Tour a U-Pick APPLE ORCHARD with 60 Different Apples! — Ep. 021

so when we were looking for land we were actually looking in this area of the finger lakes and we wanted to see who the potential neighbors would be and one was little tree orchards which is an apple orchard and we got to meet dennis and anna and his kids and we were like oh my god these people would be so cool to have his neighbors but it didn't work out but we are here today and we're going to have some fun doing some apple picking and finding out a little bit more about this orchard [Music] hey guys are you okay with being in a camera shot if you don't want to that's okay but if if you are cool with it then we'll come over there for a second for the calendar for the countdown yeah the sexy apple picker calendar it's going to rival the firemen calendar we're going to say how do you like dem apples [Laughter] what are they all doing now they're picking apples for okay for today for today they're going to go in the cooler and then they'll get taken they'll get graded probably can take it to market so this is like this is a you pick but then they pick too yeah so anna i understand this was your orchard to start yes we started this orchard in 1973. there were a few old peach trees here but that was all in a couple old apple trees and actually this was a pasture of cows field and down below we had alfalfa and we began transforming it in the spring of 2000 or 1974 and planted most of the trees over a period of i don't know five years or so and we also put in raspberries back then so we would have a crop that would come on earlier and we intentionally were planting for yupik so we picked trees and picked rootstocks that would be well well designed for that and the layout was also intended for being able to have you pick we also do a lot of picking ourselves and always have and we press cider so we have a whole side of things where we take apples and cider to market we got involved with the ithaca farmers market in 1975 and have continued to be involved since then there was a small group of people that got it all going um and it was the 70s and so it was sort of communal yeah and we had a lot of fun getting it started and getting it going and watching the trees grow it looks very different today than it did then because when we first planted it was like sticks in the ground and those trees have taken off and they have personalities of their own from year to year they vary which ones are happier than the others in terms of producing fruit but we have a system now of going through periodically trying to prune everything at least every other year depending on what rootstock they're in the trees will grow different like different sizes okay so we have semi dwarf and dwarf apple trees here if we had standard trees we would be using ladders or climbing yeah some way to get up yeah because most of it would be out of reach for people they make really wonderful trees for for children and for beauty and for just enjoying but they're more challenging to to work with and to pick how many varieties do you have here well we have around 60 varieties but in those 60s we have one block that we may walk down to i don't know that's got 23 different types of yellow apples so and so there's different strains so you can have different strains of apples that most people would call like a golden delicious or yeah um but they actually have slightly different names what's your favorite apple it varies from year to year okay i really love akani and i really love melrose and jonah gold and i love the cox orange pippin i like burgundy in season it's a short season early apple and i don't think there's an apple i don't like i think there's just some that i like more than others and i will say from year to year even the flavor within a variety picked from the same tree they they can vary a little bit from year to year so as the season progresses there's different apples early on we have polarade we have discovery which is a really good apple um polyrad similar to empire i don't think there's such thing as a bad apple but on chunks well you know just out of curiosity because you know you have like eating apples and you have baking apples off the top of your head like what do you think are the top three best eating apples and top three baking apples and is there any other other cider apples i guess too yeah there are cider apples too for eating i mean jonah gold melrose mutsu are very popular eating apples empires very popular macintosh there's still a crowd of people that macintosh they'll swear by you know if you're gonna give me an apple it has to be a macintosh yeah good branding i guess yeah they did very good branding and and we really love to um get people excited about other varieties as well yeah for baking um well it depends on what you're baking but burgundy if you if you make a apple sauce from burgundy apples they have a very deep dark red skin and you can get a beautiful pink color to your applesauce and people love them and they're on the tart side but they're sweet enough that you don't need to add sugar so it's a straight-up applesauce mutsu makes a really great um commonly called now crispin but makes a really good applesauce by itself it's also great eating apple northern spice northern spice oh yeah it's like you're on the coast of italy and you're like remember that northern spot in fact i was very excited just earlier this week when i walked by and thought okay i'm gonna have a northern spy today and i was so excited to go pick the first northern spy that i was eating yeah was it good it was very good yeah yeah the seeds and the seeds look ready oh gosh so it wasn't just my opinion it's the apples telling us it's ready so can we walk down and see that yellow tree is that possible i don't know how far down that is but maybe we could walk and chat [Music] um but i have to go back to varieties oh yeah go ahead we did it we didn't mention ida red okay red is another really really good apple and then we have when you talk about baking we have a few rome beauties we have we just have one row i think do we have two two rows of rome beauty rome beauty is a very dense apple it's commonly been known as being a great apple for doing a baked apple because