Leslie Bonner picks late-season peaches at Carlson Orchards. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz))
Harvard’s famous apples, peaches, and nectarines might be a little smaller than usual this year, but the flavor is “excellent,” orchardist Frank Carlson said this week. The heat and dry weather of the past few weeks “probably cost us one size,” he predicted, meaning that the apples will be a quarter-to-half-inch smaller than they would be ordinarily. And that, in turn, will lower their value: “The bigger they are, the more they cost,” Carlson explained, even though smaller fruit is often more flavorful.
Regardless of size, his orchards are filled with a high-quality crop, Carlson asserted, and there will be plenty of apples for the annual fall “pick-your-own” season. And although the long dry spell has had an effect, some varieties and some orchards have done better than others because of differing soil conditions. The peaches and nectarines were trickle-irrigated all summer, so they developed normally, but the dry spell did cause Carlson to divert some of that irrigation effort to the apples, which means his peaches lost size toward the end.
At Westward Orchards, orchardist Don Green is expecting a normal harvest, he said Tuesday. The recent dry weather “was a stress on the trees and they could drop fruit,” he conceded, but his apples and peaches had a good start in the spring and appear to be fine. Peach picking is “close to finished,” but apple picking has just begun, and if anything, this week’s rainfall is a hindrance, he concluded, because “we lose a day of picking.”
