Let’s Talk About Tree Fruit
NH Industry Update
Summary
Kendall and Rebecca discuss the New Hampshire tree fruit industry with UNH Extension fruit and vegetable field specialist Jeremy Delisle. They explore the challenges farmers face, including extreme weather events and market shifts. They also discuss the resilience of New Hampshire farmers, the use of integrated pest management, and the impact of community and grower associations.
Show notes:
Integrated Pest Management (IPM): https://extension.unh.edu/agriculture-gardens/pest-disease-growing-tools/integrated-pest-management-ipm
Network for Environment and Weather Applications (NEWA) in NH: https://extension.unh.edu/agriculture-gardens/pest-disease-growing-tools/network-environment-weather-applications-newa-new-hampshire
Poverty Lane Orchards (Farnum Hill Ciders): https://farnumhillciders.com/orchards
Apple Hill Farm: https://applehillfarmnh.com/
UNH Extension – https://www.extension.unh.edu
Multi-Cultivar Grafting Trap Trees Report: https://portal.nifa.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/1020950-multi-cultivar-grafting-a-novel-low-cost-grower-friendly-attract-and-kill-approach-to-manage-key-apple-pests.html
Natural Resources Conservation Service - https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/
Women in Ag Newsletter signup - https://unhoutreach.tfaforms.net/217751?CID=701G0000001AiKCIA0
Jeremy Delisle – Jeremy.delisle@unh.edu
Kendall Kunelius – kendall.kunelius@unh.edu
Rebecca Dube – rebecca.dube@unh.edu
Guest Jeremy Delisle, Fruit & Vegetable Production Field Specialist
Transcript
Kendall Kunelius 0:09
Welcome to this episode of Shared Soil, a podcast dedicated to creating community, honoring challenges and encouraging personal and professional growth for all people in agriculture. My name is Kendall Kunelius, and I'm a county-based field specialist in the area of agricultural business management.
Rebecca Dube 0:25
And I'm Rebecca Dube, providing technology and administrative support to UNH Extension. Well, it's fair season, and with that comes berry and apple picking, peach cobbler and all sorts of agritourism activities, so many of which are organized around fruit trees. So tell me, Kendall, what is your favorite fruit product to consume?
Kendall Kunelius 0:49
Oh, you know, so that's tricky. I'm gonna kind of expose myself here. I'm actually not the biggest fruit fan, so I'm very picky about the fruit products I do choose to consume. I love a homemade apple sauce. Nice, you know, like the really good ones, like your grandmother's recipe with a lot of cinnamon and ginger. So if I'm gonna consume something, it is absolutely an apple sauce.
Rebecca Dube 1:12
Oh, terrific. Well, I've had my first apple crisp of the season at a fair, so I feel like I'm ready for fall.
Kendall Kunelius 1:19
We're prepped. Yeah, we're prepped. One of my very favorite memories as a kid is apple picking. We used to go to a place in New Hampshire because I lived in Vermont, so we would cross the border to go apple picking. And I think what's interesting is, as a kid, you just, like, expect those apples to just magically appear, like that. You know they grow on a tree, but you don't think about how much work goes into producing a beautiful apple. Never mind one, but like, acres and acres of those fruits, right? So now that I'm older, I have a little bit of a different appreciation for what it actually takes to get that product made.
Rebecca Dube 1:52
Well, you know, farmers face many challenges in fruit growing, especially after several difficult weather patterns and events in the past few years. So today we're talking with Extension field specialist Jeremy Delisle about farm resiliency. Jeremy, can you tell us about what you do and some of the ways you work with farmers in New Hampshire?
Jeremy Delisle 2:11
Sure, thank you for having me. So I'm a field specialist with UNH Cooperative Extension, and I am on our fruit and vegetable production team based out of the Merrimack county office in Boscawen. But my work takes me all over the state, and the programming that I work to put in place hopefully impacts growers throughout the state. A lot of the focus that I have has to do with production of fruit and vegetable crops. More and more of an emphasis on fruit crops these days in my work, especially looking at integrated pest management strategies. So we can talk about the programs we have in place for that. And I also am the coordinator for our weather station network in New Hampshire, which is connected to platform called NEWA, the Network for Environment and Weather Applications. And there are a lot of different ways that farmers use that in New Hampshire these days.