it keeps its shape so you can hollow it out and add whatever you want into it and bake it very nice if you do it in the house but also especially nice if you do it over a campfire oh wow yeah this is this is very good so it's like so i mean what would you what would you pair if you did a candy apple what would be a good apple oh no amara is our caramel apple expert caramel apples tonight oh you are um so we'll have some for sale out here over the weekend but um i like to use a tart after i was gonna say parting tart tart with the sweet yeah otherwise it's like overwhelming yeah too much so i think i'll probably tonight i'll probably maybe use um jonah max which are pretty tart macintosh jonathan cross um but then i'll probably use northern spies next week when we pick them um but yeah this is the 21 mixel block and spina can talk about it some people now really come every year because they like wandering through yeah so every couple of trees is a different golden delicious cross variety yeah um so you get really interestingly wildly different flavors yeah they range anywhere from there's one that people say has like a hint of bubble gum flavor yeah another one has like a hint of a pineapple kind of flavor to it and so uh on normal years when we highly encourage people to go through the orchard and do a lot of tasting yeah this is where we really encourage them to come when they're in season um because each tree tastes a little bit different and it's just a really fun picking experience to go through and taste the different ones and people come back up they're like i found the pineapple tree and i get so excited about like which ones they've tasted and what they tasted like and um so this is probably one of our uh top places to send send groups of people to come down that's fun all the differences so how does you pick work like do you athena is our prime person who gives directions to people coming out and sends them down into the orchard so she's got a spiel so this year will arrive we have a check-in station up at the top near our parking lot area where i get to ask them fun coveted questions and then i tell them about where they can go and pick they get a map they choose their bags by weight so they pay for only what they end up picking so if you only get one apple you pay for one apple uh if you've got a half bushel you pay for a half bushel um and then they come on down and we have signs in front of the rows that are ready for picking that tells people these ones are ready there's not a sign it means they're not ripe um and then they come on up and then they pay for their apples and they get the donuts and cider and slider slushies and vinegar and vinegars and butters and sauces all of our wonderful apple products that we've got you know of course we want people to buy apples and um have a good time but really it's about the experience of just getting outside having really fun time in nature connecting with your food source and where it all comes from the whole process of the food and when does you pick usually start because there's obviously a few season a few months when there's no right so we typically do like mid august through mid to end of october really depends on the season and how the crops are looking this year because of covid we started a little bit late because we really wanted to be sure we were prepared for that um and look this year we're probably going to end about mid october some years we'll even go into very early october where we have a measured cleanup or early november where we have orchard clean up where we drop the price of everything there's a lot of drops on the ground and so people will come out for those and stuff so are you ever concerned with the you pick where people are just like i want i want to try this apple bite it drop it or whatever and then yeah so uh on normal years we actually encourage people to do a lot of of tasting this year with coved we're asking them that if they touch the apple take the apple put it in your bag if you take a bite of the apple take that home with you don't leave it here yeah so they can still try the apples um they're required to wear their masks if they're within six feet of anybody outside of their bubble of people that they're with um and so so otherwise we do want people to do a lot of trying of the apples because we do have a lot of old-fashioned and lesser-known apples that people have kind of forgotten about and you know the apple association does a really good job of promoting all their brand new fancy apples but there's so many old-fashioned ones that are just still there that are so fantastic and get a little forgotten about and so we really try to promote those ones which are the ones we mostly have so how do you feel about your role in that and being able to preserve a piece of like apple history uh i feel good about it um yeah it feels it feels really good the thing that one of the things that i just love about the orchard and doing what we do is the connection with nature and preserving things and honoring um you know what mother earth has provided us with and trying to really tend and care for us talking to amara just the other day in athena just saying you know i feel like we're keepers of the land in a way and trying to it's not our land um but it's it's our it's it's here and we're doing our best to try to preserve and handle it and care for it in a way that is uh kind and loving and respectful um and these two it's really one of the fun things about this is they they grew up here yeah this is their childhood yeah and um they're second generation and who knows kind of what directions it may end up in under 10 20 years but the things have evolved so we when we started doing applesauce that was a great thing and making the applesauce with our apples and so finding ways to have shelf stable product and decrease our dependency on the immediate and the fresh and then and then we moved into apple butter from applesauce we moved into apple butter or did we do the other way around i don't remember now and then amara started doing the vinegars and mars our key cider press person so she fixes the blend every time we're making cider she decides on what the blend should be so it's like you could say apple but it's really