Description
link to short video of what happened in the Spring 2026 freeze event
ABOUT THE FRUIT & THE ORCHARD:
On April 17 there was a precipitous freeze. The entirety of 2026 Ela tree fruit crop died: peaches, pears, apples, cherries, and plums. Luckily the trees all came through fine, but they won’t set new fruit buds until next year. As a result we are limiting our farmers’ market attendance this season. Thanks to our zero-food waste practices we have plenty of apple and pear sauce, fruit butters, dried fruits, freeze dried fruits, and jams to allow us to keep some presence at farmers’ markets. And fortunately our organic heirloom tomatoes were not yet in the ground when the freeze hit, so we will be bringing plenty of those to markets this year!
Every single fruit tree in the orchard gets cared for by hand every single year. Think about them kind of like kids – they need attention all year round, every day. If you neglect them, it stunts their growth and potential if it doesn’t outright kill them. Your support helps us care for our young trees every step of the way!
CARING FOR AN ORCHARD:
An organic ecosystem takes the long view. Growing a perennial crop which takes years to mature takes patience. Here’s one look at how they go together. Below is a quick synopsis of a few of the everyday elements we think about.
WIND MACHINES (see one here)
Running wind machines to stave off frost in the spring is normal. It means we’ve got temperature sensors with alarms stationed throughout the orchard which alert us when it gets colder than acertain set pont. As spring progresses, the fruit buds get more and more sensitive to temperature. That means there is never a single set temperature which is “too cold”. The threshold is a moving target. Research stations help with monitoring the stages of the buds and share that information with growers. When we think temperatures might be approaching a dangerous level of cold (this happens usually in the middle of the night) and conditions are right (no cloud cover with no wind) we can zoom around the orchard turning on our 11 tall wind machines. Like giant helicopter rotors, they stir the air and hopefully get the coldest air off the ground level while mixing the rising warm air back down to the trees. Those machines run on propane-powered truck engines. As the local propane companies are getting bought up by national chains, it’s getting trickier to make sure we get the tanks refilled immediately. Since cold nights often come in sets, that can be a little nerve wracking!
WATER
Irrigating has to wait until the freezes have passed, since we don’t want to flood the lines only to have the water in them freeze and create cracks or leaks. Then we keep water coming to the trees on rotation until our season’s water is all gone. How much water we have varies year to year depending on snow pack, soil moisture, and summer rainfall. Our irrigation systems are the most water-conserving they can be, every tree row is fed by microsprinkler and/or drip systems. All but one corner of the farm is able to be watered by the pressure generated from our gravity-fed system. Pipes, Filters, hoses, valves, and sprinklers all need ongoing attention and are a chronic source of small repairs needed.
BLOSSOM & FRUIT THINNING
These are (except for this unique year) a labor-intensive part of each spring and early summer. The goal is to give each of our more than 30,000 trees only as many little fruits as it can support. We thin each tree by hand, usually taking hundreds of baby fruits off each tree!
PEST & DISEASE MANAGEMENT
Every year, including this one, we must take steps to mitigate the presence of insects and pests which can damage the fruit and trees. Populations need to be kept low to keep the orchard a strong and resilient. To this end, we use integrative strategies like pheromone mating disruption and netting our apple trees. The nets are giant rolls of loose-weave fabric we drape over the trees, securing the fabric below the branches. (Check out this reel) They have drastically reduces insect damage, and also reduced overall heat stress on the apple trees, which will be a double win in this drought year.
PRUNING
Pruning is about training the tree into a strong and productive shape, it is about keeping new branches growing which will have fruit buds on them for the next year or two. Growing great fruit takes seasonal pruning of each and every tree. We also prune because of disease. Every kind of fruit tree is susceptible to diseases just like humans and our pets are. Depending on the kind of fruit tree and on the severity of the disease, trees may need additional pruning 1-3 more times each year to keep them healthy.
COVER CROPS & SOILS
Soil building is a central tenet of organic growing. They are a complex and hidden world just now being explored by science. In the meanwhile, we build ours through growing cover crops and leaving them in place, undisturbed, to build those subsurface communities. The cover crops do take tending though, throughout the growing season.
NUTRIENTS
We do our best through cover crops to generate on-farm all the nutrients our trees need. However, sometimes our soils just don’t have enough of certain minerals and we will supplement those through occasional foliar sprays or organic fertilizers.
ABOUT THE TREE VARIETIES
Peaches and Apples make up the greatest part of our orchards. At this point we have a little over 60 acres in fruit trees, and there are about 25 acres of each of these. We also grow about an acre of Plums, a couple acres of Cherries, and around 10 acres of Pears.
OUR TEAM
We love the people we work with. Many of them come back year after year. Some are in the middle of building houses, others having babies. Our hearts are broken this year, because it is not only our family affected by the crop loss, but the families of all the crew we will not be able to employ with the loss of revenue from this crop loss.
Words can’t describe how much your contributions touch our hearts. Thank you!
