Growing Apples in Idaho

SPRING is wake up time in the orchard! Now is the time everything comes to life, the grass start to grow, the buds come out on the trees. The orchard is getting ready to make fruit.

We have to put on another spray at this time to prevent the worm from getting in the apples, there is a small moth that causes the apple to have the worms it is called the coddling moth, it will bite the apple (sting) and lay an egg, as the egg hatches it grows into a worm and eats its way into the apple. So we spray with insecticide to kill the moth. This has to be done every 21 days through out the growing season until the apple is mature and we pick it. Usually three or four sprays for the growing season.

Then it’s time for the prettiest part of the growing season, when the trees are in full bloom. But we can’t rest yet because there are so many blooms if they all make apples it will break the trees down. So we have to thin the blossoms, and for that we use a chemical spray and then if that doesn’t get enough off we must do hand thinning. Every bloom has five flowers, but we only need one so we go pick off the bloom we don’t want by hand, for that we have to hire a crew of people to go thru every tree in the orchard and pick off the excess bloom. A time consuming and expensive job.

In the spring  of  the  year  we  also have to worry about the cold weather, at different stages of  growth the blooms and small apples are very suspectible to cold, so we have to protedct  the trees so the  frost  does not kill all the blooms  or  young apples. We  installed motor driven wind  machines to  move the air in the orchard so the crop won't freeze. 

This must be done so that each apple has room enough to grow to the size we need to take it to market. While taking care of the trees we have to be watering the trees, while watering the trees the grass also gets watered, we need the grass in the orchard as a ground cover so the sun won't reflect off the ground and burn the apples. You can’t sell apples that are sunburned. So now we have to mow the grass, to do that we have a machine called a beater we attach to the tractor power take off. The beater is eight feet wide and has two sets of big steel blades to cut the grass. The orchard grass grows very fast; we need to mow it every two week. In two weeks it will be two or three feet high.

In the winter and spring we have to apply fertilizer to the ground to keep the trees healthy, so the trees will produce nice big red apples. This is another reason the grass grows so much.The fertilizer is like vitamins to your body. It is applied by a big spreader and broadcast over the whole orchard.

What do we do in the summer? If you want to know look for our next chapter, Orchard in the Summer.