June drop

Well before it is time for harvest, the size of the New England apple crop is impacted by “June drop.” Occurring now, it is a time when the apple tree divests itself of surplus fruit competing for food, water and nutrients. June drop enables the remaining apples to mature to a good size, without overwhelming the tree.

The fallen apples typically are about one-half inch to one inch in diameter. Even with this naturally occurring governor, farmers follow June drop with additional thinning, often by hand, to ensure a good crop. Only the best-looking, healthiest apples are left to ripen.

If allowed to, almost all the blossoms on an apple tree will bear fruit. But as little as 5 percent to 10 percent are needed for a full crop. By removing excess fruit, the tree is spared from the threat of breaking under its own weight, and does not have to expend energy producing lots of smaller apples.

Another reason for thinning is to allow development of flower buds for next year's crop. This is especially important for varieties that bear fruit in alternate years.

The farms behind the food you eat

New England’s orchards, like the apples they grow, come in all shapes and sizes. There are the larger farms that grow exclusively for the wholesale market; these are the apples that you typically find in your supermarket (admittedly, a large farm in New England is dwarfed by the huge acreage apple growers farm in states like Washington, New York and Michigan, which collectively produce the bulk of the U.S. crop).

There are the farms that span generations, and many of these, happily, continue to thrive (although succession is often a concern). There are the mid-sized operations that make ends meet with diversified crops and an entrepreneurial approach to retail marketing. There are the hybrids—orchards that supplement their farm income with a second business that takes advantage of the beauty of their land, from golf courses to weddings to microbreweries.

However diverse their operations, New England’s apple farmers are a hard-working and resourceful bunch. The New England apple you see at a grocery store, farmer’s market, farmstand, pick-your-own orchard or restaurant is the product of a labor of love: of fruit, land and tradition. Admiring the spectacular view from one orchard lately, a friend commented on its beauty, but then added rhetorically, “Do you know any orchard that isn’t in a beautiful setting?”

It is that love of the land, the fruit it bears and the hard work it takes to sustain it that makes a New England orchard “typical,” rather than its business profile. In this sense, Hamilton Orchards in New Salem, Massachusetts, serves as a good example of the farms behind the fruit you eat.

Hamilton Orchards today produces fruit on about 30 acres, set high off Route 202 on the western side of the Quabbin Reservoir (you can glimpse the Quabbin from several places in the orchard). They grow mostly McIntosh, Cortlands and Macouns, a few Red Spys, with some plums, blueberries, strawberries and pick-your-own raspberries mixed in.

Owner Barbara Hamilton lost her husband, Bill, three years ago; they had been together for 30 years, marrying just months after a chance meeting at an apple growers conference. Today Barbara, at an age when most people have retired, continues to work seven days a week. She says that Bill was still working when he died at 81, and adds, “if he had lived to 101, he still would have been doing what he could in the orchard.”

They had two sons, aged 10 and 12, from previous marriages when they moved to the farm in New Salem in the late 1970s, and the eldest, Bruce, returned to manage the farm after Bill died. Under Bill’s direction, says Barbara, Hamilton Orchards became the first orchard in the region to launch a pick-your-own operation, and to grow raspberries in a greenhouse.

At the outset, they built a small restaurant and bakery, the Apple Barn, with picture windows overlooking the view. We recently had breakfast there (they open weekends beginning in March, but suspend serving breakfast during the peak of the fresh harvest), and it was delicious.

There were no frills, just good food in a nice atmosphere at a reasonable price: blueberry and raspberry pancakes (if you visit, be forewarned: they are huge) served with maple syrup made on the farm, eggs and sausage, home fries, cider donuts, cider and coffee.

The adjacent bakery sells pies and pastries as well as cider donuts (the latter were outstanding), plus cider (from Carlson Orchards in Harvard, Massachusetts), and a few of their jams, jellies and maple syrup. There are a couple of photographs of Bill on the spare but attractive barn-board walls, some apple posters and, spanning several walls to either side above the cash register, an enormous collection of potholders with apple themes.

The place is bustling in late summer and fall, but much of the selling is done on the road. Though she still limps slightly from a broken foot suffered in February (the cast has been off now for less than two weeks), Barbara has already begun making weekly trips Tuesdays and Fridays to the farmer’s market in Boston’s Copley Square, and sells at farmer’s markets in Chicopee Wednesdays, Holyoke Thursdays, and Amherst Saturday mornings.

The cider donuts, not surprisingly, are a big hit year-round, as is the maple syrup, while it lasts. The berries and apples are sold mostly in season (supplemented with the berries grown inside their greenhouse).

Asked what her favorite pie apples are, Barbara answers quickly and succinctly, “Cortlands.” While she clearly misses Bill, she seems to savor his memory rather than dwell on his loss, and she has successfully managed to carry on their enterprise with Bruce’s help. Whatever challenges she is facing (such as the replacement of two hoods for her industrial ovens this winter, to the tune of $12,000), she’s not complaining. Her love of the land and the lifestyle is palpable.

