Apr 7, 2007

Thousands drive for miles to visit Edwards Apple Orchard

It’s 80 snarled-traffic miles from Chicago to the corn and soybean fields around Rockford, Ill., but lots of people make the trek, sometimes several times, between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. And it’s not to look at corn and soybeans.

An estimated 225,000 people will visit Edwards Apple Orchard during those 13 weeks, picking the place clean of 45 acres of apples, 15 acres of pumpkins, three acres of raspberries, plus squash, ornamental corn and gourds and 2,200 chrysanthemum plants. Half will drive more than 30 miles to get there.

In June, a different group trekked to the farm to see how this picture-postcard market works. On June 16 Edwards Apple Orchard in Poplar Grove hosted the Illinois State Horticultural Society summer horticulture day, and owner Ken Hall was probably as nervous about a visit from 150 of his peers as he was about all the customers he will receive later this year.

“It’s out in the sticks, but it’s a picture place,” said Don Naylor, with the Illinois State Horticultural Society.

“It’s a destination,” said Hall, agreeing that people don’t just drop in. They come to the farm with the intention of spending a half-day at a picture-perfect place in a farm atmosphere that combines nostalgia and modern reality. There is a clean crispness to the farm that matches its Honeycrisp apples.

Since 1990, Ken and Barb Hall have operated the farm that was owned by her parents and grandparents. In 1963, Robert Jr. and Betty Edwards bought the farm from his parents and began transforming it from dairy and row crops to apples and a retail market. The barn that once housed milk cows is The Apple Barn, housing a gift shop, bakery, fudge kitchen, coffee shop, cider mill, packing facility and cold storage. Other outbuildings are now a farm museum and a farm animal barn, part of the agritainment package the Halls provide to attract and amuse visitors.

“Our focus continues to be apples,” Hall said. “We grow 11 varieties on 45 acres.

“Golden Delicious is our biggest seller, followed by Jonagold, and Honeycrisp is the fastest growing and will be No. 1 in the future. Red Delicious is trailing off, and we’ll be decreasing acres. We also grow Jonathan, Empire, McIntosh, Gala, early Fuji and Granny Smith.”

All of their apples are retailed on the farm, as pick-your-own or packed in peck and half-peck bags or pressed into apple cider. No fruit is sold through wholesale channels.

Hall is an active member of the International Dwarf Fruit Tree Association, moving off the board just last year, and he took the trip to Europe last year. He was quite impressed by what he saw in the South Tyrol area.

“We’re increasing tree density, but not to the level they use there,” he said. While the Europeans are setting trees on a 1- by 3-meter spacing (about 3 by 10 feet), he’s planting 3 feet apart in the row but keeping 15 feet or slightly wider between rows. Partly that’s because of equipment dimensions, partly to handle u-pick sales, but it also reflects growing conditions, which are hotter and more humid in northern Illinois, he said. Fire blight is already a problem and closer spacing favors that and diseases of all kinds. He wants the air movement. To control fire blight, Hall uses copper and streptomycin early in the season and prunes out strikes during the rest of the season.

“We’ll be training more and pruning less in the future,” he said, “but our trees will continue to look like trees, more of a Christmas tree shape than the super spindle with its short limbs up the trunk.”

Branches are, however, tied to wires, bent downward and trained to reduce growth, contain size and encourage early bearing. He uses Apogee to control vertical growth and encourage reproductive growth.

“We’re moving from tree densities of about 200 in our oldest orchards to about 900 in the new ones,” he said. “We’re using more Bud 9 for rootstock and some Geneva 16.”

Hall and some of his workers gave a training demonstration during the field day. Using blue rubber bands and twisted-paper string, they fix branches into the positions they want. He likes to plant well-branched trees, but said American nurseries have yet to turn out the 12 to 15 “feathers” the Europeans have to choose from when they tie and train.

Winter pruning is on the way out and summer training is the new practice coming in, he said. Pruning is needed to remove limbs that reach 50 percent of the diameter of the central leader, with the cut made at an angle to encourage a new bud for a new lateral.

Hall trains the trees to a single wire at seven feet attached to wooden posts every 60 feet and a 10-foot piece of 3/4-inch conduit at every tree. A solid anchor post is set four feet deep at each row end to hold the wire.

