Apples: it's a good year
It is shaping up to be a good year for New York apple producers. The state is on track to produce 30 million bushels of apples this year — a...
Sep 25, 2014 — It is shaping up to be a good year for New York apple producers. The state is on track to produce 30 million bushels of apples this year — a strong follow-up to last year’s record-breaking crop. But a good year does not mean it’s easy to produce that perfect apple.
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At work the other afternoon, I bit into a beautiful, huge, red and green tinged Honeycrisp apple. It was delicious — and quintessentially autumnal.
I ask Champlain Valley apple producer Bill Everett of Everett Orchards to describe the perfect apple. He says that’s something the customer gets to decide. "You have to pretty much give them a blemish free apple," he said. "They want it about as perfect as you can get.
And it’s not like apples just become perfect and fall off the tree into your hand. Everett says it’s a long process that starts from the day the flower blooms. Producers have to look out for late frosts. They prune their trees a couple times over the summer. They might spray for pests. And come fall, it takes cold nights and warm days to get the right color. It is not like apples are just red or green, either. Cornell Cooperative Extension fruit specialist Anna Wallis explains apples have both a background color and a blush color.
"Your apples start off green," she says. "And that background color will remain green and then turn yellow. And then the blush color, which starts from the side that’s facing the sun, that’ll turn red."
Then there’s harvesting — making sure whoever’s picking the apples doesn’t bruise or damage them. Producers cross their fingers that there’s no high winds or hail that could damage the trees. And even if the weather’s nice, eventually apples just — fall.
"It’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. I’ve never seen a year when we didn’t have drop," grower Bill Everett says. "They just get to a point and they’ve had enough and they start to go — they start to drop."
Everett is about 12 days into his harvest. He says they are picking fast before the apples start to fall. And the goal, he says, is for "when [the apples] leave the packing house in the boxes headed for the retailer [they] looks just like [they] came off the tree."
So yes, it is a good year for apples. Bill Everett’s hoping for a slightly higher yield than normal. But there’s still a lot of work to do.
