News from the Orchard September 2, 2007 Hoch Orchard and Gardens 32553 Forster Road LaCrescent MN hoch1@acegroup.cc (507) 643-6329 www.hochorchard.com This newsletter is for everyone! Please print it and share it with your friends, neighbors, relatives, and customers Apple season is here! It looks like I did it again. I wrote one Newsletter at the beginning of 2006 apple harvest and have not wrote one since. I am going to try real hard to make sure I get more newsletters out this season. We had another busy year. Many recent changes and improvements have taken place in the past twelve months. Our youngest daughter graduated from High School this spring and left for college today. Our new cider facility is just about ready. We increased our organic acreage and now have over fifteen acres of trees in transition. We had a great berry crop and were able to freeze a lot of berries. We plan to start making cider jelly soon. We survived record rainfall and severe flash floods in our region. This year’s apple crop looks to be about the same as last year’s in volume. But one difference this year is that we had a very small summer apple crop. Redfree was less than 25% of last year, Beacon was about half, Wealthy was down and just about all the other early varieties were light cropped this year. You may have noticed we have not gotten apples to many of our regular coops yet this year. We only delivered our early apples to hand full of stores. I decided to supply few stores with what they needed instead of delivering to bunch of stores and shorting everyone. It was a tough decision to make, but that’s what I went with. The good news is the apple crop is ripening about a week and half ahead of normal. We started picking Cortland, McIntosh, Gala, and few others this week. We should have a good selection available to all our stores by next week. If everything goes well we should have our first apple cider available the following week. Farm and Family Survived the floods and mudslides You may have heard about the record rainfall in Hokah Minnesota on Saturday August 18th and the lives lost around LaCrescent in the flashfloods. We had some terrible weather with 12 to 15 inches of rain falling in the communities of LaCrescent to our east, Hokah to the south, and Witoka to the west. We had friends, relatives, and neighbors suffer from the storms. We were fortunate on top of the ridge here and had little damage. Everyone on the farm is OK. We were without power for a day and couldn’t get calls out for the better part of a day, but other than delaying our fax to the stores on Sunday, we were not affected. The power came back on before our coolers warmed up so the apples were fine. We have been keeping up on harvest so we did not loose ripe fruit in the storms. Luckily, we did not get severe winds with the storm. We had a few trees tip over in the saturated ground but it could have been much worse. We had heavy rain only a few days before and the ground was already very wet. After another foot of rain, we could almost push the trees over. The ground was so wet that the hillsides started to move in some areas. Roads were closed in almost every valley around us from mudslides over the roads. If we had high winds, there would have been many trees down in all the communities around here! Orchard Tours Sept 15 Saturday September 15th will be the day for our annual Open House. We will have orchard and packinghouse tours, apple tasting, cider demonstrations, and lots of apples and cider for sale. LaCrescent Apple Festival will be going on in town so you can make the whole day an ‘apple day’ by touring the orchard and visiting apple fest. Come and see our new cider room/kitchen addition. We hope to have it up and running that day. Our Family Our oldest daughter Angi has decided visual arts is not the major for her. She has transferred from the U of M to MCTC in Minneapolis to study culinary arts. Missy our youngest graduated from LaCrescent High School this spring and will be starting college tomorrow. She worked full time here at the orchard this summer fitting right in with the international interns. She took the past couple weeks off and got herself ready for college and spent a little extra time with her friends and (now former) boyfriend. Jackie took her to UW Stout today and helped her move into her dorm. Jackie and I will be drinking a bottle of Champagne (given to us by our good friends Pam and Wicky) to celebrate our first night of being empty nesters! Missy is going to study art education. Grandma Hoch doesn’t get up to the orchard very often these days. She is not very mobile anymore and has not tried to drive since she had a slight stroke last summer. But she has been keeping up on the progress of the cider room/commercial kitchen and is ready to come up and provide consultation as soon as the kitchen is finished. This year’s crew We have several new faces on the farm this year. Our first new intern is Andy Montain from the Twin Cites metro area. He graduated from the U of M with a degree in Environmental Horticulture and has been a great help on the farm. We have two guys from Peru who came to us through the MESA Program. Mauro and Hernan are both accomplished horticulturists and teach sustainable and organic farming practices in Peru. We have two interns through the U of M MAST Program. Mylene is from France and is studying Agriculture and Food Science. Fabio is from Brazil. He has only been with us for a couple of weeks but he is fitting in well. Hernan, Randy, Weezy (4 legs), Mauro, Missy, Andy, Mylene Look for this international group plus my daughter Missy in the Apple Fest Five kilometer race in LaCrescent. They are all planning to run it on Saturday morning before our farm tours. Our First Organic Inspection Technically this is not our first organic certification. I had small block of trees certified organic by the Organic Growers and Buyers Association (OGBA) back in the mid 1990’s. But we never shipped those apples, only sold a few at the local farmer’s market. We had our first inspection through the Midwest Organic Services Association (MOSA) in July. We know have several blocks of young trees and berries certified organic. Next year we are on track to have our first apples certified by MOSA. What’s Ripe? This week we should have the following fruit available at the farmer’s markets. Remember, some varieties are in small quantities and may sell out early: The week of September 1st Apples Beacon, Redfree, Akane, Estival, Wealthy, Sansa, Zestar, Gingergold, Red Baron, Jerseymac, Estivale, Tydeman’s Red, Paula Red, and the tart early picked Cortland and McIntosh. Plums Alderman, Pipestone, and Toka