Apple Picking

Did you know it takes 3-5 years for apple trees to produce apples after planting? Our pick your own apple orchards are a long labor of love, starting with nurturing a seedling tree, then grafting it onto our root stock and carefully training and pruning it into a row.

WINTER: Every winter we hand prune all 40,000+ trees, to promote tree health, decrease pests and encourage fruit development.

SPRING: In the spring, when the apple blossoms start blooming, we purchase and rent bumble bees and honey bees to pollinate.  In order to grow big, juicy apples we also must hand-thin some of the blossoms off every tree. It’s a balance! Too little blooms and the crop is thin, too many blooms the apples are small and can become diseased. 

During the early season we also spread a rich compost we create on the farm, to provide organic nutrients back into the soil. After the spreading of compost we then cover with mulch, which helps to retain nutrient-rich soil and moisture where the trees need it.  Mulching our rows also creates a weed and grass free row, meaning NO RoundUp, which is commonly used in orchard rows on other farms.

SUMMER: During dry growing seasons, we water over 90% of our crops from water retention ponds through our drip irrigation system. Drip irrigation slowly supplies water to the roots of our trees, drip by drip, which means very little water run off, if any, and no water evaporation into the air like traditional overhead sprinklers. All and all, we are using less water than traditional overhead sprinklers require.

We grow our fruit utilizing the Integrated Pest Management system. This means we monitor pest levels  throughout the growing season by hiring scouts to manually count insect types and populations. The IPM approach means pesticides often are not even used, even when pests are present, because there are not enough of them to pose a serious threat to the crops. Overall, IPM helps to reduce the use of pesticides all-together which is the bottom-line goal of most conscientious consumers.

Fall: In August we start checking the apples daily, as varieties enter their picking window, to monitor their ripening progress. We carefully determine when picking starts and do not allow picking until we’ve reached optimal ripeness. It is important to us that everyone experiences our apples at the peak of their flavor and that we manage the picking of our orchards to reduce leftover fruit, which is both a waste and also promotes pest and disease.