many kinds of apples like there's many kinds of people and we all have our strengths we all have our challenges and ways we need help and support one of the things the apple trees that the support and help we give them is by how we care for them and how we prune them in the winter and how we take into account like people can come in different shapes and sizes soda apple trees and like northern spy is a precocious tree and it tries to grow big and bold and be seen all the time and it's not necessarily in the best interest of picking it and other kinds of things so we try to work with it in a way that says it's like raising a child or something how do you how do we tend and care for these apple trees and then when we pick the apples we're very particular and when we do school tours which we do i don't know this year probably won't be happening but um you know we teach them when you pick an apple it's like handling an egg so if you aren't very gentle with it and when you put it in your bag put it all the way to the bottom of your bag and put it in so it's touching the other apples before you let it go or you're going to bruise it the way egg would break so i enjoy i think the girls enjoy and dennis enjoy sharing you know some of the things that we've learned and some of it does have to do with relationship with with other living and non-living beings how we how we are in the world together so beautifully said what's the benefit of having maybe some forbs and uh flowers and everything for pollination yeah so we rely totally off wild pollinators a lot of orchards will bring in bees in the springtime to pollinate their trees but we have really worked hard to cultivate kind of some natural areas which if we keep walking we can kind of see there's like some areas that have goldenrod you know yeah areas that we haven't mowed can we see some of those areas yeah yeah so because we work with wild pollinators obviously it is really important that we have food sources for them throughout the year so we're conscientious of where are we mowing and how are we mowing so that we maybe leave not only places for them to get food but also places for them to live and also in conjunction with if you have too much of that especially during bloom time when everything is blooming if you have bountiful flowers everywhere and flowers on the trees potentially less pollinators are going to go to the trees because they have so much food yeah so a lot of more kind of industrial commercial orchards that you'll go into you'll see it's very kind of like grass or barren ground right aren't wildflowers or dandelions growing because they don't want that competition but because we were really taking like my mom was speaking to the kind of the approach of really trying to tend the land as a whole um and the whole kind of ecosystem we allow those things to grow you know so it's it's a fun balance to figure out how we move through well i think we even went to um a talk you know at cornell and there is uh very strong research to say that leaving some of the wildflowers and the wild spaces open near your apple orchard actually promoted yes more but this is an issue i'm thinking because probably for i think my mom can speak to this more but i think probably for you know from the 40s to the 80s or something you know it was very kind of structured and more rigid even i feel like when we go up north to the apple meetings because that's where most of the meetings are yeah for for apple growers there are not very many farms that look like this right right so this is a great example right yeah so yeah and we and we time our we time our mowing to to minimize so we keep maximize that potential for the natural attractants for the bees and working with the apples it's endless learning yeah everyone every season you have to be different yeah like and the more that you're on the land you get a feel for it you know right it is constantly like okay well there was too many rabbits last year and we do a little bit less yeah and and i think from the start of the reevaluation yeah sorry i'm sorry but i think from the start of the orchard at least one of my focuses has been education yeah and so um help so educating myself but also helping to um share education and learn from learn share what i know learn from others and keep growing in that way so a big piece of having the yupik is about the experience it's coming out here and being able to you know roam and wander pretty freely hopefully respectfully and respectful to the trees so we can talk about that being respectful of the trees if you're having to reach up and tug and you might be breaking a branch you shouldn't probably pick that apple leave that apple get ones you can reach so um you know just really be treat them with gentleness speaking of pollinators i see a monarch in the distance yes i've been seeing more this year yeah that's good yeah we're very careful if there's milk we need to we're gonna go ahead and try hard not to know this weed's right here so i would love if people want to walk down to the laboratory oh yeah i would love for you to see the laboratory okay i probably need to head back okay get ready for my meeting okay thank you so nice to meet you yeah thank you so much for joining yeah thank you i really love the jonathan apples oh yeah i didn't mention them open for you pick this weekend and they look really beautiful they're so beautiful like with the deep little red jewels you know they're pretty tart but really flavorful and um really good baking apples they also store pretty well they're pretty like dense and firm yeah yeah they're they're and they look really just lovely this year you can pick one if you want oh yeah i'll definitely i like i like to do this just that just for the fun of polishing it up for this look you may have to help it off a little bit yeah there you go yeah and they're beautiful and the leaves come with it i know it's like you want to put it on like an old-fashioned oak table or yeah yeah and you don't have to wipe it off i like to when i when i was doing tours with the kids i would say only because i love to see the color come out but you don't they're it's not shiny it's not necessary by any means i don't always do that but when they're so beautiful