A day of commercial apple picking!

[Music] hello farmer jason here at wave fruit farm today we're picking apples now the other day if you guys watch my video you might have even been a little jealous of us or definitely there might have been some envy there because we're outside doing this task on a beautiful sunny mid 70s october day well it is no longer that day and it's gotten pretty awful outside um today we're here we're still we're actually in a different orchard than we were the other day we're still late october you can see the mountain behind me is all in color and the apples were getting towards the end of the apple season but it's been awful weather uh yesterday was even worse than today and actually even just a few minutes ago we had on our rain coats uh it's been sprinkling drizzling mid 40s low 50s and it's been cold and miserable we're wearing gloves we're wearing raincoats and it's not all that much fun but we need to get done because of the fact that we are going to run out of time the weather forecast for this coming friday into saturday takes us down to 25 degrees which is cold enough it might freeze some of our apples so we are full steam ahead trying to pick these apples which are ida red apples very pretty apple uh these ones are a little bit tarter really good for baking good for tart eating but also really good for baking and so we've had quite a few of them we're getting quite a few off of here fidel and pablo are here picking away at our tree and i'm going to show you the little bit of difference between these and picking peaches with peaches we did a video and we showed how we go through and we selectively pick but whenever we do the whenever we do the apples we pick everything on the tree unless we forget one down here at the bottom and so we'll grab that one for them and so we've been picking at these trees this whole row is full of ida reds and you can see it goes a long ways back there and all of these are cleaned off we've already been through here we've already picked these apples and now we're moving on we just keep going down the road until we're done we still have a ways to go as i said we're in a bit of a hurry with it today because i am a little afraid that they might freeze and you can see the whole wagon full of apples and i'm going to show you how we drive that down will be the next thing i do and so we're going to move this one out of the way and i have another tractor sitting here so this is our full wagon and i have another tractor sitting here ready to go that have a whole bunch of these empty so the first thing i want to explain is sort of how we do it so we have this tractor we have the tractor with a wagon we have five bins on here what this will hold is 115 bushels worth of apples each one of these bins is um each one of these bins is 23 bushels and you can see we have our name on the bin as well as the date that we bought the bins so these bins are from 2013 so we've been using them several years we wash them each season we make sure they're nice and clean uh they're just a big plastic bin that's actually made out of recycled water bottles is what the original part of these is from and so we will fill all of these up and then we'll take them down and so i'll show you that process what i'm going to show you first once i move this up is i'll show you how we pick the apples it's not too complicated much less complicated than the peaches but a little bit harder work physically so that's what i'll show you next and so we're gonna move tractors all right fidel's pulling that one forward everybody's waiting on us so we'll get moving forward here too so fidel's just gonna move that out of the way for now and then we'll take it down here in a second and so you can see the bin behind me following up and what we're going to do is we're just going to get up far enough that that last bin is right where they're picking and so perfect right there and so we just pull it up and we keep moving the wagon up as we pick um other orchards some other orchards what they do is they'll put the bins actually in the orchard on the floor i don't find that as efficient i like doing it this way where we can just keep moving the bit moving the tractors because like back in the first section of trees back there we've already picked there were a lot more apples in here so you have to judge and sometimes you have to walk a long way to your bin so we just like having one of the tractors and we just like moving it with it so i'm going to show you next how we pick apples all right so what we use to pick apples unlike the peaches where we picked them in crates apples we pick a little differently we want to be a little faster with it they're a little bit more hearty than the way we pick our peaches so the innovation if you will um be it not a new innovation by any stretch but the innovation that we have is our picking back this is the latest greatest version of it uh and what we do is the apples are gonna go inside here and then i'll show you how we use this to get down in so there's a poly plastic body on it here that makes it a little bit more comfortable we used to have wire mesh ones that would be across here and the problem that i especially had with the wire mesh ones is they would dig into your abdomen and by the end of the day you'd feel where those bars went across so this one's fully molded and a little bit more comfortable so i'm gonna strap the camera on and i'll show you how we use the back all right so now what i'm doing is i'm here at the tree and i have a whole tree full of apples ahead of me my bag is empty except for two little ones i already threw in and so what we're gonna get in here is we're just gonna get into the tree and we're gonna start picking i like to start at the bottom to make sure that we don't have any that we knock off with our legs as well as if we drop anything from above the ones that fall from above will bruise the lower ones and so we want to pick off the bottom of the tree i'm down here on my knee picking all of these off and then we'll stand up once we get all these bottom ones done now there are tricks to picking apples it's not just grow grab and pull and throw what we want to do is we want to take the apple we want to take it we want to spin it and it should fall right off now when i'm putting them in my bag i don't want to drop them i want to set them down if you treat the apple too rough you'll bruise it and so we want to get in there with a nice motion kind of crack the apple off make sure we always have the other one on the back side these ones