- Well, good morning, everyone.
I have three orchards for sale. (laughing)
No, just kidding, just kidding.
I'm gonna talk about growing Pazazz.
The title might be a little bit misleading,
I know the title that was published was
Growing and Marketing Pazazz
and RiverBelle.
I'm gonna really focus on Pazazz,
but probably more, even more than that,
kind of high density,
kind of our experience with Pazazz
and a high density,
where we're at with high density plantings.
Cool, huh?
Pazazz, what a great name though huh?
I think that's a fantastic name.
So we're gonna talk a little bit about
how this apple is being marketed,
but I guess to start, I was a little bit,
just a little bit uncomfortable
with talking about Pazazz,
because I wasn't sure how many of you
actually grow any.
Can I just see a showing of hands of how many of you
actually have some Pazazz trees?
Wow.
That's way more than I thought.
Good.
(laughing)
Then this might make a little bit of sense here.
So I really wanna just focus on what our experience
is to date.
How'd that get in there?
(laughing)
Those are my grand kids.
So Pazazz history,
let's talk a little bit about the history.
Recognize this good lookin' pair here?
Huh?
That's Mr. and Mrs. Pazazz over there,
they're sitting over there along the door.
Of course I'm talking about Doug and Gail Shefelbine.
This is a Doug Shefelbine creation.
Doug I'm never sure what word to use there,
creation, developed,
I know you just say you're a seed planter.
Right?
But, so it is a Doug Shefelbine creation.
It started out as a Honeycrisp seed
from probably back in the cider days I would guess,
Doug, huh?
Hard to say completely.
Originally there was really two trees,
and I know this has maybe been a little bit of an issue
for some of you,
it was a little bit of an issue for us as well.
There were two trees and they had Doug's numbering system,
DS3, Doug Shefelbine 3,
and DS41.
And in the end, those apples are so similar to one another
that they really both became Pazazz.
The...
It's a patented apple,
the name is trademarked.
Wescott Agriproducts... Fred...
Fred Wescott which I think many of you know
owns the rights to the apple,
so that makes it a managed club variety.
And just as a little bit of a disclaimer,
I don't have anything to do with that,
so I'm not one of the owners of Pazazz or anything,
I'm a grower.
So all those questions relative to trees and contracts
and all that stuff, I don't have anything to do with that,
I just have my own,
you guys have your own,
and you really gotta deal
with Fred about that stuff.
The first round of planting is complete,
those trees are spoken for,
either they're in the ground,
or you're planning on planting them
in the next couple years,
but the first round is done.
Second round, whether there will be a second round
of planting is really dependent
on how well the first round does.
So,
so success is kind of the key there
on whether or not there will be more trees.
There are four growing regions.
Pretty equally split.
New York has about 10 growers,
Nova Scotia, up there,
is it pronounced Van Maken?
Up in Nova Scotia, in that group of growers.
Minnesota and Wisconsin, which you guys make up,
and then Washington,
which are really Fred's orchards
in Washington as well.
There was an exception made in this,
because it's a managed variety,
and some of the experience that you're familiar with
with Sweet Tango,
that an exception was made in terms
of being a commercial, whatever that means, grower
for farm market growers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
I'm not sure,
I don't necessarily fit into that category,
so I'm not exactly sure what the rules are
around that but I think the main thing
was that there's a minimum quantity of trees,
I think it was 200 trees,
and you could only sell them in your own farm market.
Okay, so that's the history on Pazazz.
The apple itself,
it's a good looking apple, there's no doubt about it,
I don't know
how many of you have had a chance to try it.
It's a good looking red apple,
it's crisp, it's got the same kind of crispiness
as Honeycrisp of course.
It's harvested in mid October,
which for many of us may be a bit of an issue, right?
And whether or not we can get this in in time.
Commercially, by that I mean grocery stores,
going into grocery stores in mid January.
So just this past week,
it started to show up in grocery stores.
Some of the picking advice,
it's a little bit different.
The apples being picked in October
to be sold in January.
So it's picked, it's got a little bit
higher starch content
when it's initially picked,
and then over time the starches convert,
and it mellows out, and by January,
pretty sweet, good mix of sweet, tart,
nice acid mix by January.
So that creates a little bit of a challenge
for picking it right in October
and selling it in your store right in October.
So,
these are kind of a niche,
I know you don't all do every one of these
when you got out to pick apples,
you'll bite into it and see what it tastes like,
method still works best for me.
But that doesn't necessarily apply to this one.
So, if you're picking
because you're a grower that's either packing them
for grocery stores or sending them to Wescott,
you know, that's one thing, we're gonna pick 'em early,
we're gonna pick 'em when they have good color.
When they fall into this category,
smart fresh 'em,
send them to Wescott,
and then get packed in January.
For us, the ones that we sell in our own stores,
as well as maybe applies to you,
you're gonna leave them hanging there as long as you can
to get the sugars up as high as you can
before you pick 'em.
And then try to sell them in your store.