yeah look at how picture perfect that is so good now there are some apples that kind of like have a drying effect when you bite them they're pretty strange yeah they're stringent yeah these are b they're tart but you see what you think i don't think that i often think that's associated with cannons and and i don't think these have super high tannins oh these are nice yeah yeah yeah they're tart but like i don't feel like they're overly tart i think what also adds to the experience though is going and doing a little you pick and you're like the weather is nice the sun is like shining and this year even though we're having to do certain things modify some of how we handle things because of kovid groups are coming out like families together and then i'll see them sitting by themselves um you know and they've done that in the past but there's been more interaction with people but people are still coming out and having just a really like relaxed good time just everybody sounds happy and looks happy and things are saying i think people are grateful to have places to get outside yeah and be doing things activities and stuff because i think people are so um even now like school children have gone back to school but it's mostly online so like families are all kind of cooped in the house together or even you know older students or you know a lot of people are still working from home so it's having places where you can get outside and do things and we're lucky because the farm is big enough yeah that you can come here and not feel like you're on top of people even if there's quite a few people here right enough spaces to go so this is a um sweet cherry planting oh wow so these are some younger trees they're you know compare relatively younger eight years yeah yeah maybe and i see you have some protection down below for the rabbits or yeah for rabbits yeah at this point those tree guards could probably be taken off yeah they're big enough trees now but you can see even like through this planting where there are trees missing and stuff yeah that's usually it's mostly from deer damage and it's mostly from deer's rubbing and um and here you have the the golden rod planted interspersed in between these trees is that like a natural mother nature does that for us we spend a lot of time weed whacking so the areas that are cleaner under the areas that we we'd whacked at the end of last year or this year before we opened that variety yeah you pick so it's easier for people to get around the trees i just think cherry trees are always so attractive with their bark yeah yeah yeah there's yeah birch bark beautiful yeah overlapping and then this is the labyrinth entrance this is fun yeah this is my this is mom's creation it's so enjoyable and it's taking on a life of its own yeah because we've had that we've had the path in the same relatively same spot for many years now yeah and each year can look a little bit different but the golden rod this year it goes in and it spirals around it's like a four yeah it's a should we should we try it can we try it yeah i'm gonna have to head out okay yeah we gotta get to syracuse yeah um but i will see you guys tomorrow happy massaging we'll see you tomorrow good afternoon thank you thanks uh yeah this is just so enjoyable look at this so you encourage the the kids and the parents to come through here yep athena tells them about it when they are checking in and getting figuring out where they're gonna go but also like goldenrod since it's like it's just a native like it has all these galls and like there's so much yeah there's so much to see you could open them up like and then yeah i don't think don't know who it is not gonna answer it's from texas yeah yeah i think if i knew somebody in texas i might consider it but i was like you know sometimes i'm like if it was really important they'll leave a message that's what i yeah so here's another gall you see this i just love i love goldenrod yeah you could always see um i always i used to look for assassin bugs on uh goldenrod you could usually see bee assassins and things like that there's still like a nice little community yeah and very important for bumblebees and everything so yeah see some honeybees in fact and bumblebees are a big during our pollinating time but we have a lot of bumble bees so important pollinators it's really fun in the spring when the when the trees are blossoming and you go out and you just can hear the buzz in the orchard yeah you can look up and you can watch the bees going from place to place and do you leave these through the fall or do you mow these down or how we generally leave them okay and then we just keep the path mode and you can get a sense of you know what's happening here and how it comes in and i love that this um oh cool this i think it's a jack pine i keep trying to make sure i check what it is but it's a volunteer so i'm wondering if things evolve what's gonna what's gonna grow up because we've got another spot we do a little side off where there's another tree right well it wants to turn to forest right so yes i think you kind of have to manage it as meadow if you want it to be men i know what's this guy right over here i'm not even sure what variety that is that one's been there for years that was one of the early plantings um and it's kind of overgrown and there's berries all under wild berries and then this seems to be cox orange pippin down here okay um the big walnut tree there yeah um walnut trees are kind of toxic to trees around them yeah so that's what you see going on here yeah um and um but we have cox orange piping down here and we also have golden russet and the golden rusted are really good for cider and also for fresh eating um sort of a more uh like the russets and the pippins yeah like um european varieties the british often know about the pippins and the russets um they they actually have that russet like a little rusty russet surface oh interesting that some people find less attractive yeah um i think they're beautiful are these all walnuts by the way uh quite a few of them okay so yeah yeah and they're in the hedgerow and we used to have a cherry planting down here but the hedgerow has grown up a lot since those trees went in the golden rusted still produce fairly well