Hi everyone,
It's been a really busy week. Although I guess that's pretty standard for this time of year, this week has been particularly short on sleep. I just spent a few days in western New York at the International Fruit Tree Association's summer tour. We had two days of orchard tours to see what some of the biggest orchards in New York are doing these days, and we spent one day at Cornell's Fruit Field Day to see their current research on a bunch of different fruit tree management topics. New York is the biggest producer of apples in the country after Washington, and as such a lot of their orchards are bigger and more cutting edge (unfortunately) than we are here in Ohio. So I came back with a lot of ideas of things I'd like to try over the next few years.
I got back on Friday and spent the day picking peaches (more on that in a second), and then spent today picking
Pristine apples. We'll have Pristine in the store tomorrow morning. For this time of year, it's a great apple. It's an excellent sauce apple and makes a good pie. But unlike Transparent and Lodi (the other early summer apples we grow), it's got some sugar to balance out its acid as well as a better crunch, so it actually makes for a pretty good eating apple.
In other news (and this is kind of a big one), tomorrow (Sunday the 24th) is going to be the last day of berry u-pick for the season. There are still a few blackberries and blueberries left out there, but that's about it. The blueberries are mostly in rows 5 and 6 from the driveway, although there's a scattering in some other rows, too.
This also means that starting on Tuesday we won't be open at 8 for picking anymore...we'll be going back to our normal 9-6 Tuesday-Saturday and 11-5 Sunday hours. These will be our hours through the end of October, when we shorten them up a bit for the winter.
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