here at Little Dog, we don't roll like that. So I'll be reaching out to my neighbor to hire hands to snap off hundreds (possibly thousands) of buds per tree.

The crazy thing is, thinning ends up meaning more fruit in the long run. I'm going to try to take or find good pictures so I can illustrate this stuff for you a bit better. Pictures are good, right?