Kendall Kunelius 3:05
Very cool. So it sounds to me like you are involved at every level of growing. Is that accurate to say, or not so much so?
Jeremy Delisle 3:13
Well, yeah, you know, it's interesting with extension work. It really should start with needs assessment, right? We should really be connected with our communities, our stakeholders, whatever that audience is that we're serving relative to our area of expertise or our program area. And so that's always been my approach is, let's get to know the people first that I'm here to serve and learn about what their needs are: what they see as challenges, opportunities. And develop those relationships with them and maybe a little bit of trust, so that we can then know where they're coming from and what their goals are as farmers and as farm families. Then start to put the pieces together to think about what can we as extension educators or UNH researchers, how can we best help them meet their goals?
Kendall Kunelius 4:08
So after hearing that, the word holistic comes to mind. So can you give us a little bit of a holistic overview of what the tree fruit industry looks like in New Hampshire? Maybe some varieties, and even if you want to touch on some harvest methods, but just kind of give us, like a little primer.
Jeremy Delisle 4:26
Sure, yeah, so in New Hampshire, according to USDA and our Ag Statistics, we have 270 farms in New Hampshire that report growing apples. About 1700 acres of apples total, with about 1500 of those currently bearing. And so then peaches - we've got roughly 110 or so farms growing those on about 120 acres. And then grapes - maybe to some folks surprise, we have about 80 farms growing grapes. Just over 100 acres of those, so that would include wine grapes and table grapes. The industry in New Hampshire has changed substantially over the years. Up until the 1990s there was a large wholesale market and actually an export market of fruit in New Hampshire for many years. And just with market changes and various circumstances that has shifted over the past 30 years or so to primarily a retail market, and really heavily focused on U-pick, direct-to-consumer farm stand sales, and a little bit of value-added processing into products like cider. And certainly, there is a wholesale component that some of our farms are able to meet because of the scale of their operation. But that's a smaller fraction of the overall production and how it's marketed, I would say, in New Hampshire. And that actually, it's an interesting thing to think about, because there are lots of opportunities that come with that different marketing regime, or marketing goals for retail versus wholesale. What that end product can look like, and then what some of the the risks that some farms can take knowing that they're going to be selling that product directly to consumers. And that we don't necessarily have to meet the same demands as a wholesale product.
Rebecca Dube 6:35
Oh, yeah. Now, are there factors that have contributed to this shift over the past few decades?
Jeremy Delisle 6:41
Yeah. So I think part of it has to do with the fact that we're now a global economy. And so lots of countries grow apples, and we've seen expansion in countries like China being one of those, you know. So there's global competition for apples in the marketplace and space in the marketplace, and then I would say consumer demand and consumer preferences also plays into that. You know, if we think about areas of the world where apples are grown on thousands and thousands of acres, or hundreds of thousands of acres; and they plant a variety of apple; and that apple for a period of time is really popular amongst consumers. And then, for whatever reason, maybe there's a newer apple that's crispier and or has a better name that comes along and consumers shift their preference to that apple. Well, if there are thousands of acres of that apple out there in production, those growers who are growing for a wholesale market kind of puts them in a tough spot, right?
Rebecca Dube 7:48
It's hard to change out an orchard!
Jeremy Delisle 7:50
Right! It really drives that market and so some of that has to do with the scale of production, right? You have to be big enough to get into some of these markets and have enough production so that you can access them. But at the same time, big ships are hard to turn, and they take a little bit longer to turn. So contrast that with our production currently here in New Hampshire, which is primarily on what most parts of the country would consider small farms. Most of them are diversified to some extent, some highly diversified, not only growing apples, but a whole suite of other fruit crops. Oftentimes also growing a whole bunch of different vegetable crops, maybe incorporating agritourism into their operation. And also growing smaller blocks but a higher diversity of apples, in this case, so that they have this wide range of offerings of varieties that hopefully meet the demands of all the different customers that are going to come through their farm in the course of a season.
