Autumn is the season for apples

By Randa Wagner

editor@newscolorpress.com

There are dif­fer­ent kinds of scab fun­gus, such as fly­speck, which makes lit­tle dots on apples. Then there’s apple scab, evi­dent on this unsprayed apple.

Autumn brings the new school year, foot­ball games, cool­ing tem­per­a­tures — and apples.

Orchards every­where are hum­ming with activ­ity right now as apples get picked, sorted, bagged, and pressed into cider. For the Osbornes at 6027 US Route 42 south­west of Johnsville, it’s busi­ness as usual since 1958.

Though the past sum­mer was dry and hot, son Steve Osborne said, “This year there’s quite a few apples — a cou­ple thou­sand bushels maybe. The har­vest varies every year, from 500–2,000 [bushels].”

He also esti­mates they’ll have about 1,500 gal­lons of cider.

“We sell a lot of it,” he said. “We have a cider press now: I found a small one that does about 10 gal­lons per press­ing so it does pretty good for us.”

Grow­ing 12 types of apples and main­tain­ing peach trees has its ups and downs. Weather is a major issue, says Steve, adding, “There’s a lot of things that can hap­pen, such as a storm can pass through with hail and reduce your apples to ‘mak­ing apple but­ter only’ status.”

But the Osborne’s orchard fared well dur­ing the hor­i­zon­tal wind­storm that passed through in July this summer.

“I lost some limbs on some of the trees, partly because there were so many on them,” Steve said. “We had one old tree blow over by the road. It wasn’t too bad.”

This summer’s drought took its toll on many crops in Ohio and across the nation.

“We were for­tu­nate here,” Steve notes. “We did have a dry spell for about a month but we got some rain at crit­i­cal times, so I think that helped us a bit. About a quar­ter of the apples are still kind of small com­pared to usual.”

Steve says what sur­prised him this year was every­thing blos­somed about two weeks early at the end of March.

“I had yel­low deli­cious apples in early Sep­tem­ber, about two weeks ahead of sched­ule,” he notes. “We started pick­ing Mac­in­tosh and Cort­land then and other apples you don’t (usu­ally) have until the end of September.”

Steve planted a hun­dred peach trees this spring in the back of the prop­erty and said it will be about three years until they pro­duce if he keeps them pruned and ‘grow­ing good.’

How were the peaches this year?

“Pretty decent,” he reports. “A pretty good size really — I was sur­prised. Peaches usu­ally come on the last week of July through early August. You usu­ally only have them about three weeks; you have to move them fast — they don’t keep as long.”

Fruit presents some of the same chal­lenges as grain farm­ing. A wet spring and sum­mer usu­ally means a prob­lem with scab and fun­gus, par­tic­u­larly in apples.

Steve says the fun­gus wasn’t bad this year, prob­a­bly about 5 percent.

“I did pretty good with that, I think the dry weather helped.”

How­ever, if it rains at least an inch, you have to spray to keep the scab and fun­gus down, Steve said.

“You have a 24-hour win­dow to spray the leaves and apples with a pro­tec­tant fungi­cide, and it has to be in con­tact with the apple to keep the mold spores off,” he explains. Fun­gus comes from the ground from the year before. When it rains, it sends mold spores up onto the leaves first and you can kind of con­trol that, if you watch, to keep it from get­ting on the apples — if you can get in (to the orchard), but that’s not as much of a prob­lem as it used to be.”

Steve notes a grower can spray with pes­ti­cides up to a month before harvesting.

“Because it washes off so eas­ily, you have to do it again and again,” he explains. “In a wet sea­son, scab is prob­a­bly you’re biggest con­cern, though there’s always insects you have to watch out for, too. Spots on the apples are most often caused by scab fungus.”

Spotty apples can still be used for cider, Steve says, because, “you’re not using the exte­rior, you’re using the juice in them; they get ground up and press into burlap bags and fil­tered 3-or-4 times before it goes into jugs.”

What if it’s a hot and dry season?

“If it’s too dry, like this sum­mer, you get smaller apples (unless you have some sort of irri­ga­tion sys­tem),” Steve notes. “The amount of apples is more deter­mined by the num­ber of blos­soms in the spring. What sur­prised me this year was the apple trees got frosted three times while they were in blos­som — and they’re still loaded (with apples)! I’d come over in the morn­ing to check on every­thing and there would be frost all over the trees, but they really had a heavy blos­som set on them; I don’t know if it helped. But I’d say there’s 90 per­cent of the crop out there.”

A grower can do a lot of things to stim­u­late tree growth, he says, such as fer­til­iz­ing trees just about every year and keep­ing the trees pruned.

“Prun­ing is a big thing, because the water will go to fewer apples — so they’ll get big­ger, and you’ve got to thin out the limbs that aren’t going to pro­duce any apples and keep your sprouts down to min­i­mum. I did some prun­ing in the win­ter to get as much sun­light into the tree as pos­si­ble and also be able to get the spray into the cen­ter of the tree.”

Another way of deter­min­ing the har­vest is by spray­ing the trees to thin ‘blos­soms’ in the spring. Too many could mean an over­abun­dance — and smaller — apples.

“It’s tricky because it has to be a cer­tain tem­per­a­ture when you do it, and the size of the apples has to be right,” Steve said. “The size of a dime or so. If you think you have way too many on there you can spray; the chem­i­cal takes off some of the apples. But if you put too much on, it will take off ALL the apples! I don’t do that too often unless I’m wor­ried about it.”

If a grower thins an apple tree by hand, the apples can be removed when they’re a bit big­ger. Steve had so many apples on the trees this year he hand-thinned some out so the limbs wouldn’t break.

“It’s time con­sum­ing,” he notes. “If I had left ALL the red deli­cious apples on the trees, they would be the size of grapes now!”

The orchard has changed over the years. Bev­erly says it was a lot dif­fer­ent when she and her late hus­band, Gene, first bought it from Henry Baker 54 years ago.

“There were a lot more trees and they were just get­ting into (fruit) bear­ing age,” she recalls. “It was the oppor­tune time [to buy it].”

As older trees died off, they replaced them with apple vari­eties pop­u­lar at the time. Cort­land and McIn­tosh are the ‘main­stays’, the Osbornes say.

They still use the old build­ing in back for cider apples clear through Decem­ber and Jan­u­ary, Steve says, but mainly used the refrig­er­ated room in the build­ing in front for apple stor­age. That way they keep mak­ing cider for months.

Today, Steve esti­mates the orchard has about 150 bear­ing peach trees, mostly Red Haven, and about 650 apple trees.

Though there aren’t as many trees as years ago, it’s still a lot of work. Steve, who works in con­struc­tion, and his wife Melissa are Beverly’s ‘right hands’ since Gene passed away.

“Steve is sure a bless­ing!” his mother said. “He started young to help his dad and he liked it.”

“I enjoy doing it,” Steve said. “When dad was here we made a lit­tle money at it. It’s like farm­ing; some years are good, some years are not so good. We’ve had a good crop in spite of the early frosts and the drought: I’m amazed.”

Randa Wag­ner is edi­tor of the Mor­row County Sentinel.

Posted by Rob Treynor on Sep 26 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.