but they vary from tree to do you can see like this year there's a whole section where yeah where they didn't it was a funny year because we'd in the same block you'd have some trees that were loaded with blossoms then you come across a tree that had no blossoms we haven't quite figured out what what that was about and then so you wrote dennis into this too then yeah well done yeah dennis came into it pretty early on yeah in the sec he was he was here in in the 70s i think maybe 78 or so he very interestingly grew up uh in florida but his grandparents had a plant nursery and raised trees and things oh nice um i didn't actually know that when i first was meeting him yeah but so so he's become an integral part yeah and is the the chief storyteller he is the chief storyteller yep [Applause] i was looking for a job and i came over to littletree and i picked apples and they gave me a little plot of land on the other side and i raised tomatoes took them to market well at the time i was the only person at market that had early tomatoes so needless to say i captured the market but i got involved with the orchard more after seeing and talking and watching anna for a long time she was one [Laughter] and we're still here that's so it's such a precious story it is [Music] so how many years have it been i came into the picture here and helped them plant some of their other trees um 74 76 and we're in that range yeah so right around when they were starting yesterday after they started the trees were still little guys you know there wasn't much going on there was a lot going on but we were still replanting or planting stuff and you know keeping it in order what has been some of the the more current challenges over the last you know number of years the biggest one weather weather you know weather the unpredictable nature of it it's farming yeah if it was easy everybody would do it and my alley the idea and that is everybody should to a point if you have a five gallon bucket you've got a tomato plant in it you're farming mm-hmm yeah it's not a big farm but you know you're farming you have to learn how to take care of that how to how to harvest it or when to harvest it you know i think so it's a small scale for me right well it you know you when you grew up in miami you were selling these shrubs and trees for people to put in their yards and uh you know you now you have a little larger scale not like huge scale but like a larger scale you know apple orchard so if somebody were to actually start you know and have a property and they wanted to put a few apple trees which ones would you recommend personally depends on how few they're talking about like let's say three or four yeah three or four yeah what would what would be your selects your favorite so before you even think about the apple yeah you have to know what is your soil what's going on there is it an acidic soil is your fragipan six inches down or three foot down is your soil acid is it you know too rich is that possible no um is it clay is it you know is it clay how much clay yeah is it on a slope does water stand there i mean there's homework to be done to do that if you want to have a successful apple tree that's going to or any kind of tree you know that's going to read the land first you have to understand it and after you look at that the hardest other thing is like and you can't find it many places is picking the right rootstock that's going to work in that soil some rootstocks work better than others you know some will do okay in in clay soil others are like it won't make it at all they'll die we're fortunate here with the majority of the land here is called howard's gravely loam which is like a premium [Laughter] good for apples very good yeah very good for apples um i guess i could pay attention more to the fertilization and stuff and that but they seem to be doing okay you know so i'm not getting too crazy well what i loved um and i told anna this is what i love about it is that there's it feels a little wild like you leave some of the wild spaces you leave some of the wild carrot and the solidago and like the you know the goldenrod and everything goldenrod is specific because i was mowing it and i was just mowing rose next to the trees and i was going to mow the whole field out but as i'm mowing i saw something i had never seen before praying mantis and there were so many of them i'm like what the hell this is great yeah i'm not going to mow that yeah and we also had for the first time in many years a large influx of monarchs she mentioned that and we saw one actually flying right behind us it's getting to the end of their season where they're going to be up here i think they're all heading out of the south smart people yeah but yeah there was like um i would see flocks of maybe like 40 to 50 of them just and it was like wow i'm not going to mow this no way this is going to stay but what amazed me more were the praying mantis i mean i was mowing a strip a few hundred feet long and in that strip it was probably 30 or 40 minutes oh my god i've never seen this before yeah my dad has one outside of his house and he's he sends me photos all the time he's like now there's a small male i'm like oh my god i feel like my dad is like turning into the discovery channel with this praying mantis there's a dead male yeah exactly then there's a dead male like and i said oh you have to you send me a photo of her eating his head off oh god but i mean it is kind of amazing because they are you know they're large insects and they kind of look alien-like yeah and so you have this you feel like attached to them in some way i had no idea what they were at first they were flying away and i'm like is that a locust that's that's a big something but it was more impressive to me was their wings their wings were silver looking i'm like wow i've never seen one fly you know and that is your that's your beneficial insects right there i'm going to leave that yeah so what benefit do they have to the land insects they prey on other midsections yeah the mantids the mantids would eat all the bad bugs yeah could you could actually purchase them right as a beneficial insect and release them but the fact that you have them already here why and they release themselves i find egg