are not super tight they've been hanging on the tree for a while waiting for me to get here as well as i want them to get a little more size so we're we're they're not super hardy on the tree so we don't have to pull real hard but like one of the things i don't want to do is i don't want to pull two at once i don't want to pull them together because what will happen is i'll bruise them so one at a time pull it off sometimes the little branches come we pop them off too and i set them in my bag so i just keep repeating this process until i have a bag full my bag's about half full right now and so we just keep doing this process i gotta get all these off there one fell on the ground you're gonna see some apples on the ground that's part of it you try not to have any fall but sometimes they do again twisting with the wrist i kind of give them a little snap with the wrist and that makes them come off easy if you just try pulling sometimes they can hold on they're pretty good so what you want to do is you want to give the wrist a little bit of a twist and so when i'm in here i want to give it a little bit of a twist and that'll make it come right off the tree if you just try pulling a lot of times they won't come off and again one at a time and into the basket not pulling multiples when you get a big one like that make sure the other ones are okay and pull a little twist a little twist a little twist with the wrist twist pop twist twist pull twist twist twist down i have my bag full of apples which is where i want to be nice and full this is a little bit less than a bushel now we come over to those bins and i'm going to lift it up i'm going to drop it down in here and then this bag has straps and the bottom opens up and everything comes out and i want to try to do it nice and gentle so i don't bruise them going in there and see now you can see right down through the bag and so all the apples have come out the bottom side and it allows us to do it much quicker much more efficiently and then whenever i'm done i just hook them back in and i go back and i start all over again so that's how we pick apples and as you can see we have a lot of apples to pick yet this row has hundreds of trees in it each tree has all these apples and so it takes a while you can see there are a few on the ground not a lot but if i walk over to these you can see this variety this was my mccowns and i was trying to let them get sized and we picked these a while ago but you can see just how many are on the ground and you know sometimes that just happens in apple farming where if you don't get to them fast enough um this orchard was very dry and so i ended up having a lot of smaller apples so i was trying to give them some extra time to grow and they're just falling and you know and this is part of the problem with farming too is it can be very hard i'm gonna walk over here i have our stamens and i do have some followers of stamens they're falling on the ground but they're all so tiny you know they're barely bin sale size that they're not really all that good of a size and so i've been trying to let them grow and instead they're falling on the ground instead of growing this orchard we're up here on top of the mountain and every orchard has its own characteristics sort of like every every house every person every yard like parts of yard might grow better this orchard up here when it's wet it's really wet when it's dry it's really dry and so the problem we've had is just this orchard was drier and the stuff didn't grow as good but it still is very good it's a good apple it just needs to grow a little bit more all right so all right so now we've got to get out of this orchard you can see we're up here all the way on top of the mountain which is nowhere near our store so we're going to take this full tractor that we had pulled forward earlier and we're gonna head down and we're gonna unload these with our forklift and then we'll get them into the cooler um probably tomorrow morning as i showed in the previous video we like to let them sit out overnight even though it's not very warm today they'll still do a little bit more additional culling tonight and um that way whenever we put them in the colder they don't require as much energy so we're gonna hop up in our new holland tractor here it's a little dirty for being used so hard this fall and so we're gonna start it up it actually has an air ride seat so we're gonna put a little air into our seat [Music] all right we're going to get in the right gear i want to be in 2-2 which is fast but not too fast and then what i like to do too i don't know i find like when i'm in a tractor i like to listen to country music i don't know it's just one of those things that seems to be the way that life seems to go is country seems to work the best and we'll turn on our local 101 froggy boss frog is a friend of the farm regular customer and a friend of ours and so we'll listen to froggy here on our way down and part of with the tractor is nothing is fast you know we're gonna bump along here at not too high of a rate of speed because then what will happen is all of those apples that are following me will get bounced too much and you can see the wagon even flexes a little bit and so we're just gonna keep going down through here at a nice gentle speed [Music] all right i'm bringing this back out of the fast forward here for our last little bit you can see just how crooked sometimes the trailer gets going across these hillsides and sometimes the back of it will actually start to slide um we're actually sitting pretty crooked right now i'm actually having to use my leg to brace to keep me from sliding and there you can see the tractor the trailer really leans but because of its low center of gravity it doesn't roll over and you can see down here we still have lots of apples um what we're doing those were these apples down on this side it was dryer and also for some reason the frosting to settle in this corner so there's not as many apples down in this corner as there are in some of the other locations and so when we get down here it won't take us as long to pick now the tricky part with driving this tractor is we don't leave ourselves a whole lot of room you can see i'm coming to the end of the trees but the fence row isn't that far in front of me so what we have to do is we have to hang really close to this side and we have to get right up to the fence we have to turn hard because that trailers gotta follow us and if we cut too sharp we will hit that tree and so we missed it so now we'll bump up through here and