They're very, very popular.
The feedback that we've gotten
the last few years selling them in our stores
has really been fantastic.
Don't let them freeze.
I'm a little bit hesitant on this.
One of the issues that we're gonna talk about
little bit later is scalding.
And really trying to zero,
it's a bit of a work in progress to really
define the protocols for harvest and for storage
to really minimize freezing,
we're not quite there yet.
But right now,
my recommendation based on our experience
with growing would be don't let them freeze.
So if it looks like they're gonna freeze,
get 'em off the trees.
Would be my recommendation.
Use a Honeycrisp storage protocol.
50 to 60 degrees for 7 to 10 days,
and then a little bit of a mix,
you know, don't bring them down to 33 degrees,
keep them 38 to 40.
Whether or not a gradual change
from that, you know, 50,
50 to 60 degrees down to 38,
there's been some experimentation going on
whether that should be stepped down or not.
You know, it's gonna be hard to tell.
The data on that kind of thing is pretty
pretty slow to come.
Smart Fresh definitely seems to help.
Right now all of ours that will be on a larger scale
will all be Smart Fresh 'd.
Sometime during that protocol.
Okay.
I wanna talk a little bit about our experience,
because we've been actually growing them for a while.
Those top two pictures are what was our
initial planting.
We planted those back in 2010,
so we've got a few years of growing those.
Those top two pictures are at our orchard in Galesville.
It was a small planting, it was a test planting.
We wanted to see,
get a little sense of did we wanna go big into
this variety and let's at least get some
in the ground and see,
timing, maybe we would even like to have
a little longer, but,
this is our experience, I'm just gonna put these up here.
That's how we've done so far.
We started out the regular tall spindle planting,
spacing in this particular block
is a little bigger than what we normally wanna do,
but we didn't really know what we were getting into,
so I think these are 42 inches,
or 3 1/2 feet by 14 feet.
A lot of that has to do with this orchard,
it has a lot of real steep hills in it.
So you had to keep the side hill,
give the mowers and the tractors
all a little bit of room to move.
But you can see right in the second leaf,
we let the trees have about 10 apples
per tree,
and then we ramped up from there.
You can see a dip in that third year,
and, did anybody here have an issue in 2012?
(laughing)
That's 2012.
Which is fantastic, I think.
We had apples below these,
Honeycrisp below this planting.
We had Galas and Fujis above this planting.
They had nothing.
And Pazazz had fruit,
had flowers,
the other trees, they didn't even have flowers, so.
So they survived through that time
and gave us a crop,
so we were really happy with that.
And then we moved up,
unfortunately we're one of the ones
that have gotten hailed the last couple years.
So those last two,
really when we would be expecting to be
probably up in the 800 or so range per acre,
in this planting, because the rows are wider,
and we probably would have been there,
but you know, we got hail,
and we ended up going through and picking
a lot of apples off and all that, you know,
when they were small.
With hail damage, so,
so we're really happy with the performance with the trees.
You can see those trees on the top,
they haven't had a whole lot done to them,
you know, we talk about branch bending and all that,
and we took out branches that had really bad
crouch angles and that kind of stuff,
but we didn't do a lot of branch bending
and that kind of stuff in there.
A little bit, but they're doing really well.
I don't know if they'd pass
the mistakes test or not, but,
(laughing)
and then, so,
sometime here during there
these first couple years, we said, hey,
we're really happy with this,
let's go big.
So in 2014, we planted 40,000 trees.
And those all went into our Eau Claire orchard.
A little different setting, soil's different,
that kind of stuff,
we used all bud nine,
we were really happy with bud nine.
Our best performing Honeycrisp around bud nine,
so we went with bud nine here.
Biggest thing nowadays is getting root stalks.
You know, to get 40,000 root stalks all at one time
was quite the,
we felt pretty good about being able to do that.
So we planted those trees,
they're 3 by 11,
on bud nine,
we build a trellis system
that was capable of putting hail net over the top.
You know how that is, you know.
We got stung the last two years in a row with hail.
It's looking more and more attractive all the time.
With the multi peril insurance
and where Honeycrisp is at
with price on multi peril insurance,
if we can get Pazazz,
we need to get producing some Pazazz,
get some selling some Pazazz,
and get that moved in to varietal group A
on multi peril insurance,
it's very important.
That factors into this decision on whether or not
hail netting is still
still in the works or not.
We're gonna do some anyway,
just because we wanna kind of stay up
and make sure we know how to do it.
And then these are all drip irrigated.
So what I'd like to do is,
that's our experience so far with Pazazz,
I'll talk just a second about the actual marketing,
what's happening right now with marketing of Pazazz.
And then move on more into the details of
what we actually did with our planting.
So,
so right now it is being sold and marketed
across North America.
Let me grab something here.
(shuffling)
You know, these are the types of,
they call them tools,
I don't have all that marketing-ey speak, you know,
when you talk to Fred and Don Roper and those guys.
