We were doing a coach tour of the floración, the flowering, the blossom on the fruit trees in Cieza. Like lots of places with almonds, cherries, peaches, etc., Cieza makes a bit of a thing about it. They have a big programme from country breakfasts and bike rides to photographic exhibitions, music competitions and visits to lots of local places of interest all tied in to the blossom.
I have to be honest and say I usually forget until it's too late. For some reason, Cieza, which is only 45 minutes from Culebrón, isn't one of those places I think of as a likely destination. What I should do, as soon as I see some sort of fruit tree with blossom, is check what Cieza has on offer and get us booked in.
The first time we ever heard of la Floración was when I worked in Cieza. I'd seen the posters but never taken much notice and, when I did, in 2018, it turned out to be the last weekend of the event. We got a map and traipsed around a route but we didn't feel to have done it justice. Then, last year, or it may have been in 2022, we remembered, too late again. The official event was actually over, but we thought there would still be something to see. There wasn't. We ended up driving aimlessly around back roads near Cieza, not quite knowing what we were trying to find.
This year I remembered. I booked up a tour on a bus which was nice enough without being roller coaster exciting. I understood enough of what the guide said to have enough information to be excruciatingly boring the next time we're driving visitors past trees in bloom.
I'll be able to talk about the different ways to prune the trees to make the harvesting easier. I can drone on about how spraying the trees with water, when frost is predicted, can protect the blossom by enclosing it in ice. I can talk about how a lot of the blossom has to be removed from the trees with big fans and by hand, to ensure that the fruit has room to grow and won't damage the tree. I can escape specific answers as to which tree is which by saying how the colours and size of the blossom are a general guide to whether the tree is plum, peach, nectarine or apricot but that there are so many varieties that the only real way to know what's what is to be someone who knows what was planted.
We also found out that the future of the floración is in danger. One of the reasons is why farmers, all over Europe, are currently invading cities with huge John Deere and Massey Ferguson tractors. The price paid to them for their crops bears no relation to the prices for the product in the supermarkets. The farmers feel they are being diddled. More prosaically though the problem with the floración might be that there will be no pretty coloured blossom to see.
Hail is one of the big threats to a successful harvest. Hailstorms are not infrequent in this part of Spain and often they come at just the wrong time and destroy the harvest. In order to protect the trees and their fruit the growers have started to put marquee-type plastic meshing above the trees. Effective they may be but nobody is going to be keen to look at hectares and hectares of off-white plastic anti-hail meshing.
