The cool weather this week was just a taste of things to come. As we head into fall it is beginning to become apple picking season. If you don’t have your own trees, there are plenty of you pick orchards around the area. 

It’s funny how people wouldn’t pick fruit for a living at a farm wage, but will pay to be able to go out and pick fruit with friends and relatives on the weekend. If you just want fresh fruit without the work, most commercial orchards also have farmstands. 

Even though New York State has a lot of apple orchards, it is Washington State that produces more apples than every other state combined. With modern refrigeration we can enjoy fresh apples to eat all year round, but the majority of apples today are consumed by drinking them. 

Apple juice is the number one selling and most popular juice among children and as long as it is one hundred percent juice with no added sugar, quite healthy. Apples are fairly sweet and sugar should never be necessary. Sweet cider and hard cider are the other two categories, for liquid apple refreshment. I am not a beer drinker but I am a big fan of hard cider. 

Of course I have been down to Angry Orchard on Albany Post Rd. between Montgomery and Wallkill, but I like to try different ciders where ever I go. I mentioned that I had gone to an orchard that produces cider in Ireland when I was over there this summer and the visit was very enlightening. It is a family owned and operated orchard over 60 years old started by the current operators’ grandfather. 

Bramley apples are the variety they use over there with a couple of modifications. Their grandfather when starting the orchard tied the limbs of the tree down so that they couldn’t grow up. 

Over time the limbs almost had a weeping effect that would make harvesting the apples much easier in the fall. He also grafted Golden Delicious apples to the top of each Bramley tree. This was for two reasons, the first being better cross pollination using less square feet. 

The second being that the Bramley apples ripen earlier than the Golden Delicious to ensure that the orchard would be picking apples for a longer period of time as back then they didn’t have huge refrigeration units like the orchards have today. 

More recently though the orchard has been using dwarf trees that only grow six to seven feet tall. They are growing the dwarf tree close together on a fence row similar to that of a grape arbor. 

You get much more fruit on standard trees compared to dwarf trees but what they have found is that you can plant many more dwarf trees per square foot than standards, usually planting trees five to six feet apart. 

Because the dwarf trees are shorter, they are easier and faster to prune and pick the fruit in the fall. They prune their trees twice a year, once after the fruit sets in the spring they take off any vertical shoots and regular overall pruning in the fall. 

They can do this because their summer temperatures never get too hot. It is a great idea to prune off vertical shoots as they take strength away from the tree that could go into the fruit, but in our area we have to seal the cuts with pruning sealer so that they won’t bleed in the hotter weather. 

Overall they are getting as much fruit per acre with the dwarf orchard as the standard orchard and the dwarf orchard costs less to maintain and pick. So over time as the standard orchard starts to wind down with production, they will be replacing it with more dwarf trees. You can look them up on the internet but their ciders and vinegar are not available for sale in the United States, yet... Go to Longmeadowcider.com to check them out and I found a short Youtube video that shows both the standard and dwarf trees on the farm, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjEd6N7Mdmo.