Kendall Kunelius 8:59
Yeah, I think one of the unique things that, and we talked about this in our agritourism episode, about U-pick, really being like the OG agritourism piece, right? One of the things I think tree fruit sellers in New Hampshire, in particular, is that they sell an aesthetic, right? They sell an opportunity for people to come and take pictures and make a memory. They sell an opportunity for people to come experience what they're seeing on Pinterest and YouTube and Instagram. The experience, I think, is just as important as the varieties in some really targeted marketing areas. And I think it's a really interesting juxtaposition between what you're saying with the global market, those market shifts versus the people who like the apple variety may be arbitrary, they just want to take a picture in front of an apple tree and post that on their Instagram, and that's what they're after, right? So it's really fascinating how we have to ask the question. We know that money doesn't grow on trees, but does it? What exactly, is it that about that idea of going and picking apples that you think is so alluring to people versus buying an apple at a store?
Jeremy Delisle 10:15
Yeah, right. I think you really hit the nail on the head there. I mean, it really is about the experience in large part. But I will also say a lot of the farms that I see really thriving in this retail market, they are very, very conscientious of the fact that the goal is to have product on the shelves throughout the course of the season. In the world of fruit, that usually starts for us with strawberries, right? And so early in the season, they're the first thing as far as a fruiting crop of the season, starting in early June, usually late May, early June. And then we transition right through the season to brambles and blueberries and peaches, into apples and pears and all those things. So I think that's part of it. And then mixed in with all that, are all the vegetable crops. And these are all a draw to the farm. So when we get folks there, the really savvy business managers are also then thinking about, well, now that we have them here, what else can we offer? And I think a lot of times that comes down to personality of the farms, and really what they enjoy - the type of experience that they want to create on the farm, and having conversations with growers. Even this year, we have a project going on where we're interviewing New Hampshire farmers that have an orchard at the heart of their business operation. And so we're asking them some of the questions about the business and why it is the way it is. And this theme keeps coming up that they're very conscientious about the experience that they're trying to develop. You know, some want a very peaceful, quiet, relaxed experience without a lot of bells and whistles, almost in as natural a setting as they can achieve. Others really want to have as much entertainment available to their customers as possible, and so they'll really diversify and fully embrace that agritourism side of things. And they may do things like pumpkin picking. They'll have the corn stalks. They may have, I know one farm has a little bee train for kids, these little cars that are painted like bees that pulls them through the orchard. Hay rides, all of the things, right? Cider tasting. So many things, and it really all comes back to business analysis or at least it should. Those farms that we see really having success and thriving and adapting from one season to the next, or from one market channel to the next, they really are able to do that most successfully if they have really their finger on the pulse of their business and the areas of that business that are either making money or that are less profitable. And they can modify and adapt and really remain nimble and relevant and meet the customer demands by doing that. And so that's when it gets really exciting, when you know, we're able to go back and look at what crops are performing best, say, across a full decade, and compare those crops on, say, a per acre basis, and make business decisions based on those. To know that hey, you know it looks like, for example, maybe strawberries are really competing well with apples in some instances, and maybe we should consider acreage of one crop over the other and compare that with customer demand and what we have as far as availability of that crop to really make sure that we're maximizing the profitability of the business when the opportunity prevents or provides itself.
Kendall Kunelius 14:06
Yeah, I think that's a great way to sum up the conversation. To say no matter where that income stream is coming from, whether it's agritourism and people are on your farm or you're just doing a commercial kind of picking scale of apples and selling them wholesale. All of those things come from what you were saying, right? Farmers being resilient, sales channel analysis, but they come to a grinding halt if we have bad weather and if we have an unexpected disaster. And I don't mean to take this really wonderful conversation and dive into the meat at the heart of this episode, but I do also want to recognize that really what we want to pick your brain about is the fact that in New Hampshire, we've seen some significant weather patterns in the last few years. Rebecca, do you want to move us into the next question?
Rebecca Dube 14:52
Well, sure, and you were talking about some of the history with these farms in the past five years. So can you give us an overview of what some of these challenging weather patterns have been in the past five years and the challenge they offer for farmers in New Hampshire? What have they been facing?
