Managing an Apple Orchard

As the weather has gotten colder we've still been working away, busy as bees, here at the Corner.  The source of all this activity is the apple orchard.  Never did I think when we bought this place that a few apple trees would occupy me for 3 months at a time.  Of course, I didn't count exactly how many apple trees came with the house.

The work began back in late July when Jody cleared the weeds out of the orchard.  Climbing nightshade have taken over in there and requires vigilance to keep it at bay.

From there we began thinning apples.  Apple trees tend to produce many many little apples.  The trick to getting larger fruit is to thin your apple crop.  When we came upon a clump of say 5 apples growing together, we would pull approximately 3 of them off the tree, leaving 2 behind.  Those 2 apples will receive all the nutrition that the original 5 would have received and grow into larger apples.

At the end of August our first apples matured.  There seemed to be a large amount of apples that had fallen under one particular tree so we began taste testing.  Happily we discovered this tree is a Yellow Transparent, otherwise known as an August Apple.  It produces soft yellow apples with a tart flavour.  How did we know what kind of apple it was?  We considered that the trees in our orchard were likely planted around the time this house was built.  Basically some time in the last 100 years.  You won't find these apples at your local supermarket so we needed to find a source that listed heritage varieties.  AppleManFarms lists heritage varieties and talks about varieties that are common in the maritimes and was a big help to us.  We still haven't been able to identify all the varieties on our property but we're getting there.  Identification requires a lot of items to be addressed.  The size, shape, taste and colour of the apples are important.  But other qualities such as bloom time and tree shape are considered as well.  In the coming year I hope to more carefully document each of our trees so we'll be that much closer to a positive identification.

These apples ripened in late October and were extremely tasty.  Unfortunately we haven't been able to identify them.

Now in November there are still a few apples hanging on in our trees although most have fallen or been picked.  I spent some time recently on my hands and knees clearing apples off the ground.  I managed to do some weeding while I was crawling around as well.  Once the ground was clear I spread lime and compost as the trees have not had a good feeding in who knows how long.  One of the ways I know this is because our apples suffer from Bitter Pit.  This is a condition caused by calcium deficiency.  Our apples appear pitted and brown spots occur in the flesh.  The lime and compost spread throughout the orchard will hopefully begin to alleviate this condition.

Many apples too high to reach fall to the ground and are damaged by bruising, bugs, slugs and birds.  It means a lot of clean up!

Another issue with our apple orchard is space.  Any fruit tree needs a combination of air and sun to grow large blemish free fruit.  Not enough air circulation or sunlight promotes conditions such as fungus and rot.  Many of the trees are planted tightly together and we have had a difficult time accessing the apples.  Often when we do find them they are quite small, deformed or bug ridden.  A decision was made to create a little more room and our orchard is now minus 3 trees.  It's funny but you hardly even notice they're gone.  The branches from the other trees simply relaxed into the open space and filled it right back up again.  Hopefully the removed trees will create a little more breathing room and ease up the competition for nutrients and light.

On the right you can see the stump from a former apple tree.  There was only a couple feet between that tree and its neighbour.

Things have slowed down in our orchard right now and we're getting a bit of a break but there's always another chore to be undertaken.  The next step will be pruning which we'll do mid-winter or early early spring when the trees are dormant.  In the meantime we're enjoying the fruits of our labour, slices of apple pie and cups of hot cider on a chilly evening.