Winding down still

Friday night October 18. We will still be open for u-pick this weekend, but the forecast is for rain. Early next week we will start to wrap up picking the trees that we left for u-pick so this is the last chance to u-pick Empire, Gala, and Northern Spy. I will leave some Mutsu and Ida Red until later in the week. We will pick the Honeycrisp for the last time starting Sunday but with Honeycrisp we leave the apples on the tree that didn’t color well so a determined person could find some good ones for the next week or so.
We will have apples to sell for quite a few weeks yet. The big cooler is packed with fruit and we are going to put 200 bins of Gala in one of the cooler rooms over in the new building on Church Rd. We built that room as a freezer but we can put all of the frozen concentrate in one room and raise the temp in the other room to the mid 30s for apples. Most of these Galas are destined for the big packing house in Sparta called Jack Brown Produce. Jack Brown will then pack them and market them on consignment. They have state of the art sorting equipment where a computer takes pictures of each apple then sends it to one of at least 16 lanes determined by size, color and any defects. They even have an internal defect detector that helps to sort spots and decay before it happens. All this happens at dizzying speed. However, because the crop is so large their storage is filling up and we will store them here hoping to have them run them later. We had so much rain this year the apples are very large. That wasn’t the case in the larger apple growing areas to the South so I am confident that they will still want to pack our Galas even in the overabundant apple environment.

There are still some Bosc Pears. We have them hard and green or starting to turn gold color and ripe. I love a ripe Bosc pear almost every day.

Jim was able to move a few people out of picking apples to bring in 22 bins of squash and pumpkins, so we are all picked on the vine crops. They also picked 25 bins of drop apples. With the new food safety rules there is not much market for drops except as deer apples.