Jeremy Delisle 15:11
Yeah, so a little bit of everything I would say in the past few years. The most memorable of those years was probably 2023 and you know, in that year, it just so happened that we had two freeze events. The first one being in February, where temperatures just really plummeted, and we got down to like negative 18 or so in some locations. And that was really an issue, because in those areas of the state we have stone fruit production, that being things like cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, those sorts of things. And many of those varieties really are only hardy reliably to maybe minus four Fahrenheit. That's where we start to see bud damage occur in some of those species. And so what ended up happening there, we were well beyond that low temperature tolerance of stone fruit, and so we lost the vast majority of that in New Hampshire and in many parts of New England that year. So that was February of 2023, and then fast forward to bloom time and early May. Apples were in bloom at that point, and we had a frost event that occurred during the first couple of weeks in May, right in the middle of apple bloom for much of the state, and that either killed flower buds or if there were fruitlets out there that was damaged, the fruit was damaged, and we wound up with what's called frost rings on on that fruit, making it largely unmarketable. And so that was through May, and then by the second half of summer, someone opened the water spigot and it started raining. It didn't stop for the majority of the remainder of the season, and we were really, really wet. Excess moisture is the term used. And so we had saturated field conditions, leading to all sorts of issues: increased incidence of disease, inability to get into fields and perform key production tasks at the right time. Think cultivation, something as simple as cultivation to manage weeds. Farmers couldn't get in there because the fields were so wet, they would create ruts. And so by avoiding that, the weeds were able to go to seed, and it kind of perpetuates this problem. And then we certainly are seeing extreme weather events: heavy rainfalls, hail, high winds, those sorts of things which we've always experienced, but they they seem to be more frequent and more intense in recent years. So those are some of the challenges. And then this year 2025 as we record this episode, we're right in the middle of a fairly severe drought. You know, a lot of the state in New Hampshire is in D2 drought status. A significant part of Grafton County is now in D3 drought status, talking to the Department of Environmental Services who monitors water levels, both in streams and in groundwater. We're at historically low levels this year, and so that creates a real challenge for farmers, and it makes us all think harder about how can we make farms more resilient? What sort of practices can be put into place so that farms are as prepared as they can be for some of these extreme weather events when they occur?
Rebecca Dube 18:52
Well, then Jeremy, what is the current health of the tree fruit industry and farmers in New Hampshire?
Jeremy Delisle 18:58
So I would say, I would say it's good. New Hampshire and New England tree fruit growers have this history of really being on the leading edge of research, on-farm research, collaborative research, adoption of new practices, especially things like integrated pest management. They have a long history of partnering with extension and university researchers to essentially open up their farms, partner with researchers on whatever the latest research needs are, and figure out new, progressive ways to address those. I can give you an example of some research that's going on now. Where a couple of farms here in New Hampshire, I think I can list some by name. I don't think they'd mind too much. Poverty Lane Orchards in Lebanon, Steve Wood there, and Apple Hill Farm in Concord, Chuck Souther and his wife, Diane. They are partnering with UMass Extension and University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, and have been for years on work to create what we call multi cultivar, grafted trap trees in orchards. And so if you think about a traditional orchard, say it's Macintosh, one of the quintessential varieties grown in New England and New Hampshire, because we can grow it really well. That variety is in a lot of orchards, and it's one of those that I would say consumer preference has declined over the years as new varieties have come on. I mean, it's still there. It's still a popular variety for some folks and for certain uses, but there's a lot of competition, I guess you would say, with Macintosh for other new varieties. But those trees that are there as varieties kind of fall out of favor, or we need less acreage of them to go into the product mix, the variety mix. Then we can utilize something like this multi cultivar grafted approach. That essentially what it does is through grafting, we can take scions or pieces of one year old growth from any variety that you can think of. We'll mention a variety called Wickson, which is small-fruited, primarily cider variety. It's very prolific. It produces a lot of flowers and a lot of fruit. And we can take cuttings from a tree like that, or scion would from a tree like that, and graft it on to a Macintosh tree. The reason that we do that is that through research and through grower observations, we're learning that certain varieties of apples tend to be very attractive to some insect pests. And in New Hampshire, two of those that are most problematic are plum curculio, which is a very small weevil that does its damage early in the season, and then apple maggot fly, which, on the other end of things, does its damage later in the season. And so we can graph these varieties on that are very attractive to these insects, and try to draw them to these - what we'll call trap trees. Why would we want to do that? Why would we ever want to draw these insects in, you ask? Well, that's a great question. You know, one is so that we can better monitor populations of those insects in the orchard. And so if we can draw them here, and we know that these cultivars are the most attractive that we have in the orchard, then we can just go to those trap trees, and we can look there first for the damage, and we can see, are these insects active? Yet, if so, in what sort of numbers, how much pest pressure is there. And it saves us from having to go scout all around the orchard to try to figure out whether or not this is happening. And the reason that those varieties are attractive, it has to do with the plant volatiles, or the odors oftentimes, that they put off in addition to the color of that fruit, Apple maggot fly in particular, is attracted to red apples, and so that, combined with the odor of this fruit can be very attractive, and so we can draw them in there. Now in this system, we're grafting maybe three to five different varieties onto this tree in addition to the stock tree or the Macintosh in this example, so that we spread that attractiveness over the course of the season, and we can feel confident that we're attracting these insect pests just to these trees which are always on the perimeter of the orchard. So that presents another opportunity. If those trees and we can make them that attractive, then maybe we can attract the vast majority of those pests just to those trees which make up a tiny fraction of all the trees in that orchard. And if that's the case, maybe we can only control that pest, or primarily control that pest only on those few trees around the perimeter of an orchard block. If we're successfully able to do that, some of the research has shown that a system like that could reduce insecticide usage by up to 90%
Rebecca Dube 24:27
Wow, that's very exciting!
