I was very, very lucky to get to visit the orchard for a week, to meet various farmers and suppliers, whose superb produce makes it to Calgary every week to be carried home to hundreds and thousands of tables across the city. On my trip I learned a lot more about how we do what we do, and had reiterated exactly WHY we do what we do.
So, follow me through the Orchard and the Similkameen Valley: the story of how our produce arrives on your table every week.
Blush Lane Organic Orchard - Keremeos, BCI arrived on a Friday night, and Rob ushered me out to the orchard before it got dark, to see the fruit trees. The Spartan Apples were near-ready, and apples hung heavy on the branches. I have never been up close to an apple tree like that before, and I was immediately struck by firstly; its beauty, but secondly; its presence. I grew up in Manitoba, where farmers harvest grain and other annual crops. Fruit farming is different: the trees are planted and take a couple years to fruit, by the time they are into their peak production they are a few years old. There is time to build a real relationship with the trees; they stick around for a time, and this one has a unique trunk, and that one is the only Golden Delicious in its row, and this one died so was replanted with a younger tree, and that one didn't get thinned and is heavy with fruit. Each tree is different and from year to year has characteristics that set it apart from every other tree in the orchard. Maybe on a bigger scale this presence might be lost, but the Blush Lane orchard is about 10 acres, bigger than I expected, but small enough for me to visit every tree during the course of the week.
The Golden Delicious, an apple I had relative distaste for, stole my heart on my visit. I found out why this apple-- an old, canonical variety-- has been ruined for the general public. I used to think that people who came in the Farmer's Market asking for this apple didn't know what they were talking about-- why choose an apple that is both dull in colour and in flavour, when there is Honeycrisp and Ambrosia and other exciting varieties, bursting with flavour and freshness.
I found out that because of their light colour, the Goldens are much more apt to show bruises, and are thus picked weeks before they are ripe, so that they can stand up to the rigours of picking and packing. When they are green they are chalky-starchy tasting and lacklustre. This year, Rob has decided to let the Goldens hang on the trees until they are ripe, and sell them as "Old-Time Golden Delicious", as they are meant to be, as Mother Nature intended them to be, ripe, fresh, distinct, and delicious. After all, they are suspected part-mother of the Ambrosia, the younger, more popular apple!
The Spartan apples are also much more exciting when viewed in their natural habitat than when they are stacked high in the market stall. The weather this year has caused all of the apples to develop fantastic colour, and the Spartans have a deep purple blush, a colour more beautiful than can be captured on film, so deep it seems as though it should be nearly bleeding into the crisp white flesh.
When taking photos of apples here, the clear blue sky and soaring mountain peaks are a big part of the photo. In most, you can see the top of a mountain in the background, a reminder that it is a relatively close valley, the mountains looming huge above the trees.
Before coming here, I wondered what made an Organic orchard recognizable from a non-organic one, or if you'd even be able to tell as an outsider (It's definitely not a swarm of hippies and waft of patchouli emanating from the rows of trees-- though some places I'm sure it may be!). The main distinction for someone, like me, who knows nothing about tree fruit farming, is that conventional orchards spray herbicide at the base of the rows of trees, so there are aisles of brown, dead earth bordering the trunks of the trees. In one particular orchard, the earth was worn away to bare stones, making one wonder how a tree could even grow from such a base. In the Blush Lane Orchard, the trees rise from native grasses and sandy topsoil, towering above the healthy earth that is their base, their foundation. Healthy soil is the main building block of organic food.
The Ambrosias at the Blush Lane Orchard are one of the newest trees, and are in the more contemporary style of farming. The first thing one needs to know about apples is that"In the wild, apples grow quite readily from seeds. However, like most perennial fruits, apples are ordinarily propagated asexually by grafting. This is because seedling apples are an example of "extreme heterozygotes", in that rather than inheriting DNA from their parents to create a new apple with those characteristics, they are instead different from their parents, sometimes radically."
What this means, then, for the apple, is that a bud of the desired variety is grafted onto a rootstock (often a more native tree) of the desired size, rather than planting seeds like in a ground crop. The rootstock determines the size of the full-grown tree, and it has recently become an industry standard to use dwarf-- or at least less than full-size-- rootstock, grown with supporting wires in higher density, rather than the full size tree which requires the apple picker to circle the tree on a high ladder with a heavy apple picking bag strapped to his or her front. This allows for much higher density and therefore higher yields and easier picking.