i'm in range two what i'm gonna do is before we hit the main road here i'll shift up in range three so i can go a little bit faster on the main roads and so we're coming up here towards our gate in the orchard each apple that we pick has to go this way be it in that orchard over there um that's we've already picked that or we have an orchard way over there by those towers that's where we shot the last video so we're all the way on the other side we still have some goldens to pick there as you can see and there are blueberries that are netted up there all right now same thing when we come to the gate here we've got to swing it wide so whenever we come down we miss dragging the trailer into that gate all right we're gonna stop so we can shift up the third range and we're gonna head on down the road [Music] so [Music] so [Music] it took us about 10 minutes uh in the fast-forward there to get from the orchard down to here we're pulling in and this is one of my favorite moves is i come in here and it shows you just how well this wagon turns but we have this big wagon and it looks like i'm heading straight for the bins it's gonna be catastrophe and instead what happens is i spin my front end and i spin right in the circle and the wagon follows me right around and this way i don't have real far to go with my forklift i can unload it right where we need it and then the forklift is sort of a fun venture oop let me turn off my four ways so the forklift unloading this is kind of fun too and so i'm gonna keep you guys with me while i do that you can see apple's made it down here no harm few high ones will move them this last bin just the bouncing coming down always settles it out there's one apple that doesn't deserve to go we'll throw it away and so the back bin settles a little bit you can see how it settled down when we started out this one was full but lots of nice red apples um you know doing real good so these are ones we've already picked um setting them outside here as we did in our previous video i'll put all that away in the morning so we'll head inside and we'll grab our forklift all right out we go i have to drag the bin a little bit sideways first and that way i can get right underneath it and i have a single one sitting over there so we're gonna put it on top of that one and again these plastic ones are nice because they kind of settle into each other right like that nope didn't quite get it right gotta get it in there there we go [Music] and again we'll stack them not quite on that side if you can see and so i'll drag it back drop it in when you drive a forklift you sort of have to be aware of your surroundings because i do a lot of backing up and so i've got to make sure there's nothing behind me to hit as i do that two more bins and then we'll put empty ones back on now this next bin this one right over here is the trickiest bin of them all because it's tucked back in there if i just try to go straight into that one i'm going to hit the wheel so what i've got to do is i've got to take that bin and i've got to give it a little pull i tuck one fork in over there and turn sideways and i pull the bin over and now what i can do is without putting hole in my wheel i can go and i can grab that one and we're all good [Music] so all right now what we're gonna do we're gonna grab two wafer farm bins here we're gonna drop the first one on there pick it off we're gonna swing around we're gonna drop the second one on here now what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take my forks and i'm gonna shove it back into the hole and that way we can grab three more bins out of our stack we can grab three more of these we're gonna bring them down we're gonna set them on the trailer [Music] and we now have successfully loaded and unloaded a trailer just that fast and now we're back into business so that's what we do and that's how we get her done and that's what that's how we end up with a nice big stack of lots of beautiful apples what we're picking right now is as i said the ida reds and then over there if you can see are some goldens we picked before we switched over to the idler reds and so now we'll hop back in the tractor and we'll head back up and we'll keep picking [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] all right i did this fast forward through the long rows you can see just how long these rows are they measure almost a half mile from one side to the other and every foot of them is filled with apples now again we're at the end here of the honey crisp is actually what those new little trees are is they are honeycrisp trees and so we're going to have a lot of honeycrisp for a long time to come because i planted a lot of trees now same thing when we do these ends we've got to swing out all the way into these trees to make sure that as we swing into this row over all the bumps we'll try not to hit the tree and we gotta pull our wagon in because if we don't it'll hit the other tree so that's the game we're playing and off we go now these are the same idea red trees that we've been picking these are just empty so back to the starting spot that we left with a full wagon with an empty wagon uh this is what we keep doing and we've been doing it since late august it's late october we're all getting done with it but it's just how harvest goes and we're happy that it's almost over hopefully hopefully we don't get too cold on friday into saturday to where it's over a little bit earlier than what i wanted to be i still have a about five days worth picking to go so um now if you guys enjoy these videos make sure you follow us on facebook we'd love to have you as regular followers of these videos uh we enjoy doing them we've had a great time doing them even though 2020 has been a hard year with all the pandemic and everything that's going on we've enjoyed doing these videos it's allowed us to connect with you guys and i think that's very very important and we've we've been doing them since the beginning if you want to see any we have a bunch of these that have been done uh and you can always go back and watch all of the previous ones we've done a lot of different things over the last year since we started this so we thank you all for following us we've had a great time follow us on facebook and um you know come visit us at the store and grab yourself some apples have a great day thank you [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Way Fruit Farm

Views: 16,905

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Id: nvwd4_1n8PE

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020