Honeycrisp Harvest

We finally started harvesting our largest block of Honeycrisps this week. Like I mentioned previously, we're two weeks later this year than last. This makes us a little nervous to have so much fruit still hanging on the trees this late in the fall. We're watching the weather closely!
Besides the late harvest, the labor supply is tighter than in years past. We have a crew of 13 that are with us for the season, and most of them live in the housing we provide. We definitely need a bigger crew and consequently more housing so they will stay with us year round. Making a plan for this next year will be our winter project.
We've advertised on the roadside and through the local Spanish radio station that we need more pickers. No response, so Bill started calling fellow organic growers at the river level who would be finishing varieties that we would be starting. Voila! We've had a crew of 22 pickers for most of the week.
A farmer with smaller acreage next door hired a couple of caucasian pickers. They take eight breaks a day, an hour lunch and each picker gets one bin a day. We have ~1000 bins (this includes Triangle C's remaining 150) yet to pick, so that kind of pace wouldn't work.
Here's our group of 22 pickers. This includes 3 women that I have such respect for!

This canyon grows great Honeycrisps but is very chilly in the mornings! Bill provides hot coffee and  donuts every morning to help ease the chill.
The stem on a Honeycrisp is very thick and rigid. If it's not clipped short when picked, it will puncture other fruit in the picking bag and bin. The skin is quite thin which is part of its eating appeal, but it also makes it more suseptible to punctures. The pickers keep a pair of clippers in one hand as they pick. It takes finesse to pick and clip without bruising or breaking the skin of the apple.

Here I am ticketing and checking bins. This process is so much easier with apples than cherries! How do you like my apron custom made by Grandma? It has a pocket for every item imaginable. Bill really likes it, and he uses every pocket when he checks bins.

Here are some full bins.

Honeycrisps are absolutely my favorite apple in the world for three reasons:

1. The name Honeycrisp in itself is fabulous
2. The thin skin
3. The crispy burst of sweet juicy tangy flavor

Gosh I want one right now! Actually, I just thought of another reason they're my favorite.
    4.    Their gorgeous color.

We've spread our Honeycrisps between three packing sheds: Columbia, Phillippi and Stemilt. This is a little tricky because each of the sheds has specific field staff, bins, tickets and truck/truckers. Bill especially likes the Columbia trucker Norm. First things first. Norm complimented our Honeycrisps by saying they're the nicest he's seen all season. Then Bill and Norm had a lively literacy discussion. Turns out Norm wasn't much of a reader a few years ago, then he tried a John Grisham book on a vacation with his wife. He reads books all the time now by the same authors that Bill likes: Patterson, Baldacci, Follet, Crichton. They really hit it off. Bill had to take a picture of Norm's truck with a full load.

Honeycrisps are a challenging apple to grow well. They biannual bear and are suseptible to bitter pit. We've minimized the biannual bearing issue by pruning more on the light crop years and with semi-annual fertilizer applications. We apply weekly foliar sprays of calcium to minimize bitter pitting. The calcium has made for better pressures/crispiness in the apples so we're able to let the apples hang longer for better color. The elevation and cold environment of this canyon provides an ideal growing environment similar to Minnesota where this apple variety originates.