The newest part of the orchard is in this style, less aesthetically pleasing, but more functional.
My favourite part of the orchard was a grove of Apricot trees, long past harvest, but huge, beautiful trees nonetheless. There was a kind of quiet in this grove that is unmatched anywhere-- despite the fruit stand being right on the highway, you would swear you are inside of a poem when sit for a while in this quiet place. The trees are old and it feels like they are all good friends, like they can communicate through the hushing of leaves. I can't imagine how beautiful these trees would be with fruit!
The peach trees are frilly and beautiful, with long leaves that make them stand out, even from far away. You can recognize a peach tree without even being close to it, it looks like it doesn't belong because it is just too perfect.
This photo is of Betsy, the tractor. She's an old, reliable girl.
Beneath all these leaves are hundreds of pounds of squash, though you can't even see a single crooked neck or spotted body sticking out! Believe me: I picked some!
~~~~~The Ambrosia is one of our best-selling and most popular apples. While in BC, I was fortunate enough to have a most excellent guide who was able to take me to see the Ambrosia mother tree, something not on the agenda for just any tourist! Luckily, we caught the mother the day before her apples were picked, and she was a breathtaking sight!
In returning to Alberta, I was surprised at how few people-- including most of our staff-- knew the story of the Ambrosia apple. Here is the story, for those who don't know:"In 1980, when Sally Mennell purchased her orchard it was planted to Red and Golden Delicious, MacIntosh and Spartan apples; Italian Prune Plums; Bartlett and Anjou pears; nectarines and peaches. Between 1980 and 2004 the entire orchard was replanted.
In 1987 a row of Jonagold apples was planted where there had previously been Italian Prune Plums. The nearest apple tree was a Golden Delicious planted among the prunes. A seedling grew up in the row of the new Jonagold apple trees that was different from all the others in the row. In 1989 it bore its first fruit. The fruit was so good and distinctive that the pickers ate the apples before the Mennells could properly taste them.
The following year the same thing happened and as pickers seldom eat apples the Mennells thought that perhaps they should take this seedling seriously. In 1990-91 about 180 trees were budded onto M26 rootstock to see if the variety would remain true to type. It did and by 1993 Wilfrid, Brian and Robert Mennell had propagated about 400 trees. Wilfrid named the new variety Ambrosia because it had the honeyed flavour of "a food of the Gods"."
The mother is now surrounded by her progeny, but in the rows of smaller grafted trees, it is easy to spot her gnarled, twisting trunk and reaching branches.
Every Ambrosia apple originated from this tree... Lots of new apple cultivars originate in apple research stations, but the Ambrosia came from Mother Nature, she is distinctly Canadian and grew in a healthy Organic orchard.~~~~~
Lina's GardensFred and Nancy Danenhower and Daughters
I didn't have my camera with me the day that we saw the Danenhower's farm, but they are too special to go without mention. Right now at Blush Lane, more than half of our delicious, crisp, and juicy apples are from Fred and Nancy Danenhower's farm.
Technically, they are "Danenhower and Daughters", and before I left for the orchard Joanna and I giggled at a stick-person drawing of a family with two daughters that had recently started appearing on the sides of the Blush Lane boxes. We thought it was very cute, and wondered how old that little girl must be, obviously one of the daughters. Well-- nearly as exciting as seeing the Ambrosia mother tree-- I also got to see the original drawing, and the best part of it all is that I found out the daughter is in her 20's!
Technically, they are "Danenhower and Daughters", and before I left for the orchard Joanna and I giggled at a stick-person drawing of a family with two daughters that had recently started appearing on the sides of the Blush Lane boxes. We thought it was very cute, and wondered how old that little girl must be, obviously one of the daughters. Well-- nearly as exciting as seeing the Ambrosia mother tree-- I also got to see the original drawing, and the best part of it all is that I found out the daughter is in her 20's!
