Fruit Growers News

Apple Varieties Coming Soon from Washington Breeders

During the hospitality hour before the annual banquet, two important figures in the Washington horticulture industry offered a treat to visitors – an opportunity to taste promising new apples not yet released as varieties. On one side of the hall was Bruce Barritt, who retired last summer after a career in which he started the apple-breeding program at Washington State University in 1994 and raised it to prominence among the five or six such programs at land-grant universities. On this evening, he and some colleagues were slicing a pretty apple, an elite selection that tasted like you’d expect if you knew its parents. It was pinkish red, crunchy, juicy and sweet/tart, as a child of Honeycrisp and Pink Lady should be. On the other side of the hall was Kate Evans, hired last summer to take over from Barritt. She was slicing four different apples and enticing…  » Read more

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Not Many Have Been Able To Grow Them

When Anthony Owens started on the path to growing apples organically, he was part of a group of growers who decided to collaborate and take a shot at it. Now, eight years later, he has about a hundred acres under the organic regimen, but he’s the only one of the group who’s still doing it. “In the Southeast, I’m it,” he said. “I’m not bragging. That’s just a fact.” Along the entire East Coast, the number of commercial-size organic apple growers can probably be numbered on one hand. There are about 1,000 acres of organic fruit in the eastern United States. Marvin Owings, the Extension fruit educator in North Carolina’s Henderson County, said Owens in the largest producer of organic apples on the entire East Coast. Owens makes no bones about it. If you want to grow apples organically, it’s best to choose the nice desert environment in…  » Read more

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Growers Should Prepare for a Credit Crunch

As growers prepare for the new production year, there are a few things they need to know about money. First, money this winter could get as cheap as it will probably ever get, so if you have good plans for expansion and growth, it’s a good time to borrow money and go for it. Second, however, credit is tight – an odd counterpoint. The $700 billion rescue of the financial system was supposed to loosen credit, especially long-term money for homeowners in distress, but the money failed to trickle down through the layers of fear and greed that sucked it up without apparent benefit – to the amazement even of gurus like Alan Greenspan, who believed the free expression of individual self-interest would make everything better. While there’s been a lot of “happy talk” about how good farmers’ balance sheets and bottom lines are, and some assurances…  » Read more

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There Must Be a Pony

I’ve always liked the story about the youngster who, told to clean the horse manure out of a long-neglected stable, zestfully begins pitching, looking for the pony that must be in there somewhere. We hope that, with this new issue of Fruit Growers News, you’ll find it easy to find the pony. Not only do we have a new look, we’re trying to organize things better. Like all branches of the media these days, we’re going to put more information on the Internet and into e-mail so you get news in a more timely way. But on the other hand, we take the editing function seriously. We think you want us to edit, to filter, to choose and throw away marginal stuff. You want to find the pony. In this age of blogging, where everybody not only has an opinion but gets to express it, you…  » Read more

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