After a long winter, the orchard springs to life in a burst of color and fragrance.
Pink, green, and white never looked so fantastic!

Asian pears, that is…

Farmer Lisa takes you on a brief walk in the orchard in this short video.

Everyone (everything!) loves Asian pears, and here’s why that’s a problem!

1 big assortment of baby trees + 1 bunch of awesome helpers = 1 brand new orchard!
This project definitely deserved a video, so here it is!

PS. These are the trees I’ve been writing about lately in the posts “141” from last spring and in “20 Years of…” which celebrates the first orchard we planted as well as this new one. New Farm Helper Laura Beth also wrote about her planting adventures here.

If you’d like to share in this new adventure, you can sponsor one of these babies, for yourself, a special someone, as a memorial or as a gift to grow up with (for a baby). Click here to sponsor a tree and help to flavor the future!

Dear Readers,

Welcome to my first post of the 2012 season!

It is the season for planting, and we at North Star Orchard are busy tucking apple, peach, Asian pear trees, and grape vines firmly into the ground. They arrive from our suppliers in 10 foot long, heavy boxes, their roots kept moist inside plastic wrap. Each morning, we load a truck with the boxes and drive less than a mile through rows of blooming apple trees to the next field. One person drills holes in the ground with the tractor, and everyone else plants the baby trees, using hoes to surround each tree with a small mound of dirt.

I have some exciting news… that tractor driver is ME!!!

On my second day at work, Ike (the farmer and co-owner of North Star Orchard with his partner and wife, Lisa) taught me how to drive a tractor on the quirky Kubota L210. I learned to drive stick at Drumlin last season, so I had some elementary knowledge of how to drive a tractor. In the past week, I have spent almost 20 hours driving the L210. My job is to back carefully up to equadistant marks along the rows, and drill a hole with the drill attached to the back of the L210.

Lisa and Ike are trying something new with these baby trees: they are asking people to sponsor a tree. Sponsors get a tag on their tree, free gifts from North Star, and information about how their tree is doing over the years to come. Some people give the gift of a sponsorship as a memorial; others do it to have a baby tree in their life. If you’d like to sponsor a tree, don’t be shy! Click here for more info.

At North Star Orchard, we grow literally hundreds of varieties of fruit. In the past week, I have had a couple of Goldrush apples left over from the 2011 season; every bite contains a shock of rich apple-cider flavor that develops with each second. As Ike said to me at my interview in the fall, “We are big fans of crisp.” That’s when I knew I had to work here; there is nothing better than a perfectly crisp apple, straight from the orchard. Over the season, I hope to open my imagination to a world of fruit that I couldn’t have dreamt of; and I will be sure to share it with you.

As always, please ask questions, and comment! If I don’t know the answers, I’ll ask the farm crew, and pass along the info. Enormous thanks to Lisa, who took the pictures of my first time on a tractor.

Love,
Laura Beth

P.S. And Lisa put together this lovely video of pictures, detailing our work this week… to some VERY enthusiastic music. This is how excited we are ….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGGmbewWSB4

A few shots of CSA members, farm tours, and fabulous food taken over the past few years.

Thanks go to Becky, Rodney, Paul, and Lisa for all the photos!

CSA Member Elizabeth S. enjoyed playing with her food in 2010!
Here’s a short film of all the amazing creations she made with her weekly Veggie and Fruit CSA share.
Awesome!!

When mid-May hits, a flurry of activity begins in the orchard. It’s fruit thinning season!

Remember all those gorgeous blooms of spring? Well, almost every one of those blooms sets a baby fruit…and there are just too many on each tree. From the tree’s perspective, this is a good thing. Since it’s just aiming to reproduce, the more potential seeds the better. From the perspective of a fruit eater, however, there’s just too many fruits on a tree. The development of excellent flavor is dependent upon the balance of the fruit load and the energy a tree can put into it. For nearly all fruit trees, we have to thin off quite a number of baby fruits, so the tree can put its energies (and sugars!) into the fruits that remain.

Apple, peach, and plum thinning can go relatively quickly (although in the case of plums, it can take an entire day to thin one single tree!). But thinning Asian pears is what takes up most of our time in the orchard during thinning season – both because we have so many trees and they set so many little fruits! One of our helpers a few years ago took it upon herself to count how many pears she cut off a single full-grown Hosui Asian pear tree, and the result was right around 2000! That’s 2000 individual cuts per tree to get the job done. (quite frankly, Mo, I’m not sure I really wanted to know that!)

Time flies by though – most of us listen to ipods or other listening gizmos. Once you know what you’re doing, the task isn’t too hard and it’s nice to listen to music, podcasts, or audiobooks while working. Personally, I get a lot of ‘reading’ done during thinning season – cool!

Fruit thinning season finishes up (hopefully!) by mid- to late July.

I just love the West Chester Growers’ Market!
The market was the first producer-only farmers’ market in this area of PA. Its first year was 1995, and we were one of the founding members.
While there are a bunch of markets everywhere now, I’ll always have a warm spot in my heart for the WCGM….you always remember your first!
I hope you enjoy the video….