There is much more to tell about Hamilton (or any New England orchard), but the best way to learn about the source of your local apples is to visit for yourself. At the very least, you can expect good food, fresh air and stunning views. The essence of this quintessential New England experience lingers in every apple you taste grown on these soils, whether you find it in on the limb, at the farmer’s market or in the bin of your produce aisles.

No bees, no apples

They arrive quietly, in the middle of the night, unloaded from trucks, while they are sleeping. They come from as far away as Georgia and California, and they will be gone in a couple of weeks. The honeybees are descending on New England’s orchards.

That’s because, with the opening of the "king" blossom (the largest and center-most of the apple’s five-blossom clusters), pollination season has begun. While the temperate weather of the past week or so has slowed down the apple bloom, it is still running a couple of weeks ahead of most years due to the unseasonably warm weather the region experienced in early April.

Once the blossoms reach this stage, colonies rented from beekeepers must be moved in quickly—at night so the bees are "home" and not in flight. Sunny, mild days are needed during bloom to encourage strong bee activity. If we have extended stretches of rainy weather during bloom, it can seriously reduce the size of the year’s apple crop.

Pollination is necessary to the reproduction of all flowering plants. It involves the transfer of a plant’s male reproductive cells in pollen to the female reproductive structures of a flower, the stigma.

As the honeybee flies from flowers on one apple tree to those on another in the orchard, pollen sticks to its body. The pollen then rubs off onto the stigma each time the bee visits a flower. Pollen grains stick to the surface of the stigma, germinate and unite with the female cell in the ovary. After fertilization occurs, seeds develop and the fruit begins to grow. In this way, a honeybee may fertilize as many as 5,000 flowers a day.

Apples need more than one variety of pollen for the cross-pollination that ensures good fruit set. A Mac can’t pollinate a Mac, in other words. It needs a nearby Cortland, Empire or other variety to do the trick.

Not all of the orchard’s bees are imported. There are dozens of species of native wild bees that pollinate the apple blossoms. Many local beekeepers also supply New England’s apple orchards (and other farm crops), including hobbyists and, in at least one case, a high school beekeeping club.

It takes roughly a hive of bees to pollinate an acre of apple trees. The hives are often spread throughout the orchard, but the bees can travel far enough from a single location to cover an orchard with a two-mile radius.

Some orchards take no chances, putting additional pollen at the entrances of hives to guarantee that the bees coming and going will have a full payload

One grower in Connecticut recently told us that his supplier’s bee population is down 80 percent this year, a result of honeybee colony collapse disorder, an unexplained plague that has threatened the domestic bee population in recent years. But for the most part, New England growers—and their suppliers—seem unaffected

That may be because there are no great areas of monoculture of trees in New England, as there are in other regions. “There are many woodlots and other suitable non-agricultural areas in New England where there continues to be an active wild bee population,” says Mo Tougas of Tougas Family Farm in Northborough, Massachusetts. “There are plenty of bees to set our crop

“We bring in honeybees for insurance for our apple crop. Adding pollinators also may tend to give us better quality, as fruit will be more symmetrical with better pollination.”

Spring bloom

The unseasonably warm weather is causing New England's apple trees to blossom early, about three weeks ahead of a normal year. In parts of eastern Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, the orchards are already showing a lot of color.

Depending on what part of New England you live in, the next week or so will be a good time to drive by your favorite orchard and take in the annual flower show.

It's not good news for farmers, though. Despite the current warmth, it's so early in the season that we will remain vulnerable to frost for the next several weeks, and a hard frost could kill the blossoms and the fruit they would eventually bear. Cold weather after this heat wave could spell disaster for the 2010 crop.

So enjoy the warmth and check out the blossoms. But keep your fingers crossed that it stays above freezing from here on, so that New England's orchards will be as compelling to apple lovers in the fall as they are to honeybees now.

The Wolf River apple, dating back to the 1880s, was named after the place where it was first grown, near the Wolf River in Wisconsin. William Springer from Quebec, Canada planted seeds of an Alexander apple near his new farm in Fremont, and the Wolf River was born!

Most notable, perhaps, for its good looks and huge size, it sometimes weighs upwards of one pound. Wolf Rivers are a light red in color with red striping and swatches of light yellow/green. Their pale yellow flesh is coarse and somewhat juicy. These tart apples are most useful as a cooking apple, especially for apple butter and sauce.

Wolf Rivers are ready for harvest in September and do not keep well; they're best eaten fresh off the tree.

Most apple seeds do not reliably reproduce a similar apple tree which is why modern horticulture relies on grafting to propagate varieties. Wolf River is among the few apple varieties that produce, from seed, a tree close to that of its parent.