Welcome to www.SunnysweetOrchardandFarm.com
386-366-1323
We are actually in Gilchrist County but our "City" mailing address in the area is Branford, FL.
In order to contact us please call or text the number above.
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| This is what things looked pretty much like when we bought the property. | One of our first tasks which took a lot longer than we thought was to clear the well. After I finally got most of this stuff out we found that someone plugged it up with lots of concrete blocks......... Talk about destruction!!! It took a while and then work from Russell Hook at All Pumps And Well Repairs Well Repair but we got the well running again FINALLY! |
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| After buying the property we needed to try to clear out a lot of weeds that had grown over. We planned to bush hog it and spoke with a local farmer who offered to burn it for us! So glad we took him up on that. It helped a lot and we could actually see the land now! | This is one of the first batches of apple trees for our orchard! |
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| Here I am cutting a line to help break up the soil. The little tractor was a little under powered to use the bigger plow or to get the disc plow deep enough so I started this way. | Here is the first planting of trees! Sadly we lost many of them. They survived the high temps, that caterpillars, the grasshoppers eating them BUT they were eaten by deer in the early fall. Deer protection fence would have cost WAY MORE than I could justify. The property is about 700 feet by 1700 feet. |
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| The above image you can see the barn that was installed the first year, and the power lines that alone took nearly a year till we could get it finally done..... BUT you will see just in front of the barn visually (actually it is only about 1/3 the way to the barn) where are bees are. The left row here are plums and the right row is Asian Pears. | This is a few of our apple trees!!! |
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| Above are SOME of the bees in one of our hives. This is how a bee hive should look through the entire hive. | This is one of our Flow Hives. I know a lot of people call them all sorts of things but I will say there is a lot that I really do like about these over the traditional hives. It sees to be very clean and a lot less disruption to the hive. As you can see from the above image this one was full of honey. I never take more than 1/2 of the honey. I am not really keeping the bees for the honey as much as we are for the pollination of our orchard but I will say this is some of the best honey I have ever had!!!! It is occasionally available for sale. just contact me |
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| I wanted to take some photos on a very dark moonless night. This is just one of a few I took. | This is a shot I took with a full moon at night. It was actually BEFORE the power was installed and the inside of the barn it lit by a rechargeable lantern. To give you a comparison the trailer to the right is a 16 foot trailer pulled by a Yukon XL. |
Michael Kevin Johnson text me at (386) 366-1323
Our actual mailing address is:
3560 Apple Orchard Dr., Deltona, FL 32738