Jeremy Delisle 24:29
So that in itself is exciting, right? Yes, but we could go beyond that, and we're working on this now, again, with UMass and with a researcher out of Georgia to look at alright, well, let's take this a step further. We've already capitalized on the preferences of these insects and what they're attracted to. We've taken advantage of their biology, and they're laying eggs in this fruit. Okay, when they do that, eventually, as that larva develops. That fruit will fall to the ground. That presents us with another opportunity for control, and in this case what we're looking at is the use of beneficial nematodes, or intima pathogenic nematodes, that can be applied to the soil surface. And their greatest joy in life is to attack the larva of pests like plum curculio and apple maggot. And so this is using biology to then control some of these, some of the greatest pests that we have in orchards in New Hampshire. And so that's an example of the level of commitment that New England apple growers have to advancing strategies related to IPM research, the advancement of their craft overall.
Rebecca Dube 25:45
And strategies that can be used throughout the country, eventually.
Jeremy Delisle 25:48
I think there's great potential for it to happen elsewhere, and that's really a big part of our goal with projects like these. There's a research component, right? Which is why we're partnering with an entomologist and a researcher from UMass, and then myself as an extension field specialist. My responsibility, and one of the the strengths that I would bring to a project like this, is to help them get the word out and help educate growers about these strategies and these techniques and opportunities. And then to go a step further, I can also talk with partner organizations like NRCS, because that's another part of the role of a field specialist, is develop these relationships with partner agencies. So we're able to communicate in an organization like NRCS. They get funding from USDA, and that's how USDA dollars come into states to implement soil and water conservation practices in this case. And in New Hampshire, we're fortunate enough that NRCS has worked really closely with New Hampshire to develop a whole suite of integrated pest management strategies that farmers can adopt, including things like utilizing the weather stations and making data driven decisions, or monitoring for insects on their farms, or even doing grafting or creating these trap trees. So we're very fortunate, and we're really, you know, I would say, on the leading edge of being able to provide our growers with these sort of opportunities and for them to get cost share assistance from an organization like NRCS.
Kendall Kunelius 27:19
Interesting, it kind of sounds to me like, well, I'm thinking of like the old adage where, you know, you think of the New England farmer who's very like, this is the way we've always done it. That's the way we're going to do it. But it doesn't, it actually doesn't sound like that's the case anymore. It sounds like these farmers are very invested in moving the industry forward and continuing to do this research for not just their own good, but for the good of the production in New Hampshire. One of the things that we talked about with Olivia in the last episode was the importance of community, and it sounds like there's a lot of really great grower associations in New Hampshire. Can you speak a little bit to how those grower associations and groups may be influencing some of the resiliency strategies, or group resiliency and moving forward-type mindsets?