masses every once in a while yeah and i'll take the egg mass and set it over someplace yeah up in the hill or into the tree somewhere you know you had mentioned something before and um just for you know folks who are you know you know have really been taken by the the apple because i think the apple is such an obviously an iconic fruit everybody knows the apple and apple jay keeps the doctor away you know everything among those but you mentioned rootstock and i think that's important because uh you know here you have um a lot of maybe some dwarf varieties or ones that won't grow into huge trees you have to keep them really no standard what they call standard trees uh here they're all dwarf and semi-dwarfs and there's multitude of rootstocks in here which is kind of nice gives you an idea what's going on and there's a lot of numbered rootstocks m9 and 107s and stuff if you look that up you'll understand what the the height because the rootstock controls the height of the tree pretty much and you know for people just to understand like in order to get the same apple variety you have to graft it onto correct a root stock so yeah can you go a bit deeper into yeah people who absolutely know nothing about yeah yeah dwarf what is it yeah yeah tell us about because if you if you plant an apple from seed right you're not going to get the same apple variety chances not usually yeah it's not impossible and it happens more often than you really think it does you look at so many apple varieties take the empire for instance it's named after new york state obviously because it was found in new york state it's a natural occurring apple man didn't make that nature did and the only way they they found it on a farm in northern new york they liked it and so what they did they went they pulled that i don't know if they took the tree they probably took just a genome sample and broke it apart and find out what the parentage of it was and so then they could actually remake that apple you know there's a there's a in geneva there's a whole building dedicated to genomes there are so many different kinds of apples worldwide the cortland apple came out of this area right yeah yeah yeah the cornell apple i think there's another one cornell came up with two varieties i think about three or four years ago genetic wise and it might be the two best apples they've ever came up with one's called a snapdragon and the other is a ruby frost two different apples they both came out at the same time i was lucky enough to be there when they named them and had the presentation i'm like wow these are incredible you know they're really good apples they're you know if you like a sweet apple fine if you like a tart apple fine you know the two of them complement each other it's an amazing two apples probably the best thing new york ever did i i almost feel as if they should do like a steve's job style where they're like and we're gonna reveal this tart apple and then the crowd cheers yeah people line up well they did have a reveal it was at uh one at geneva and they were is that a it was a program that i went to and we were walking through orchards and looking at rootstocks and growing different you know different ways to grow and systems and things and they had a barbecue for lunch and then they actually had the reveal at the lunch you know nobody at noon i mean most of the growers didn't know it was in your recipe as you're eating it no they had they had the apples there so you could taste them i'm like wow these are great they're great do you grow any of them now no no because they are what they call club varieties and to grow one or you get to get the rights the rights to grow one right you need to pay up be in the club and then you can buy their trees and plant them and it might have changed by now but to begin with they charged you for the tree you had to pay to royalty and you also had to pay per bushel that you picked off of these trees so for the big guys so what yeah they don't you know they can absorb that and make it work little guys well no i couldn't didn't want to do that uh eventually i'll probably plant some yeah you know they're gonna open them up probably uh to the general not so much public but general orchard growers and you can't you can't like take a stem oh i could yeah and then grass would be totally illegal yeah so you have to watch about that but like but yeah so a lot of your varieties are on root stock but in order to get that same tasting apple you're basically taking a clone exactly yeah yeah and some of those clones are hundreds of years old yes they are yeah you know what are some what is some of your oldest apple varieties here baldwin's baldwin northern spice northern spices very old variety and macintosh are pretty old you know macintosh been around for quite a while um unfortunately they call it a specialty apple now i'm like why um what other ones i do most of our varieties are heritage varieties you know they've been around for a long time and that's one reason we like them what constitutes heritage age age okay um their genetic background you know was it a natural occurring and re you know so they feel like an empire and made over um yeah in flavor it's a it's hard to get an organic apple here isn't it no no okay but you want to you know probably tell me problem with organic is people expect perfection if they find an apple with a blemish on it not everybody mind you uh they'll look at it and go oh something's wrong with it you know chuck you know and but they're used to grocery store apples which are usually large and they're blemish free we try to educate people that come out and pick that you know that you know life's not perfect you know do you get up in the morning and look in the mirror what do you see you know not so much of a perfect thing going and so it life is like that in every every aspect not everything is beautiful and perfect there are imperfections in life and you can work around them live around them and eat around them or maybe you see perfection in the imperfection of it yes yeah it's to me it's about flavor and a lot of people i talk to i ask them you know they want an apple they said i says well what is what do you like you know what flavor do you like a lot of people come up i