THE FARM REPORT - May 2007 Some of our customers have been enjoying Hackleboro Orchards way before Harry and I started to manage it, which is over 15 years now. I hear, over and over how, when they were little, their parents brought them here or their GRANDparents, brought them here and now they are bringing THEIR grandchildren to keep their family tradition alive! Wow, that's a lot of generations!
I hear many times over how when they were younger, they worked here, or an uncle, or aunt worked in the packing house, or drove the tractor for the Jamaican pickers, etc.
Hackleboro means a lot to a lot of people. I've tried to record some of the stories. Someday, I will write a book about this amazing farm and the wonderful people who feel so deeply about this special place.
Hackleboro, to the best of my knowledge, has been a working farm since the war, around the late 40's, growing vegetables like potatoes, corn and tomatoes for the war effort.
The orchard was planted the good old fashioned way at about the same time, often with managers and their families coming and going, adding new blocks of apple trees all the while. There is now in our care, 40 acres of trees. We have certainly subtracted and added trees since we came here. There are many new varieties Harry has added, like Paulareds, Gingergolds, Macouns, Royal Cortlands, Galas, Buckeye Galas, Blushing Goldens, and HoneyCrisp.
We have a very large "Pick Your Own" section, featuring an early antique apple, the Puritan, which is ready in August and is closely followed by McIntosh, Cortland, Empire, Red and Golden Delicious, and last but certainly not least, Northern Spy. Our "Pick Your Own" goes from late August into--sometimes--late November, or, as I like to put it, when Mother Nature says it's over and freezes the apples still on the trees. I don't know of any orchard lucky enough to have Northern Spy in their "Pick Your Own" section!
Other varieties of apples and tree fruit are peaches, nectarines, plums, Paulareds, Melbas, Wealthys, Jonathans, crabapples, Baldwin apples and Bosc pears.
Many people ask us about 'Pick Your Own' peaches. Oh boy. Are you sure you want to attempt this? Peach fuzz isn't just on the peach, it's all over the place, mostly on the leaves of the trees. Peaches are generally ready for picking during our hottest month, August, which means you are a little sweaty and that peach fuzz sticks INTO you. You don't feel the effects right away... then all of a sudden, you start to scratch like crazy as those little fuzzies get into your skin. It's as if you rolled around in insulation! The only way to get it off is to wash it off. We usually bring a gallon of water to douse ourselves at the end of a peach-picking day. It helps a little.
Another part of peach picking that is challenging is the fact that they have very little to no stem, which means the fruit is smack up against its branch. We like to pick them 'tree ripened,' which is why so many people buy a few, start to drive away, then turn their car around to buy even more! However, they are delicate now, and 'yielding.' AND these peaches are so large, they are literally growing up and around the branch. If you twist it off gently, you scrape the top of the fruit off onto the branch. OR, if you hold the peach and PULL it off, you run a huge risk of finger-bruising it before you even get the darn thing OFF the branch that it is SO very much clinging to! ARGGGH! So, when we have 'seconds' for sale, most likely it's because that peach hung on for dear life, thus getting a bit torn or bruised in the picking process! Tough for us, but a good deal for you, the customer, if you are willing to cut your 'second' peaches up the moment you get them home. Many customers of ours do just that for jams and jellies.
Apples are a great fruit. And, they are fair game to anything that leaps, runs, crawls, or flies. The deer were our strongest, biggest and certainly the most beautiful of all our pests.
Once the kids and I were enjoying watching them out our living room window, delicately nibbling the buds off and it was just WONDERFUL to see them... until poor Harry came into the room and wanted to know what we were looking at, and he chased them off... LOUDLY. He then brought us out to show us the severe damage and asked us HOW LONG we were watching them munch away on our future crop for that fall, our BREAD AND BUTTER... (um, ruh roh, at least an hour…).
After a huge herd of deer set our crop back so far that we were about to go out of business, we decided to put up a fence. There was an existing fence, but it was so old and the deer knew it. They'd bust a hole in it, Harry would spend hours fixing the holes when he really wanted to be pruning… and they'd come along later that night and simply bust a new hole right next to the hole he JUST patched.
The time to put up a new fence was overdue. So, up it went. The cost of that fence could've been a new car, maybe some new furniture! Or, a kid in college! Well, we DO have a child in college, but the new car and the new furniture are a distant goal! The fence is a real beauty, though and it works. The deer are now safely out of the way and munching on our neighbors’ shrubs. The nurseries must LOVE selling extra replacement shrubberies.