Jeremy Delisle 28:09
Yeah, absolutely, that's a great question, and you're right. It's so important. There's this old adage of the farmer looking over the fence and we, in Extension, can sometimes talk until we're blue in the face. But if we are able to get farmers to a neighboring farm, and they can peek over the fence and see that they've adopted a practice that's working, oftentimes they're a little bit more likely to adopt that practice than if they just hear it from an ag service provider. And so that is actually one of our strategies. And we put that into place through things like our Twilight Meetings that are usually planned in cooperation with our growers associations. Those topics are selected with those Association Board members, and we plan those out. We think about what farms would we want to visit this year because they're implementing new strategies or participating in new research that other farmers want to learn about. And so we provide this opportunity for them to go visit, see and touch whatever is happening there in the field, and really try to provide that opportunity for them to stay up to date on what are the latest developments in the industry, including things like varieties, equipment, technology, marketing. All of those things are topics that we usually try to include at some point in our educational program throughout the season. And so good example, we just wrapped up our Twilight season for tree fruit programming at Brookdale Fruit Farm last month in August. And Brookdale is known to be very innovative. They're leaders in irrigation. We also saw their their weather station there in action, and learned about how they utilize that to track the development of pest populations. We're able to look at equipment like under the apple row. It's kind of a weed whacker, if you will. It's mounted on the back of a tractor, and it's on a cylinder that rotates kind of on its side. But it's able to go through and and basically weed whack the weeds, ground them down to the ground, control sucker growth from apples which pops up from the root stock, all without harming the tree; and can be a really great alternative to herbicides for a good part of the season. And so really, really interesting things like that. We'll try to bring in researchers to these sort of programs, or even consultants or plant breeders, as was the case at this last Twilight Meeting, where we had a representative from the Midwest Apple Improvement Association, MAIA, and they were talking about some of the latest varieties that are being released for growers. Brookdale happened to have some of those varieties in the ground growing that we're almost ready for harvest at that point. So in that example, growers are out there standing in the field looking at that production system, which in this case is a high density system on a trellis. And they can see how those trees are pruned, what the fruit looks like. They can even taste the fruit and determine whether or not this is a variety that might fit for their operation, you know, fit within their harvest windows and the varieties that they already have growing and when they come in. And so it's all this community of collaborative learning and sharing and a lot of back and forth from growers with extension researchers, that sort of thing, which makes us all better. I wouldn't want to do my job if I didn't have the opportunity to talk on a daily basis with growers about what they have going on, what are their challenges at this point in the season, you know? So that we in extension and other support organizations can really be as relevant as we can, and do everything that we can to address the needs that our stakeholders are facing, and be prepared to think about, how do we, how do we best address that in the coming seasons?
Kendall Kunelius 32:13
Interesting. So one of the biggest questions I have is about peaches. I'm going to be very honest with you, I can't do the fuzz on the peaches, but I love the taste of peach! So if I'm a person going out and I'm trying to select variety, specific varieties for things. So let's say I want a really good eating peach, or I want a really good pie apple. Do you have any specific resources or directories? How would I go about finding the right variety for what I'm looking to do with the particular fruit and or what varieties are we seeing in New Hampshire that we could potentially access?
Jeremy Delisle 32:54
Yeah, well, I'll start by saying just kind of across the board with fruit, and we'll use tree fruit as the example here, looking at some of the nursery, the online nursery websites that are available; they have some really great descriptions about varieties, and so that's a good place to start. They will also have harvest calendars. So that's another consideration. When do you want that fruit to come in? And if you plan a vacation every year, first week of August, you don't want your peaches coming in during that time, because they're going to be ripe when you're leaving on vacation. And so thinking about that, that's a good place to start. Then I would also say it's really amazing the job that some of our farms do in putting up signage out there in their farms - to the extent that now many farms are adopting placards with QR codes that you can just walk through the orchard, scan it with your phone, and it will bring you to either their own website or a developed website that will bring up that variety and give you a good description of the flavor characteristics and really what it's best used for. So we see see a lot of farms adopting that in New Hampshire, and I think that's a really great marketing tool, and just service to customers that are out there that want to know more. And then U-pick season is also a great time to go out there and figure out what you like. If those farms have good signage, and you know what variety it is that you're looking at or potentially picking, then you could look at those extremely fuzzy peaches that are not appealing to you, and you could say, all right, maybe that variety is not for me. The other thing I would throw out there, as far as peaches and their fuzz, is there certainly is a variation from one variety to the next. But I would also encourage you to seek out farms that are producing nectarines, because they're basically just a fuzzless peach. I. Yeah, those two are genetically very similar, and so that's one way to get around the fuzz. And in my opinion, some of the nectarines that we grow here in New Hampshire, just that flavor is hard to beat. They're absolutely knock-your-socks-off flavor. And if you were looking for one in particular, in my opinion, Silver Jam is one of the best tasting nectarines that we grow here in New Hampshire. So that's something to consider. Other peaches that I think have amazing flavor are things like John Boy, Flaming Fury, any of the Flaming Fury varieties, and there, there are several of them, Desiree and Crest Haven, Coral, Star, Messina, those are some really excellent flavored peaches. So we're recording this episode, it's September 16, and here at my house, we grow a late variety of peaches called Madison, which, you know, it's ripe now. And so middle of September, it's just now ripening, and the flavor on that variety is also excellent. And so basically that range of the season for peaches will start usually early August, and go right through mid September, maybe even pushing into the second half of September. And by that point, most of our minds, for whatever reason, have switched to thinking about apples, and that's about as late as most growers want to have peaches ripe on their farm. So again, it goes back to that market window and what we want coming in when.