like them crispy well you know crisp is not a flavor now what do you like you like a sweet then i have to actually ask them sweet tart combination thereof you know and the word crispy comes up again you know in that short conversation and they're like well okay i understand the crisp forget about the crisp think about the flavor well i don't like them when they're mushy very good i says i totally understand that a soft apple to a lot of people is very unappealing i suggest that people try that soft apple and think about its flavor not about its texture so much i mean texture is a lot of a lot of things to a lot of people you know they want that firm flesh flavor it says you can get a softer firm apple and it's still going to taste usually when an apple gets soft it's ripe or it's been sitting in too warm an area you know but you know i said try it if you don't like it okay i understand that but try it don't discount it because it doesn't crunch or you know hurt your teeth when you bite it you know the roman beauty isn't actually a very old apple also i kid because it's so hard it's crazy you know it's very late you know into november when we harvest it i tell people don't don't bite into it because you're liable to hurt yourself there i mean they are literally he says you got to play tennis with him for half an hour and i'm like oh my god you're gonna warm up the ball but it's it is the absolute perfect baking apple baked whole baked apple you can core it put everything in it anything or nothing and just cook the whole apple you put it in that shape you bring it out of the oven it's the same shape yeah amara had mentioned that that's it yeah that's good so it's it's a really good tip because and that was one of the things i asked anna i'm like what what's your favorite baking apple what's your favorite uh like fresh eating apple yeah and cider apples and stuff like that so what are yours um i'm a melrose fan nobody else grows them around here i take that but maybe black diamond does yeah i don't think so combination of two apples one of you may not like the other one you will jonathan is one of them there's a tartness where do you get the sweetness from well red delicious now i'm not a fan of red delicious neither am i but there's people that like swear up and down they love them but to me the bread delicious you take the first bite well it's not bad it's got a nice sweet flavor to it good texture milliseconds later it tastes like something you know somebody's stuffed cotton in my mouth yeah why am i well it kind of feels like um it there's like an astringency or something with it that like leaves right you feel that in your gums yeah everything dries out yeah it dries out yeah that's cool not for me so actually the nordos is the best of two worlds it's got a sweetness and a nice tartness it's a little more tart than sweet perfect and so was that like inter it interbred yes yeah so and then was that a a cross that somebody did or did that just happen naturally i don't believe it natural i could be wrong but i don't think it's a natural thing i think people made that who made it i don't remember look it up yeah i was lucky enough to buy well there's about 80 trees over there but there's like three different varieties majority of them are gold rush and are those some of the newest ones that you've planted those are that's that is the newest ones yeah yeah and you didn't have gold rush before no yeah no i've tasted them i knew somebody else that was planting them and i tasted them and he had a good storage they keep for a pretty good while and he was bringing them out in you know late spring yeah i mean tell me about that because there's you know a couple months in there i know like may june starts getting a little sad on the app yeah well i mean there's two diff a couple different ways people store them i mean the big people up north with a lot of acreage they use what they call ca storage controlled atmosphere so they'll put them in to storage the temperature will be lower probably mid to low 30s but they'll put a vacuum on the room and extract all the oxygen out of the room and then they'll inject nitrogen into the room so that stops the ripening process pretty much and they still might be slowly ripening but pretty much stops them that's why they pull them out in april and they are nice and crunchy and hard you know because they'd stop that process you know i mean it works well but you have to have the building specifically built to withh withstand the vacuum i mean it's like like when you take uh you're sucking oxygen out of a paper bag or a plastic bag and everything everything yeah that's exactly what happens in the house in the in the storage area so it has to be built to take that store you know that vacuum up and how and how do you store them like woody we store temperature only yeah add humidity and the funny thing is you know my my temperature gauge actually registers humidity uh so i know what kind of the humidity is inside the cooler once we pack it full you got about 1800 thousand bushels in one cooler right the other one holds six seven hundred bushels but you could pretty much then have apples throughout the whole year depending on the normal i say normal year um we pick a majority of our storage apples in late september through mid-october and some varieties don't we don't pick until late october early november and they'll keep we usually have apples left over for cider because they do deteriorate over time no matter what you do with temperature we have those uh probably into june of next year and then you start getting we start getting early apples so we'll take the storage apples mix them with the uh early apples which tend to be tart and the storage apples will tend to be sweeter because they just concentrate their you know their sugars more through the year you know my daughter wants to turn over to organics and i said that's all fine and dandy deer but you know there's certain things that's going to make it really difficult you know right now our spray program is i use organics and i use synthetic sprays i tend to go more to the organic side but if i got insects that are giving me problems and the organics are not taking care of it i will jump to a synthetic and take care of