The other pests are of course, mice. THEY don't eat the buds off the future apple, oh no, they can KILL the entire tree! If we get a good amount of snow, their natural predators, like the owl, fox and coyote, can't see them or get to them, especially if there is a crust on the snow. The mice know this and have little parties and get-togethers, and after those parties and get-togethers, there are more mice, and MORE mice… well, you get the picture. They like to eat the bark OFF the tree, ALL the way AROUND the trunk, which is called 'girdling.’ Sigh. If they manage to eat half way around, or WORSE, all the way around, they have girdled the tree, and now the tree dies. Its "skin" is gone. That means pulling the dead tree out, no easy feat, and planting a new one in its place, a time consuming and expensive effort.
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So, we put 'tree guards' around the trunks to help protect them. Sometimes they are metal mesh, but those are really hard to work with. Mostly we use the plastic ones, which give way when the trees grow.
A lot of people hate coyotes. But we don't, we love them. We have lots of farm animals and the coyotes have never bothered them. I think they prefer an easy snack of mice over the possibility of getting kicked in the head by my horse!
The next pest is the bug. Now, some bugs are great, and very helpful by Nature's design. Some are pollinators, like the honey bee and bumblebee, the hover fly, even butterflies. But some are very damaging: laying their eggs IN the apple blossom, which causes all kinds of injury to the fruit. One of the worst offenders is the mite. They can really weaken the tree itself. We whined and carried on about the mighty mite to our Entomologist (the bug guy), and he brought Harry some predator mites that happily munch away on the destructive mites. It has taken time—years, actually--for them to spread through out the orchard, but what a difference! We LOVE predator mites!
The other thing we must try to control or all is lost, is disease. Now diseases in apple trees are very much like the diseases that plague us. When I was little, I was terrified of getting shots, until my mother explained the whole reason why we receive them. She told me about the epidemics of polio and the measles. So… OK, OK, I'll take the shot!
It's like that with the trees. We follow the IPM method, which stands for Integrated Pest Management. But, when it comes to disease we don't mess around. We can't. Nothing else truly works. Organic sprays are available but are not always effective. And the cost of running a tractor night and day to repeatedly use these organic sprays are prohibitive. The cost of paying someone to drive the tractor night and day is huge. The emissions from a big piece of equipment like this is also a factor.
So, we use a spray to knock out the disease, so to speak, in one punch. It's a water-mixed spray so it is not sheer chemical. On the contrary: so many parts per million. The water dilutes and distributes. If there is not much sign of disease, then Harry can skip it entirely. Sometimes he can get away with just spraying a section here and a section there, or cutting the disease out completely with his chain saw.
We only use sprays that break down in the soil and never use the ones that have a metal base to them, that will not. After growing apples for over 25 years (we had a farm ten years prior to this one), he has certainly created his spray program to be the ultimate minimal. The nowledge he possesses is amazing. UNH works closely with him because he doesn't miss a thing out in that orchard. I've learned now to be wary of the invitation, "Honey, want to go for a walk with me out in the orchard?" I think, ‘Oh how romantic’… then get tired of standing around, waiting for him while he gets ‘lost’ (forgetting I exist), looking at and under every leaf on every tree... so, I continue my romantic walk by myself! I’m really not the least bit upset, however, because I realize how important it is for him to really know what is happening out there.
The payback? Healthy trees and healthy apples. I read that frogs are a sure sign of a healthy orchard. They are very, VERY sensitive to poison of any kind. All our efforts have certainly paid off! The orchard sometimes teems with them! I've always loved frogs, even since I was a kid, so when I read about that I was really excited.
Birds are another sure sign of a healthy orchard. Harry and I have become very good birder watchers. We have recorded 35 different species and counting. The ones that get us really going are the Bluebirds, the Pileated woodpeckers and the Indigo Buntings. We have a pin in the bird map at the Audubon Society for a Northern Three toed Woodpecker, never before seen this far south.
So, long story short, we work very closely with Mother Nature. The weather, the sun, and the earth are all very much a part of our lives. We employ many young people during the summer and fall months. They really, REALLY learn what hard work is all about! And, they learn so much from the farm itself and what it takes to run it properly and where their food comes from. If they work in the fall, they learn how to pick some of it, sort it, rotate it in the cooler and market it. We've enjoyed getting to know our Jamaican workers, who live in an impoverished country and remind us how lucky we are to live in America. We've been featured on WMUR's "NH Chronicle." PSNH made a commercial here. We've hosted many beautiful weddings for the nicest couples. Best of all, we've made lifelong friends here!
We think this farm is special, in more ways than one!
Hackleboro Orchards
P.O. Box 106
Hackleboro Rd (onto Orchard Rd)
Canterbury, NH 03224
Harry and Linda Weiser & Family
603-783-4248
www.HackleboroOrchards.com
Open for “Pick Your Own Strawberries” in June, then “Pick Your Own Blueberries” July & August. Listen to our business phone message for details of picking availability.
Farmstand opens full time, 9-6 (closed only on Tuesdays), from late August – Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving, by appointment.
“See you at the Farm!”
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