It’s been a tough year for growers. Way too much rain in April, May, June and July prevented farmers from getting onto their fields with equipment. This meant planting crops and performing chores was delayed. Excessive and relentless moisture also caused a lot of disease in certain areas.
We have a crop here but ironically, our biggest challenge is that there are TOO MANY APPLES. The most important summer job in the orchard is thinning fruit. This means picking off most of the small apples so that you are only left with a good amount of big ones. All those rainy days we had delayed this vital and time-consuming task from being completed until it was too late. The result is we are left with tons and tons of apples that are less than ideal when it comes to size….
We have some very cooperative and helpful employees here this year, and we are very grateful for their positive attitude as part of the team.
However, as newcomers to our country they had no previous experience working at a Canadian orchard. The learning curve is steep when newbie employees are given a set of pruning tools and painstakingly trained to start working in the orchard. Most people simply cannot grasp the concept of ‘thinning’ until they have at least one full seasonal cycle of labor under their belt.
The result is we have a tremendous amount of apples this fall. We have worked hard all season. Mother Nature has not been kind and we have had numerous hardships to endure involving machinery breakdowns and equipment failures. Against all odds we are still here and hope that your family has an interest in saving money on food because we are selling fresh picked fruit at a cost far below what is common in the big grocery chains’ produce sections (more on that in a future post)
