Well, another harvest season has come and gone. The twelve and fifteen hour days of picking, washing and sorting fruit, selling product, loading trucks for markets have now ended. We now will enjoy a little respite before the pruning season begins. Quite nice to take a break from the fast paced life of apple harvest.
We were quite happy with the support and the feedback from our customers in regards to the U-Pik location. Our overall goal was to have families enjoy the orchard setting and for children to have hands-on experience in seeing the development and harvest of apples. There is far more to supplying food than just going to the grocery store and filling the grocery cart. We wanted the U-Pik to be a source for this learning and create an awareness of the complexities of agriculture.
Overall a we experienced a good harvest season. Although we had challenges from Mother Nature in terms of weather during the summer, she compensated with excellent weather for apple picking. The freezing temperatures of late April and the straight line winds and hail in July created more damage to the apples than we had first thought. We had considerable freeze damage to the Gala, Blondie, Gingergold, McIntosh, Mutsu, Jonagold and Red Delicious. We had limited quantities of these customer favorites. As we continued to pick, hail damage was evident in almost all of the other apple varieties. Pea size hail does no favors to an apple orchard.
The past week was spent bringing in the ladders from the orchard, storing crates, winterizing the equipment and finishing sales. Next on our “to-do” list is to repair the crates damaged during picking, fertilize the orchard and then to get the equipment ready for pruning which will begin as cold temperatures set in and the trees go into dormancy.
If there is any need to make contact with us during the harvest season or in the “down” time, please find us on Facebook under Doll’s Orchards and direct your questions and concerns there. We will make every effort to respond. Sorry to say, we don’t respond so well from this post.