There was lively discussion about the Honeycrisp apple. Hall said he, like other orchardists, have jumped on the new variety – as if trying to make it an unprofitable commodity, he said philosophically. But right now, prices are $2 a pound in stores everywhere, including theirs. Apples that sell for $80 a bushel can’t be passed by.

University of Illinois horticulturist Mosbah Kushad spoke about the need for early-season calcium nitrate sprays to control bitter pit and the need for use of Ethrel and NAA to slow growth and thin to avoid the tendency to alternate bearing.

So far, the farm has not extended u-pick to the Honeycrisp variety, but probably will someday, if supply catches up with demand. Hall said their u-pick rules include a uniform charge of $1.09 a pound, with a minimum $20 purchase, for a nuclear family. “Eat all you can,” Hall said he tells pickers. “They pick as much for the experience as they do for the apples.”

U-pickers need supervision to avoid undesirable behavior, such as moving into unauthorized areas or sorting after apples are picked. It’s not profitable to have someone pick a bushel and take home the best peck. Twenty people work during the fall taking u-pickers to the field, helping them and keeping into roped-off areas.

Apples, pumpkins and raspberries are sold u-pick, although some are available ready-picked and packed. Over the years, Hall has watched the changes in his customers’ buying habits, not only in varieties but amounts.

“The pick-our-own customers pick a half bushel or bushel,” he said. “In the store, most customers purchase apples by the half-peck.”

They buy less at a time then they used to, but that doesn’t bother Hall. He believes that smaller quantities of apples are more likely to be consumed in good condition and that customers will return for more.

About half the customers come from within a 30-mile radius, he said, and even those close buy have to want to drive to get there. Edwards Apple Orchard is 15 miles outside of Rockford but the ubiquitous Midwestern square-mile-grid pattern seems not to have been used there.

On weekends, they make it a festive affair, with live bands playing Blue Grass music. The chrysanthemums decorate the farm market, but they sell out as well.

“We field-grow them in pots with irrigation, so they’re bushel-basket size and hardy, and we sell out every year,” Hall said.

Hall thinks cider and donuts contribute to the atmosphere, and they sell about 27,000 gallons of cider a year, all of it treated with ultraviolet light to achieve a five-log reduction in pathogens.

“We like the UV approach,” he said. “There’s no heat involved as with pasteurization, and it kills bacteria but doesn’t seem to affect yeasts as much. It probably increases shelf life, but the cider will still ferment. It’s a good compromise for those who want a natural product but don’t want the risk of bacterial contamination.” While some people complain that pasteurization affects taste, nobody makes that charge against UV treatment.

This year, he’s putting in a new UV system that will increase volume from about 160 gallons per hour to nearly 350. There’s also a new squeeze press, but plaques on the wall remind visitors that the orchard has been making cider a long time, entering cider contests since 1994 ¬– and becoming the Illinois cider champions in 1995.

While Ken likes the production side, particularly liking apples, Barb is the retailer and marketer. “We try to build an atmosphere that creates strong emotional ties to our business,” she said. “We want our customers to feel they are coming to visit family each fall.”

The farm doesn’t seem hokey. The old dairy calf hutches are now part of the goat corral and dozens of 10-gallons milk painted rusty-red for chairs seem like a natural leftover from the dairy era and not contrived. Similarly, there’s something natural about 1950s Allis-Chalmers, Ford and John Deere tractors, their wheels sunk in sawdust in the children’s play era. A maze built of old snow fence seems the right thing for the space. The farm museum seems like a logical place to put old tools once they’re no longer needed, not a junk collection.

They don’t charge admission, but they do price products and many services, like wagon rides for $3.

While there are no feelings of ethnic ties in the family, the choice of Blue Grass bands and Celtic background music generates a Scots-Irish ambiance, as fiddles and other traditional instruments play softly somewhat-mournful songs like Barbara Allen.

It takes lots of help to run the market. “We wrote out 205 W-2’s this year,” she said, with 90 percent going to part-time help hired during September and October. Fifteen family members, including Barb and Ken’s daughters, Kara and Audrey, help in the orchard operation.