Grower says apples bigger and sweeter
Season nears end with high demand, solid prices: Blenheim orchard owner
The hot weather this year has led to sweeter-tasting and larger apples, according to one Chatham-Kent grower. Hector Delanghe, who owns Delhaven Orchards in Blenheim, said the sweeter taste is due to all the sun the apples have been exposed to this summer and fall. “Generally speaking, it’s a good crop,” he said. “The hot weather for cooling apples has sort of made it a little extra hard because when you’re fighting 30-degree temperatures when you’re cooling compared to 20-degree temperatures, it means that the refrigeration has to work a lot harder.”
The dry weather required more use of Delhaven’s trickle irrigation system, said Delanghe, which has produced apples of bigger sizes than usual.
“It was one of these years if you didn’t have irrigation your size would suffer, you see, so some of these things pay off and this year they did,” he said, adding they started irrigating 20 years ago. The orchard grows 22 varieties of apples throughout the season. The softer apples, such as McIntosh, are picked earlier and now the harder apples, such as Red Delicious, are being sold, said Delanghe.
The most popular types this year have been Ambrosia and Honey Crisp, he said.
“The demand has been high and the prices have been good,” he said. “That’s two things. When the demand is there, the demand determines the price a lot of the time.” Delanghe said they now plant 1,300 trees to the acre, but when he started in 1958, he was planting 35 trees to the acre. “That’s why they’re put up on wire and posts. It’s a lot of work, but it has its advantages,” he said. “The wind used to blow them back and forth, used to rub the apples off. Now, they ’re all on wires and it helps a lot.” Delanghe said he grows 100 acres of apples and has 240 acres of all crops on his property near Lake Erie.
This year, he brought in a new piece of equipment from Italy which acts as a picking aid. Four or five workers are using it at the same time. They place each apple they pick on a system that moves it into a bin that can be loaded off the machine once it’s full. The Revo Piuma 4WD, as it’s called, cost $105,000, said Delanghe, who had it shipped by container. This is the first time this type of machine has been used in Ontario, he said, although it has been operated in British Columbia, according to his son Mark.
He said he felt a need for it due to labour costs and he is looking to save 20 per cent on harvesting the crop.
“We’re not saying labour is too high. I’m not saying that, because if you’re working at $14 an hour, you’ve got to have $14 an hour to survive,” said Delanghe. “The only thing we were complaining about the prices is they took a 28 per cent jump at once.”
Other apple orchards in Chatham-Kent include Thompson’s Orchards and Manitree Fruit Farms, both in the Blenheim area. Delanghe said his picking season started the first week in August and will continue until the first week of November.
“Let’s call it a good, average year,” he said. “It’s not a limb-buster. That’s when we break the trees.”