8 Degree February Morning

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.

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.