Kendall Kunelius 36:34
Interesting. Okay, I'm on a quest for Silver Gem nectarines. I guess I gotta go find some. I'll hold you to it!
Jeremy Delisle 36:45
Yeah, if you ever at Apple Hill Farm in Concord; they were in our peach and nectarine hardiness trial. They do have them up there. So I know some folks there. I can hook you up.
Kendall Kunelius 36:55
Well connected! And then my very last question is: Okay, so one of my husband's biggest secrets is he's actually a really good pie maker, and he loves making apple pies. I feel like that's a quintessential fall thing in New Hampshire. If I'm gonna go looking for a pie apple, what am I looking for?
Jeremy Delisle 37:15
Well, I think- Boy, that is the - that's a question. Just like cooks in the kitchen, you know, you ask one person, you're going to get a different answer. But for my money, I am a big fan of Macoun apples in Cortlands. I think both of those make an excellent pie apple. They've got really kind of complex flavors, a little bit of tartness in there as well. They tend to hold up well, you know, in a pie. And usually tend to be fairly large apples too. So it doesn't take too awful many of them to make pie. So that's something I would be looking for. You got quite a variety of apples out there available now, everything from Honey Crisp is still available. Fuji is yet to come, Macouns, Cortlands, Gala, Ginger Golds, so many varieties to choose from. But again, I think looking through those catalogs, if someone was going to grow their own varieties and they had a particular use that they wanted it for, that's definitely something to consider early on, because some of the older, or, I guess I would say, more traditional varieties that we've grown for years may actually be better pie apples because of those characteristics that we were just talking about, whereas a lot of the varieties that are coming out now, and the trends in the breeding programs, are tending towards those really, really crisp, snappy apples. And so sometimes they may be sweeter than some folks like. So if you're looking for kind of a tart apple or something with a little spice or a little bite to it, you may want to consider some of the apples that have been around for a long time, like the Macouns or the Cortlands or those sorts of things.
Kendall Kunelius 38:51
Interesting. I think one of the big themes on this podcast is increasing consumer awareness and to kind of help folks, when you're at a farm stand, appreciate what it takes to get that product in your hand. I really love the fact that we've covered everything from the growing techniques to the IPM improvements, to the community and to the varieties I just I really appreciate your time and your insights on this. I think this is going to be a really cool episode for people to listen to as they're hopefully snacking on a really good apple or a juicy and non-fuzzy peach!
Jeremy Delisle 39:26
Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to have the chance to contribute a little bit here to the conversation today and share a few things. And hopefully folks get out and visit some farms and have a great time this fall. We've certainly had beautiful weather. And the good thing about the weather we're having now, these sunny days and cool nights, is that that really is prime apple development weather. And so the flavor in the apples this fall should just be fantastic, as should the color.
Rebecca Dube 39:54
All right, you heard it from Jeremy, then. So grab some apples and make some pies! And we'll be talking to you all again on the next episode of Shared Soil.
Kendall Kunelius 40:10
Shared Soil is a production of University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, an equal opportunity educator and employer. Views expressed on this podcast are not necessarily those of the university, its trustees or its volunteers. Inclusion or exclusion of commercial products in this podcast does not imply endorsement. The University of New Hampshire, US Department of Agriculture and New Hampshire counties cooperate to provide extension programming in the Granite State. Learn more at extension.unh.edu.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Transcribed by https://otter.ai. Edited by Rebecca Dube.
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