Williez4a, oil and water do not mix easily. Such a mixture is called an emulsion. The first step is to treat the oil with something like soap. The two must be thoroughly blended first and then the water is added; in portions, blending as it is added. The emulsion needs to be agitated regularly as it is used; otherwise it will "cream". The droplets of oil want to clump back together and rise to the top. If you use the mixture as made, one ounce per gallon might be enough for the purpose. I do not know. But if you apply it through a hose end sprayer, the solution in the jar has to be stronger because a further dilution takes place when it is added to the water stream.

Bonnie, Just getting set to do this today as a matter of fact..Running a couple of weeks behind Pending the weather we usually spray the first week or two of March..We do spray about two weeks after the trees drop leaves as well in the fall.. We use a home made spray with Kelp,Neem, hort oil and water.Used the same recipe for about 15 years now.. I also spray the kelp with a soap and water base in the summer for fungal prevention and foliage feeding on some of the trees here.. Like Dan said above you cannot get a good application unless you use a pressure sprayer..Very important the finer mist allows for the spray to settle onto the trees whereas the hose method is way to strong and washes it away.. Years ago on this site we had a pretty long post about some of this.In our area we are dealing with peaches, plums, sweet cherries, pie cherries, apples,apricots,pears,etc,, If I had to take a guess it actually sounds like your apple tree either did not get proper pollination or could be a bi-annual producer..Most of the time when there is a ton of blooms a little fruit it is one or the other..If you know what the name is on it check to see if you have proper pollinators for it close enough..Or the type of producer it may be.. Mary in MT

Of course you can build your garden beds wherever it suits you and there's nothing wrong with building below-ground hugelkultur beds that have hardware cloth-lined beds above them. That is exactly what I want to do with our back garden because of its sandy soil/vole population, but it is more on my "one of these days" list and not on my list to do this year due to the massive amount of work involved, and the fact that we still haven't even got all the beds in our front garden built yet. We started out with a handful of raised beds in the front garden 1999, and we have added about one per year or sometimes every other year since then. Since the front garden is a large garden, I feel like we'll never really finish building all the raised beds that it needs, much less then turn around and do the same thing to the back garden. Unfortunately, our best bed-building time is in winter and we are volunteer firefighters and winter fire season is our busiest fire season, so it seems like every single time we have a plan to build a new raised bed in the front garden, we end up spending that weekend fighting fires instead. So, the back garden limps along with no raised beds, plenty of voles and lots of suspense about how many plants the voles will eat and when they'll start. To be fair to the voles, they often don't bother the back garden plants until it gets hot and dry in summer, so I can make the best use of the back garden by planting cool-season crops and my early corn back there. Then, at least, we get something before the voles begin devouring everything. And, some years they don't bother the plants at all, but you cannot count on that. If you can dig deeply enough in your clay to build hugelkultur beds below the surface, then it is not nearly as compacted and dense as our clay was when we started. That's a good thing. You couldn't penetrate our clay 2", not even with a strong, heavy-duty rear-tine tiller, a mattock, or a pickax. Now, after all these years of amending it is pretty easy to dig down about 15-18" in that garden, which is a huge improvement but it has taken a long time to get to that point, and at the southernmost end of the garden, you can only dig down about a foot, but that was the last area to get amended and the last (so far) to get raised beds built above amended clay. Be sure the garden has a nearby water source to make irrigation, when necessary, easy to acomplish. And, of course, you're going to continue to have those moles, voles, gophers or any combination thereof tunneling through the good soil. So, if the good soil is intended to be a lawn, you still have to fight the little beasts or your lawn will be torn up and unsightly. On the other hand, all you have to do is visit farm land or ranch land torn up by feral hogs one time, and you'll be shocked, horrified and then very happy to go back to your place where your problem is only moles, voles, gophers and, if you're in some parts of NE OK, ground hogs.

The guys at Michigan State University that did the research on Castor Oil to repel moles said you need a mixture of 1 pint of Castor Oil in 1 quart sprayer filled with water and sprayed over 1,000 square feet. Anything short of that will not work. The Castor Oil coats and flavors the various insect larva the moles eat making them distasteful, there is no scent involved. Go to your local drug store and purchase the bottles of Castor Oil they sell since all of the so called Castor Oil sprays I have seen at the yard and garden stores have too little Castor Oil in them and are meant to be sprayed over too large an area (10,000 square feet) to be effective.