Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/386317
20 OCTOBER 2014 GOOD FRUIT GROWER www.goodfruit.com Most major nurseries don't carry cider apples in their inventories. by Geraldine Warner D emand for hard-cider apples is outstrip- ping demand, but anyone thinking of growing them will need some patience before getting started. Paul Tvergyak, marketing director with Cameron Nursery in Eltopia, Washington, said that while most Washington nurseries have sold cider apples from time to time, none is looking at it as a commercial venture. "No one has them in their scion blocks or their inventory," he told participants at a workshop in Moses Lake in March. "Availability is an issue—not just for cider apples, but for all apples right now," he said. "We've had a run on rootstocks and on trees this past cou- ple of years, and we're booked out pretty far into the future." Growers wanting cider apples for commercial plantings will probably need to contract with a nursery to grow them, with a minimum order of 1,000 trees, and face at least a two-year wait. "If you're thinking of having four to five trees in the backyard to make cider for the family, there are other options," he said. "Commer- cial nurseries aren't going to help you." Types of planting material The standard nursery tree takes two years to grow. A root- stock is planted in the spring and budded with the scion in August. The tree stays in the ground for one more year and is dug in the fall of the second year and stored over the winter, ready for planting the following spring. Typically, apple trees for com- mercial plantings cost between $6 and $10 each, depending on the amount of royalties on either the rootstock or the scion variety, though most cider apple varieties would be royalty-free. An alternative to a full-grown tree is a sleeping eye. This is a rootstock that is planted in the nursery in the spring and budded in August. At the end of September, the rootstock portion of the top is cut back to the scion bud. The plant is dug in Novem- ber and put in storage for delivery to the grower the following spring. Because sleeping eyes are dor- mant, they can be planted out in the orchard early in the year. Tvergyak said sleeping eyes are cheaper—cost- ing between $1.50 and $2.00 each, or as little as $1.15 for a couple of hundred thousand—and the waiting time is shorter. On the downside, the nurs- ery will guarantee only that the sleeping eyes are true to type, and the grower assumes all the risks of growing them into bearing trees. "You become the nurseryman, basically, because those are the same products we use to grow two-year-old trees," Tvergyak warned. A third option is to plant bench grafts. Nurser- ies take a rootstock fresh from the layer bed in Jan- uary or February and graft it with a short stick of wood of the desired variety that has two or three buds. Bench grafts are planted in the orchard in the spring, but not until after the very last frost because they are extremely sensitive to cold. "I've seen dam- age at 37°F," Tvergyak said. Nick Ibuki, horticultural research technician with the Summerland Varieties Cor- poration in British Columbia, Canada, which supplies fruit trees, said there's a big differ- ence between planting sleep- ing eyes or bench grafts and buying ready-grown nursery trees. It takes a lot of time and expertise to grow a nursery tree. "It's really a full-time job looking after a nursery of any size and if you don't look after it you can have stunted trees and it will cost you a lot more than the commercial trees," he warned. Tvergyak said commercial growers who have used bench grafts and sleeping eyes say the cost of growing that type of planting material works out the same as the cost of nursery trees, when they account for all the labor involved. The difference is that they can develop the trees exactly as they want them and to match their growing system. Also, cash flow is better because of the lower upfront invest- ment. growth of the keg market, the family is undergoing a $250,000 expansion and has further expansion planned after that. "We can't keep up," Ringsrud said. "In some ways, it's exciting, but until we have the right fruit, we're going to grow with what we've got." Ringsrud said he's in discussions with orchardists who have small blocks they're interested in grafting over to cider apples. Challenges Growing cider apples presents different challenges from growing dessert apples. Because cider apples are so variable in size and production, Ringsrud pays pickers by the hour. Even though he chemically thins with NAA (naphthaleneacetic acid) and Sevin (carbaryl) to reduce the fruit to singles and doubles, some varieties still fruit biennially. Production averages 30 to 40 bins per acre. Of the varieties, Yarlington Mill is moderately bien- nial, but Ringsrud described Porter's Perfection as "hor- rid," with trees blanked out every other year. Kingston Black also has problems with fruit set. Roxbury Russet is an exceptional cider and dessert fruit, but its idiosyncracy is that it goes from ripe to slop in about two days. However, he's heard that in other parts of the country it matures slowly on the tree. Dabinett is extremely sensitive to fire blight—more so than Bartlett. When symptoms first show up in the leaves, the branch needs to be removed immediately, he said, otherwise by the following day it can have run 12 to 15 inches down the wood. He grows Snowdrift crabs, which are so small it can take a person all day just to pick two bins, when they could pick ten bins of a standard variety. "But five percent of that concentrated juice adds an incredible complexity to the cider," he said, "So I have to bite the bullet about how much it costs." At the other extreme, Foxwhelp apples are so huge and short stemmed that they have a tendency to push each other off the tree. Michelin, Nehou, and Muscadet de Dieppe can shed a third of the crop as they're starting to mature, and Rings- rud is experimenting with stop-drop applications to pre- vent that. Because some of the cider apples mature when he's picking his commercial pear crops, he puts the cider apples in storage until after harvest is over. He focuses on bittersweet and bittersharp apples because of the valu- able flavor components they lend to the cider, he said. He starts pressing the apples as early in October as he can and finishes by Christmas. He does primary fermen- tation following a white wine model, then racks the cider and puts it back into stainless steel tanks for six months to develop the cider flavors. "We enjoy what we're doing," he said. "It's a lot of work, but the demand we have out there way outstrips our ability to supply it." Ringsrud spoke at the workshop "Hard Cider from Orchard to Shelf" presented by the Northwest Agricul- ture Business Center at Big Bend Commuity College, Moses Lake. • Foxwhelp is a large apple, which is not typical of cider apples. These short-stemmed apples are so large that they tend to push each other off the tree. PHOTO BY GERALDINE WARNER EXPECT TO WAIT for cider apple trees Harry Masters Jersey cider apples in Tieton Cider Works cider orchard in Yakima, Washington. "Availability is an issue—not just for cider apples, but for all apples right now." —Paul Tvergyak Paul Tvergyak PHOTO BY TJ MULLINAX