Orchard Talk

A new Chinook wind machine went up at King Orchards last week. Due to the widely variable weather we hope this thing will provide some protection from frosts on cold clear nights. The idea is that on clear nights with no breeze the heat from the blossoms (and car windshields) is radiated away to space. The blossoms then become colder than the surrounding air, and as the air cools it becomes dense and sinks to the lowest areas. Our wind machine will take warmer air from up high and blow it past the blossoms to keep their temperatures from reaching extreme low temps. Sunday night when it dipped to 29 degrees about 5.00 am I started it up and I think it worked but 29 wasn’t cold enough for real damage even without the machine.

Frank King is home from college and put together a quick video for us.

The apricots have bloomed and they look very strong. The sweets are opening now and they look good too. Nectarines, Peaches, Apples, Balatons, Tarts, all opening in the next few days. Apples right behind them. We are really excited and enthusiastic and making plans to market the fruit. My apologies to those who inquired about bloom dates and I told them late next week (there will still be apple and maybe tart cherry bloom). The warm days really advance the fruit development.

The snow from last week is almost gone. The ice fishing gear is waiting to be put away. The ten day weather forecast has no frost predicted. Spring has finally broken through, even if it is still chilly.

Woke up to a beautiful white day. This is turning out to be one of the cooler springs in quite a while. So far this is all good for fruit growers. We are getting our trimming done while the trees are staying quite dormant. There is still the risk of frost or cold damage to the buds or blossoms, but, with each passing day the window where the crop is vulnerable gets smaller. It is a great time of year for growers because we are still at 100% crop potential.

Anticipating a good crop we have purchased dozens and dozens of new half bushel baskets, new t-shirt style bags for sweet corn and veggies with our logo. We bought 1,000 plastic cherry lugs last year and then they were not even unpacked. We also bought 700 new large plastic bins for shaking cherries into for making concentrate last year so we hope to put those to use this year too.
Most of the field hands are back to work trimming trees, and the shop guys are getting equipment ready to go. The bees are expected to show up from Florida tomorrow.

Snow in Heirloom Apple orchard

Lots of snow lately and cold weather. The Northern Michigan fruit growers have been more nervous about the weather than ever before so it has been comforting to have normal cold weather and a cold 10 day forecast
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We finally moved the bottling equipment into the new building on Church Rd. and spent all week bottling cherry juice concentrate. The loss of the 2012 crop created some tough circumstances. We bought all the concentrate we could find from processors in Michigan, Washington, and even Pennsylvania, where they had a cherry crop. We had to pay record amounts but we wanted to keep our product on the shelf. Some cherry juice sellers went a different route and bought sour cherry juice concentrate from Turkey. The Turkish concentrate is pretty good but it is not Montmorency (Morello actually) so it is not the same as the concentrate that all of the health studies have been done on. It was considerably cheaper than the scarce Montmorency concentrate so we have been forced to do our best sales job to keep things moving as planned.
Jim and Rose went to Hershey Pa. to the Mid-Atlantic Fruit growers convention and manned a cherry juice booth. Mark Schiller (Jim n Rose’s son in law), Jack and Bob Nelden (our sales manager) manned a booth in Grand Rapids for the Living Well conference.

Next week Jack and Mark are off to Grand Rapids for the MSU 3day fruit school. Then the following week they are off to Boston for the International Fruit Tree Association annual meeting. The latest in fruit tree systems and management, tours, lectures from leading researchers etc. The great part is that the Northwest Michigan Horticulture Research Board (from the research center in Leelanau) kicked in $1,000 each to send them! We will try to get a report when they get back.

We finally put up a deer fence around the M88 farm. We had resisted for years but the extensive winter browsing coupled with our increased plantings of close plant dwarf trees forced the move. We hope you don’t notice the fence.

I haven’t been ice fishing yet but I plan to get it together this weekend and get out soon.

The lack of snow so far has allowed us to keep the farm hands going. The manure is almost all spread and it doesn’t stink anymore (maybe I am immune). We are fixing equipment and storing it, nesting and storing the apple boxes. The Guatamalan crew has trimmed all of the mature tart trees, all of the mature apple trees and most of the mature sweet trees which will give us a good headstart next spring.

This is the 27th year for Pedro, Jesus, and Maria, and Juana is in her 26th year. Mark Doherty (our partner on the Russell Ridge Farms project, and a learned horticulturalist) has worked with our crew trimming over the years and he was trimming every day this fall. I am biased but when I go through the apples I can’t get over what a spectacular job these people do. The trees are gorgeous.

Jack is following the trimmers with the flail chopper which grinds up the trimmings and turns them into mulch. Today we have started trimming the raspberries. The raspberries were far and away the brightest part of 2012 with wave after wave of ripening berries from June until the hard frosts came.

In the fruitstand the workers (elves) have been cranking out apple shipping boxes and gift packs. We still will have apples for at least another month and the quality is very good, especially Spys, Golden Delicious, Ida Reds, and HoneyCrisp. We bought hand operated apple peeler/corer last year and we are peeling apples and freezing them for next summer’s apple pies. (Frank made a video of the peeler and it is on the King Orchards Facebook page).

I have been doing projections and analysis to present to the ag lenders so that we can be in position to put up many barrels of tart cherry juice concentrate should the tart cherry trees come through with a crop this coming year. It has been a very tough year but we sold cherries and tart cherry juice concentrate that we had in inventory, and we had enough apples to fill the markets. We sent Mark and Jack to farmers markets with apples trying to maximize every little bit. We were fortunate enough to be able to purchase enough domestic Montmorency cherry concentrate to get us through to next crop too. So all in all I think we are in pretty good shape! Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays.
John

We always look forward to the Expo which is held in Grand Rapids at the DeVos Center Dec 4, 5, and 6.. The place is packed with fruit industry people. I get pretty excited to see the latest in equipment and I still enjoy the education program. Then we hook up with some farm friends and go out to eat in Downtown Grand Rapids. This year we have rooms in the JW Marriott which is very plush and is just down the indoor walk to the convention hall. Woo Hoo!