them but i prefer not to yeah well especially now if you're if you're trying to prop up those uh praying mantids and oh yeah oh yeah well i'm very you know i'm very selective in the synthetics that i spray and when i spray them yeah you know timing is everything in the orchard yeah i'm just curious like what are some of the main issues you have with the apples insects insects actually funguses fungus yeah you know apple scab in the spring last year i had a horrible infestation the entire orchard took a hit because it rained so much it actually rained a lot this year but the difference was there was points or a few days in between rain that i could get out there and spray i'm doing organic sprays control fungus or apple scab what i was using was not working because i couldn't get it to stay on the tree long enough to take care of the fungus the rain would wash it off and we didn't have just a little rains we had serious rains last year my god you know i mean it'll put up with three quarters to an inch of rain before it's gone but the more rain on the less product left there so this year i started with organics and realized that okay this may not work and i do not want that infestation going on so i switched over and i did two sprays of synthetics perfect but i also mowed first thing in the spring and it's been proven by cornell and other people that if i take my mower and i mow very close to the ground and close to the trees that i'm picking up all that leaf matter is where the scab lives over winters i'm flipping that around and causing it to be disoriented so it doesn't really shoot up there was a video and i can't find it anymore that showed apple scab on leaf on the ground it reached the optimum temperature temperature and humidity and it showed them virtually explicitly floating up yeah they reached three and a half to four feet into the tree all right so that's just the bottom area of the tree but they matured and they went shot up and went so they really can cover an entire tree the worst thing about scab is it will pretty much defoliate a tree if it's heavy enough so this year i had excellent control i started early enough i had breaks in the weather that helped the organics helped and the synthetics helped a little bit more and the cultural part of it which was just and mowing mowing i you know what they're saying is that by doing that kind of mowing you can almost eliminate 80 percent of your apple scab i also spread urea which also helps deteriorate those leaves faster and fertilize into fertilizers so between those two things beat up you know a lot of the scab is there scab in the orchard absolutely never you'll never eliminate no yeah you'll never eliminate your pests it's always there and it's always going to be there but the point is can i can control it and i can i control it in a sustainable way that it's not going to reproduce itself radically yeah and then what about on the insect side insects well you know there's a whole series of those guys you know calling moth oriental fruit moth apple maggot those are probably the three worst then there's the european sawfly which truly doesn't hurt the tree or the apples it just makes great designs in the apple because they don't bore into it they just like go around you know the skin and they're like oh look at that look at this and you pick up an apple sometimes and like the design is amazing yeah sometimes it's curly cues sometimes it goes halfway around you know i mean it's just all kinds of designs now if you had to if if you were in a let's say a burning house and you had to take five trees with you on your noah's ark or whatever which five trees would you would you take with you i'd obviously take some melrose you know um northern spy some macintosh what else i'd take some item reds and an early apple um polar red if i could take those and have them survive well this is i mean this is really wonderful and i think like what you said before for people is know your land first know your conditions know your soil in order to figure out like what kind of like and and do your research a little bit on the root stock and and to figure out what kind of apple is that you like because there's so many different varieties and we have to get a little bit more descriptive than crisp and be able to maybe adjust your thoughts on what you really like and what you really want to do with them [Music] i'm going to grab some more stuff actually yeah how are you doing today yeah not bad i'm going gonna get him more apple butter cause he's already on to it and i think these are gonna be perfect gift gifts yeah they said that's really selling like crazy yeah i'm gonna get that for my friends okay okay awesome so 10 28. oh we'll have a wonderful day thank you thank you i'll see you later i got a bunch of gifts because we're gonna be filming and seeing lots of our friends so we got they just started these apple cider vinegars and then this one has lemon balm in it which looks really good and then hold on [Music] this one's supposedly flying off the shelves this is wild black raspberry i think this one i might give to sean from edible acres shawn and sasha because they made us some really nice bread when we were there and i fit a lot of their blackberries to their chickens and then um this is sage and rosemary which i don't know i might even keep that one for myself that sounds really good and then i got saunder some of his favorite apple butter which you just basically have to take the apple sauce and just swirl it overheat low heat and not let it burn and so all the water bakes down so that's saunders favorite [Music] you

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 36,106

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, homestead, homesteading, how to homestead, coliving, upstate New York, summer rayne oakes, how to start a farm, farm life, gardening Zone 5, orchard, apple orchard, u-pick apple orchard, how to run an orchard, how to start an orchard, apple varities, best apple varieties for northeast, grafting apples, prune apples, best apples, apple farm, apple farm tour, apple orchard tour, apples upstate new york, Littletree Orchards

Id: AyYbYWTIigw

Length: 53min 19sec (3199 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021