Apple Season
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Why are the apples this year ripening five weeks earlier than usual?
Well, we're gonna end uh this morning on apples. If any of you have an apple tree or have one in a park near you uh or on your farm, you'll notice how early the apples have appeared. It is very early. Now, like the apple uh the apple farm uh in Moorstown between Care and Clonmell, the crop was five weeks ahead of its usual time. Contrass's parents, William and Allie, came from Holland uh back in the nineteen sixties. Yeah. Looking for land to grow fruit, they found a farm with an old orchard, and the family has been growing apples there ever since Con now has forty thousand trees, producing about four million apples a year. Good morning, Con.
Ah good morning, Ella. Yes.
Uh I gather you weren't at the ploughing con because you were otherwise occupied with all these apples. Um in
woofants, unfortunately, yeah.
Yeah, in the fifty years that your family have been growing them, have you ever seen a harvest this early?
How have climate changes affected the timing of orchard activities?
Uh no, we had one or two early ones before, but this is the earliest yet. It's it's a f it's a full five weeks ahead of normal. So that's like really exceptional. You know, maybe two weeks ahead of normal, you'd say, Oh, that's kind of, you know, the what you might ex get from one year to the other. So but no, this is exceptional.
And so the obvious question is why? What's going on?
Yeah, I suppose there's there's two factors we are early displaying us. And things in are earlier than they used to be. So the activities that we might do in our church or my father would have done the or on the first of April or thereabouts, we're already doing those in the middle of March now.
And most of July was over twenty five and that's you know just uh unheard of for us. So that means that the apples think they're growing off Prime and they ripen just go through their their stages quicker.
What impact has the drought and irrigation had on the trees and fruit?
So we've had we've finished picking all the cooking apples already years ago that would have happened probably in October, you know what I mean? And now they're they're already all harvesting big eating apples that we'd n right now we're picking eating apples that we'll Get close to Halloween.
Your line is i is a little bit uh difficult there because With regard then to the drought, how has that affected the trees themselves? Because obviously, presumably drought puts the trees themselves under immense stress.
Yes. or on our own trees that haven't irrigation. The the that you know, the apples stop growing for a period and then When it raised our started falling off as well. So people will find them on the ground.
And the the summer itself, how did it feel in the orchard?
Why is traditional apple storage no longer effective in milder winters?
I mean, was there a moment when you realised that this year was going to be different?
Um, it was it was kind of tricky the whole way through, even with irrigation, you know, you're watching what you're taking out of the well so that that doesn't run dry and so on. So it's it's not you just keep on, you know, contending with With what it is. Trying to trying to adjust.
And and you put in irrigation about a decade ago, didn't you?
Yes, we put in irrigation quite a while ago because i we felt that it was something that we would need one of the days. We've used it several times since, but never like this year. This year it's been obviously used a lot more.
Um, I I wonder also then about storage. Uh you were saying before that storing apples in crates in a cool shed, that's the old way of doing it. Back when autumns were cold and cooled. But that just doesn't work anymore, does it?
How does early picking influence the flavor and quality of the El Star variety?
No, for people trying to store at home, it's really difficult now because we have large cold rooms and we can you know, run those down to just above freezing and the apples keep fine in there. Years ago, our winters in general, if you had an old shed outside or something, you know. temperature in there would be, you know, five degrees or something like that. Whereas now it's ten or twelve and the apples, if you try to keep apples at home in your garage or something like that, it's just too too mild now. And they just they just won't hold.
So is a fridge the only answer?
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why are the apples this year ripening five weeks earlier than usual?
0:00–0:54
2
How have climate changes affected the timing of orchard activities?
0:54–1:58
3
What impact has the drought and irrigation had on the trees and fruit?
1:58–2:51
4
Why is traditional apple storage no longer effective in milder winters?
2:51–3:45
5
How does early picking influence the flavor and quality of the El Star variety?
3:45–4:31
6
What new technologies (hail nets, irrigation) are the farm using for future resilience?
4:31–5:40
7
What lessons can other growers learn from Con’s experience with climate‑shifted harvests?
5:40–6:20