~~~~~
In the beginning of the summer season, we received beautiful rainbow assortments of cherry tomatoes, and when I tasted them I was blown away. We told customers they were sweeter than candy, and one lady in particular was so excited when she saw them she exclaimed "I wait all year for these!" and bought 6 packages.On my trip I had the good fortune to meet Art and Lina Nugteren, the growers of the fine cherry tomato assortments and many other top-notch products.
The quality of their peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and all their other produce is unmatched-- the kind of stuff you can tell was grown, picked, and packed with care, because it is glowing from the boxes when we get it. In my visit, I saw the behind the scenes as to why their stuff is so great.
Each tomato plant is tended with care, staked to its own bamboo, in neat and accessible rows. The day I was there, they were picking cherry tomatoes, carefully selecting only the very best, picking into small pails lined up into a half-bin, taking them to the house to be packed. Art and Lina's daughter Ariela helps her mother with the packing, and with each clamshell of tomatoes painstaking care is taken to ensure that a pleasing mix of colours and shapes is achieved. The second sort that happens in the packing is another reason that the quality on their produce is so high-- you would be hard-pressed to find a single blemish or crack amongst the sugar-sweet babies.
~~~~~
Cawston is the neighbour to Keremeos, 5 minutes away and really so close that it all seems like the same town. In Cawston, we went to the big packing house to check out some Honeycrisp apples (that turned out to be beautiful behemoths!) and while we were there, got a tour of the facility and got to see some of the neat "toys" that they have at their disposal.The packing line that you see in the above photo is all controlled by computers, they can speed it up, redirect a specific size of apple to a specific station, et cetera, et cetera... The control room had multiple computer screens (and looked like somewhere one could really do a lot of damage if one didn't know what one was doing!). They had a new piece of equipment that we got to see as well: a machine that could scan an apple without harming it at all and tell the operator the starch level, pressure, and sugar brix (a test that used to be performed by a farmer's tastebuds, probably with less reliable results!). Overall, in a place as small as Keremeos and Cawston, it was pretty neat to see a state-of-the-art facility, which has obviously emerged out of necessity so that the farmers can sell their fruit to a larger market. In the winter, once our direct apples are finished, this is where we get our apples, the ones in the "Nature's First Fruits" boxes.
Picking Apples
On the last day of my Orchard trek, I got to do something that I have been wanting to do for years: Pick apples. I remember being in University and telling my Mom that I wanted to journey some 800 kms west to pick apples for a summer and her telling me "If you want to pick something, I have plenty for you to pick here!"... So I always journeyed east instead. However, no trip to the orchard would have been complete without picking something from a tree, so Rob set me up picking the "buffer zone" apples.
On the last day of my Orchard trek, I got to do something that I have been wanting to do for years: Pick apples. I remember being in University and telling my Mom that I wanted to journey some 800 kms west to pick apples for a summer and her telling me "If you want to pick something, I have plenty for you to pick here!"... So I always journeyed east instead. However, no trip to the orchard would have been complete without picking something from a tree, so Rob set me up picking the "buffer zone" apples.
In a certified organic orchard, there must be a 25 foot buffer zone between conventional and organic trees. In the Blush Lane Orchard, there is less than 25 feet, so the first 2 trees in the row on that side of the orchard must be kept separate from the other apples. I got to pick the buffer zone apples: I put them directly into boxes and packed them up to ship to Calgary and donate to the food bank.
Here I am on Betsy the Tractor!
I picked just under 1400 lbs of apples (34-40 lb boxes) in about 4-1/2 hours. A really good apple picker will pick up to 10-800 lb bins a day... So, it appears I will not be quitting my day job!
~~~~~
The Weeks' Culmination: Produce to Calgary
And finally, the culmination of my week in the orchard: the weekly shipment to Calgary. We had about a dozen pallets of produce, which I then returned to on Friday (conveniently after they had all been put away on Thursday!) to sell at the market.It's truly something special to meet the people who grow the food you eat. My trip to the orchard allowed me to develop an even deeper connection to my food, which I can pass on to customers and staff and friends alike. Not only are we selling great produce at Blush Lane, we are supporting local farmers and building relationships with them. That's the secret to why our produce is so great-- it is handled with love by some of our closest friends.
Thank you to the farmers for all that you do, and know that all of us appreciate every ounce of hard work that is behind each thing that you grow.
~~~~~
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