Under New Management

William’s Pride apples, an early season variety

Orchard management, that is.

To be truthful, John and I haven’t been on top of our fruit tree care the last few years. 

But given this fall’s disappointing harvest, we’re resolved to step up our orchard game: getting back to basics and trying some new methods. The goal is to save time and even more importantly, money!

Our orchard story: For about six or seven years, John and I were happily raising loads of apples organically. We didn’t use sprays, fungicides or pesticides of any kind, not even any compounds that are approved for organic growing. 

It was wonderful to share beautiful, organic apples with everyone we knew. Including my sister's three horses!

Then the apple maggot pestilence found Berryridge Farm. If you haven’t heard of apple maggot, it’s a pest that ruins apples. The flies lay eggs on the outside of the developing fruit in the spring. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which bores into the apples and leaves nasty brown tracks inside.

And at our place, despite our healthy-looking trees, the last five years or so it’s been one crummy harvest after another. The apples don’t look all that bad, dimpled with innocuous-looking little dots. Yet inside the apple, leading from each dot, lies yucky brown disaster. 

John and I tend to be glass half-full kind of food gardeners. No matter how poorly a crop turns out, we’ve always figured, “there’s always next year.”

But I’m losing hope with our mid-season apple trees.

What’s kept us in the apple game at all is that we have a couple of early apple varieties that are not affected by the maggot. I imagine the young apples are already developed enough—perhaps past a certain vulnerability—by the time the apple maggot flies start laying eggs. 

But our later-season apples, especially the yummiest variety at our place, the Honeycrisp…well, Blech!

For sure, hard-won wisdom has taught us not to pick an apple and just bite into it! We’ve learned to cut into every apple first and inspect it for damage. But for us, it's getting really old, producing only a couple of edible apples out of a tree full of them.

After two years of increasingly gross fruit, John and I heard about treating apple maggot with nematodes: ground-living microscopic organisms that, as we understand it, bore into the apple maggot larvae and devour them from the inside out.  

Given the cost, I wish you could just find these “insect-pathogenic” nematodes in nature, but you order them from gardening supply outfits. And although they come in a small packet of powdery-looking material, the powder contains “live” critters that you need to keep refrigerated. 

You mix the powder with water, and apply to the ground under the apple tree, in spring and fall. For our nine apple trees, a supply of nematodes runs about $45 with shipping. Doing the math for a twice-yearly application, that’s 90 bucks.

John and I were really optimistic—and we’ve been dedicated to the spring and fall nematode program ever since. And yet…

We’ve been using nematodes for three or four years, hundreds of dollars spent on nematodes, without a huge improvement in these infestations. And quite frankly, the financial outlay is starting to get to me!

Now, as I’ve talked about before, John and I long ago gave up on trying to get our food gardening efforts to pay for themselves. Meaning, investing so many dollars into producing certain fruits and vegetables, to save a commensurate amount at the grocery store.

Case in point: giving our hens insanely expensive organic feed, to produce eggs that will never pay for themselves…even when you factor in the fun of keeping hens at your place, and the pleasure of eating healthy, homegrown eggs.

Or buying seven organic tomato plants at $5.99 per pot—I think they went up to $6.99 this year—when in a chilly summer, your $42 investment has given you a couple dozen tomatoes. But there comes a point when you get the feeling that doing this year after year isn’t just impractical. It’s sorta…dumb.

Here’s the deal: I’m quite sure we have NOT gotten $90 worth of halfway decent apples each year since we started using nematodes. So I am ready, as the old saying goes, to stop throwing good money after bad. 

John and I are determined to soldier on growing apples…but we’ve decided to get back to basics, as I mentioned above. And pursue strategies that are cheaper than imported nematodes to manage our orchard. I’ll share next week, for my regular Thursday post!