The Apple Club Newsletter

Summer 2006

June Drop

I am often asked by people who call in July or early August: "What are all the little apples doing on the ground". This phenomenon is called the June drop, though in Ireland, thanks to our cooler climate, it generally happens in July.
As you may know, each year apple trees carry many more flowers than they need to produce fruit, probably in case of a bad frost or other traumatic event that might happen once in a decade, when extra flowers would be of benefit.
Now what usually happens is that, during flowering, many of the flowers get pollinated by insects, but some do not. Usually, within a few days, the first apple pollinated on a particular branch begins growing strongly, stealing all the trees energy at that particular location, and weakening its nearby neighbours, so that after a week or so, the tree gives up on the weak fruits, and allows them to fall off. Typically, this process removes about eight out of ten fruits, but because it happens when they are still tiny, just at the end of flowering, it just looks as though the blossom is just falling off, and being replaced by a smaller number of fruits.
The apples that are left after this initial drop are called set, though they may not make it all the way to harvest. This is because there are often still two or three times as many fruit on the tree as it can bring to fruition. Well trees are very good at sensing how many apples they are carrying, and can selectively abort fruits till the correct number remain.
The way trees sense how many apples they are carrying is via their plant hormones. As young fruits grow on the tree, inside them little seeds are growing and these little seeds release hormones. The more seeds in a particular apple, the more hormones produced on the tree, and also; the more apples on the tree, the more hormone produced. By the end of June, if the tree is carrying a lot of fruit, it senses the high hormone levels produced by the many seeds in all the apples, and it reaches a tipping point, where in the period of about ten days, it drops the weakest remaining fruits, which may sometimes account for up to half the apples that are on the tree. And very cleverly, it drops the weakest fruits. This is achieved because the weakest fruits are the ones with the least number of seeds; perhaps only one or two seeds in each. All along, these fruits have been producing less hormone, and thus have been attracting less reserves from the mother tree, and so by the end of June they are considerably behind the strong fruits, which might carry five or more seeds. So, when the tree comes to deciding which fruits to drop, it makes sense to drop the ones with least seeds, as these are the ones which give it the least change of reproducing, and that, of course, is why the tree produces apples in the first place. And thus, the June drop occurs, and when people look at the orchard, they see this multitude of little apples on the orchard floor, and wonder what has happened. And we tell them, "oh, that's the apple trees getting rid of the fruit they don't want because there are so few seeds in them, and apple trees don't want to waste energy growing apples that don't have many seeds, because the only reason they produce an apple is to produce the seeds that the apple contains". So that's the short answer to the question at the beginning, about all the little apples on the ground, unless you want to know about the apples that we deliberately knock off the trees, but that's another story altogether.

Cahir Heritage Food Fair

A Heritage Food Fair will take place in Cahir on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd of September. It is being organised by the members of Cahir Farmers' Market and many others from various organisations and businesses in Cahir.
The purpose of the event is to promote Cahir locally and nationally, as a 'Food and Heritage' destination.
Cahir is a heritage town situated in a great food producing area. Many of the old buildings in Cahir town are directly connected with the foods of the region. The Cahir Mills with their big water wheels and massive old diesel engines, the Granary in Church Street, Cahir Bakeries and so on. The commerce of Cahir has been and continues to be deeply connected with food production. Every year the farms in the Cahir area produce millions of gallons of milk, thousands of prime beef cattle and sheep, and thousands of tons of wheat, oats and barley, along with a large variety of other produce. The town and the farms of the area are proud of the food that is produced in the region, and are glad to show it off in the Heritage Food Fair which is being run at the end of Heritage Week on September 2nd and 3rd.

Our cherries

During the middle of July we harvested our first ever crop of sweet cherries. We started with a variety called Regina, which was followed by Sam and Schneiders, and lastly we had Kordia. Because it was our first ever harvest, and because we only have 180 trees, we probably harvested no more than 100 punnets. But I know that those of you who had them certainly enjoyed them, and next year we hope to have some for everyone.
Now as you know, the summer of 2006 was very good, and indeed, not only did the 180 cherry trees in our tunnel produce fruits, but so too did the five trees in my garden. Those trees were initially planted in 1996, and this was their first proper crop, even though every year they have given a wonderful show of white flowers for a week in springtime. If you would like to plant a fruiting cherry or two in your garden, you, like me, may have to wait quite a few years for a crop. But what a bonus when you get a crop, as the flowers of sweet cherry are just as nice as any other garden ornamental, and most of those will never give fruits.
If you would like a large tree, to twenty feet tall or more, get a tree on Mazzard rootstock. If you would like a medium tree, of perhaps ten feet, then a good rootstock is Colt. And if you prefer a small tree, like the ones in my tunnel, then you should ask for a tree on Giesla 5.

