 |
| 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!