This year we have decided to have a booth in the exhibition hall to promote our cherry juice concentrate. We were able to secure enough high quality US Montmorency cherry concentrate to keep us supplied until the 2013 crop, so we are going to get out and tell everyone. Our salesman Bob Nelden, Jim, Rose, Betsy, myself, and younger generation Jack and Mark will take turns manning the booth and giving out samples. We will be happy to meet with any of our wholesale customers who are going to be there. So if you want us to bring any concentrate to the Expo be sure to call or email before Monday afternoon.

Several news items that I should have posted earlier but I didn’t.
The biggest news is that Jim and Rose are grandparents again as Mark and Brande had a baby boy, Benjamin Mark Schiller. Ben Joins Maizey his 2 year old sister.
Next we are back in the cider business after a 17 year layoff. Jim and I bought an old 36 inch rack and cloth press a year ago and finally got it into service. We are currently only selling non-Pasteurized fresh cider, so we are not wholesaling it. You can only get it at our markets or the farmers markets that we frequent. We pressed today and we will press again in a week or so. We are still working some bugs out of the system but it is fun to have cider again.
Many will be excited to hear that the first of 15 double bottom semi loads of turkey manure arrive this week! We are spreading it starting in Grand Traverse County and working our way North over the next couple weeks. I am always amazed at how bad turkey manure smells, but for those who live in the smell zone please be patient, I hope the smell subsides in just a day or two after we get it spread. We are cognizant of how annoying it can be and we will pledge to spread it as soon after it is delivered as possible.

We are still blessed with an abundance of apples and we have some seconds for sauce or cooking too. Since the crop was so short we did not sell to the grocery store chain in the UP that we usually sell to. So we still have plenty here at the markets. We also have a bunch of squash left, Acorn, Butternut, Buttercup, Carnival, Sugar Dumpling, Delicata, and even some giant (and some not so giant) Hubbard squash.
John

It has been a great few weeks for us. Honeycrisp quality is excellent and demand is crazy. Galas picked more than our estimate so that is good news too. We are almost done picking. Today the pickers are wrapping up the last picking on Honeycrisp, and tomorrow they will probably finish Jonagold and Golden Delicious. The Northern Spy apples are big and beautiful and so are the Ida Reds. All of the apples taste sweeter this year due to the early season and warm weather. We have very few drops because we were so on top of picking the small crop. The processors are paying about $180.00 for a 20 bushel box of juice apples (about 4 times more than aversge) so the deer hunters are going to have price shock on deer feed apples.
With reduced apple picking we were able to do a good job with squash and pumpkins. Jim King and Josh spent a lot of time this summer getting the irrigation water wheels working and into the squash/pumpkin fields. This week we picked about sixty bins of big beautiful squash, and we ran them over the brush to get the dirt off and ready for sale.

With reduced apple volume we are doing a lot more retail to keep the cash flow up as much as possible. So on Wednesdays Rose and Betsy and sometimes an additional helper head to Alpena to direct market the apples and squash at the Alpena Livestock Auction grounds. We have been going since once a week in the fall since 1980. Jack is going to the Gaylord Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and Petoskey on Fridays. Jim’s son-in-law Mark Schiller went to Boyne City Farmers Market one Saturday but Boyne City Farmers Market doesn’t want us back this year as they want to protect their existing vendors. (from our awesome apples and marketing). Now Jack was refused entry at the Charlevoix Farmers Market too. (not to be confused with Charlevoix Apple Fest).

Looking forward we are going to continue at Gaylord, and Petoskey farmers markets while the weather and turnout allows. We are hoping for a big Saturday on October 6 at the Boyne City Harvest Festival. We haven’t done this one for a few years but it has grown and moved to downtown so we are fired up to be there. Then on October 12, 13, and 14, we will have a big crew at the Charlevoix Apple Fest. The Apple Fest has grown over the years so that we will have more than a dozen employees and family up there if we have good weather on Saturday.

If you are thinking of shipping apples this is a good year to do it. There are very few apples in the Midwest and Great Lakes Region so your friends might not get the ones they like this year. Our McIntosh, Northern Spy, Honeycrisp, and Jonagolds are exceptionally good this year too. Lynne is piling up boxes to go to UPS as I write this. She hand selects the apples for shipping so they make a very nice pack.

Tags: apple shipping, Boyne City Harvest Festival, Charlevoix Apple Fest, Charlevoix Farmers Marketet, Gaylord Farmers Market, northern spy, Petoskey Farmers Market

The greatly reduced apple crop combined with very hot August and Sept weather has accelerated the apple ripening. We have been planting varieties for u-pick and encouraging customers to come spend time on the farm for several years but now we are not able to offer u-pick this year.

In a normal year we would have several varieties hanging on the tree that we are not in a hurry to harvest. When we have just a few apples on the tree they go from ripe to overripe much quicker than in a full crop year. This year we will zip through the sparse picking just as soon as they are ready so that they don’t drop or become soft. In this scenario we are not able to tell customers that we will have their favorite variety on the weekend that they plan to visit.
So we will have apples in the fruitstands earlier than ever.
We started picking Macs yesterday, and today we will try to pick a few Honeycrisp. Galas next week! (Sept 11 or so).
U-pickers thanks for your patience.. and a reminder that we have a huge crop of big beautiful raspberries that are available for u-pick.