A new tractor

It's not very often that we get a new tractor at the apple farm. Among those in service on the farm at the moment are a 20 horsepower Renault from the 1960's, a Massey Ferguson 135 from 1967, and two "newer" tractors from 1980 and 1982. However, this year, we are getting a new orchard tractor, so called because it is designed to be narrow enough to fit down the rows in the orchard, and the type we are getting is a Fendt. Fendt tractors are made in Germany by the same parent company that makes Massey Ferguson, but Fendts are especially well known for their fuel efficiency.
Having spoken with a number of conventional farmers, I am confident that this new tractor will accomplish the same amount of work using 30% less fuel than any other equivalent tractor. One agricultural contractor told me how, by switching from a different make of tractor to Fendt, for his three tractor fleet (of very large tractors), he was saving 500 euros worth of diesel per week.
Now while the tractor I will get will be much smaller, and will not be used so often, I am still looking forward to the best fuel-efficiency that I can get in the orchard.
Now if only I could start distilling biofuels from my apple juice by-products.

New cold stores

At the moment we are also constructing some new cold stores on our farm, so that we will have somewhere to hold the extra apples we hope to harvest from our newly planted orchards. Keeping apples cool, at about 2 C, is the simplest way to keep them fresh. And thanks to the abilities of modern computers, new highly efficient cooling systems are now available. So, for our three stores, we can use a single cooling pack. It would be like having three fridges side by side in your house, but only one refrigerator unit running all three, being monitored by computer, and switching over and back between the fridges, and thus saving energy, especially when the fruit are cooled, and not needing much extra cooling input.
This is all helped by the fact that the stores are being built using 6 inches (15 cm) of insulation in the walls and ceiling, and 4 inches (10cm) in the floors. Once the contents (in our case apples) in a fridge that is this well insulated become cool, even with the fridge turned off, it would take quite a few days for them to even begin to warm up, though it is not something we are planning to try.
So, if you call for apples this winter, as well as being aware of their exceptional freshness, you can rest assured that they have been stored in the simplest and most efficient way possible.

More about apples and your health:

Cornell Study Finds Apples May Reduce Breast Cancer Risk Cornell University has conducted the first-ever study on the direct effects of apples on breast cancer prevention in animals. In this study, led by Dr. Rui Hai Lui, Cornell Associate Professor of Food Science, the more apples consumed, the greater reduction in the incidence and number of breast cancer tumors. Research found that the phytochemicals present in apples may contribute to their anti-cancer activities. This study is published in the March 2005 edition of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Recipe:  Raspberry Cake

Ingredients:
225g digestive biscuits 100g butter or margarine
225g soft cream cheese 50g caster sugar
500g fresh raspberries

Method:
Crush the biscuits into fine crumbs; then melt the butter and mix
together. Once mixed, press into the base of a 22cm dish and chill until firm.
Mix the cream cheese with the sugar and spread over the biscuit base.
Arrange the raspberries over the top and dust with icing sugar.
This recipe is also good with strawberries, blackberries or a mixture of soft fruits.

Soccer, By Willem Traas

In our spring newsletter I wrote about Religion. This time I write about soccer.
This summer we had the World Championships in Germany. In all, 32 countries took part. Ireland did not take part because they did not qualify.
Some of the great teams of the World were there, such as Brazil, France, Germany, Holland, England and Italy. We also saw the most famous players like Zidane, Ronaldinho, Henri, Rooney and Gerrard. There are no bad players at that level. But some are better than others. Zidane is still my favourite. I cannot think of any player who gave me more enjoyment watching him. It is funny that so many games are played with a ball. Hurling, golf, snooker: think about it. There are even games that are played with a ball which is not round. Rugby is one of these of course. The ball does not roll but hops. You never know where it is going.
I played soccer too in my young days. That is the time when Pele, Bobby Charlton, Beckenbauer and Eusebio were big names. And Cruif from Holland.
Well I was no George Best. I ran after the ball for 90 minutes, but I had no speed. And I was bad in the air, as they call it now. I did not like to head the ball. It would break your neck. You see, at that time the ball was very heavy. Especially when it got wet, you could not shift that ball.
When I was a child we had no football. To play soccer, the children would go to the butcher, and blow up the bladder of a pig. The bladder never lasted long, so we planned to get a real ball.
Now there was a company making "Zoete koek", some kind of sweet bread. In each loaf was a letter, and when you had all the letters of the company called "Barenburg", you could send away for a free ball. It took us months of eating zoete koek until we had all the letters. I remember it well. The ball we got was a Wimbledon size 3.
Our club was called "On the Bult". That means "on the hump". Because there was a big hump in the middle of the pitch. We made our own wooden goalposts as well. We put them up before the match, and hid them in a small canal afterwards. That was because it was wartime, and if people found them, they would cut them up for firewood. After a while I got football boots as well. The name was "King". They had a steel toecap. Unfortunately, a bit of steel came through the leather and eventually it got so painful that I did not want to kick the ball at all. And that was kind of the end of my soccer playing. But I did play once in the first team of our town, and I would have played there more often if I had not changed to basketball where the girls took part too.
So that is all for now about soccer. I hope that Ireland qualifies for the European championships.



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