But these are the kinds of
materials that are being given to
to grocery stores to help with marketing of Pazazz.
I don't know how many of you
have seen a Pazazz box.
We went through all that to get the boxes,
and I forgot to bring a box.
But you can see the boxes, those red boxes,
I mean, what a display.
If you go into a packing house
and you look at all the different boxes,
cases of apples,
they all kind of disappear, but boy,
when one of those red Pazazz boxes in there,
it really sticks out.
And it was designed that way,
it's a little more expensive box,
but it was designed that way so that retailers
could use it as part of their displays.
So right now there's quite the
quite the media blitz going on
across North America.
It's being showcased and
I think it's about 300 stores.
There's somewhat of a limited quantity,
but it's really enough to get things rolling
and start creating a little bit of a buzz,
and some demand for Pazazz.
These are just four,
they sent me
just picture after picture of store displays
across the country.
And I just picked out these four.
But that's the kind of display
that you might be seeing in stores.
There's a little bit of on a regional standpoint
some exclusiveness on a regional standpoint.
You know, the display materials that I'm showing here
are Kroger's, and if you didn't know,
Kroger's is huge.
I think Kroger's is the,
I'm probably gonna get these numbers wrong,
but like second or third largest retailer in the world
behind Walmart?
You know, 108 billion dollars
of sales or something like that.
But I'm sure they probably have some kind
of exclusive into their regions, but,
publics, up in Canada,
and they make for pretty,
pretty nice displays.
So that's how it's being marketed.
I'm not a marketing guy,
there's all sorts of materials
and cooking cards and all that
to try to help produce managers
create a buzz.
So I wanna talk more specifically
on what we've actually done.
We've had questions,
I know we hosted field days and those kind of things,
but we never really get into some of the things
and how we done it, so,
definitely not saying,
well maybe I am saying this is the right way.
(laughing)
I was joking about that yesterday, but,
this is just what we've done.
There's a lot of different ways to do it, so,
we started out the year before we planted
on getting our sites ready.
The Eau Claire orchard is a lot flatter
than the Galesville orchard,
which is really nice to work in,
so we were able to do some things in Eau Claire
that we can't necessarily do down in Galesville.
But we spent a lot of time,
especially Andy and Mark,
spent a lot of time just getting the sites ready.
We had some wind breaks that were
kind of in the wrong place,
can't really move them so we took them out.
Lot of excavator and dozer work,
just getting things positioned where we want.
You know, how you've only got one shot at doing that
kind of stuff before you get the trees in the ground.
We opened up some of the big wind breaks,
you can see along the side there
just to make sure we had some good cold air
drainage paths and that kind of stuff.
So then,
Mark and,
and Andy spent quite a bit of time
just laying out the blocks.
And I'm not talking about laying out individual rows,
but just the overall orientation
of where the blocks were gonna go,
because this is a lot of trees.
They did all the soil tests the year before.
We did do quite a bit of soil amendments.
Which was kind of a challenge, you know,
it's like,
I'm not really very versed in that kind of stuff,
and seeking a lot of advice from a lot of different people,
and you know how that is.
You know if I ask 10 different groups,
then I got 10 very different answers, so,
I just threw them all in a hat and picked one,
went with that.
No I'm just kidding.
We just kind of made our own decisions
after we took all that input.
And then we went ahead and got things
smoothed out and ready to go.
The planting process itself,
we just have a Phil Brown planter.
We modified it a bit
because we wanted to try to get the trees
in the ground fast.
So I know for, maybe for orchards in Michigan,
New York and Washington,
planting 40,000 trees may be something
they do every day, you know?
But for us, you know, it was just like,
just a huge, huge thing.
And,
we were worried it was gonna take us all summer
to plant the trees.
We're not that far from the days
when I used the shovel to put them in,
or then went to a post hole,
you know, augur, you know,
and planted trees that way, so,
the thought of 500 trees is a big planting for us.
And now we're gonna put 40,000 in the ground.
So we made some modifications to that planter,
fairly simple ones, but,
the trees are only three feet apart,
and if you're gonna go fast and get 'em done,
you know, the guy putting the tree in the ground
can't be holding the tree all the way
as it comes out through the packing wheels.
So we added bigger platforms,
we put two more people sitting on the planter
to feed the person planting the trees.
And we put another seat over the packer wheels
so that that person could take the pass
for the handoff of the tree to hold it stable
as it went through the packing wheels
so that the planter could be on to the next tree.
And it worked really well,
and Mark made the modifications for the planter,
and we ended up going a lot faster than we thought.
And we ended up getting all of the trees in the ground
in five and a half days.
And it took us five and a half days because
it rained one day.
Which was great.
It could have waited one more day,
but, in one day we got 10,000 trees in the ground.
That was our biggest day.
So we were really happy with how that worked.
There's some videos in here.
Is there a way to play these?
That's, we might try this one,
this one is a video too,
but,
we did elect to, you know,
we had a lot of discussion about,
this one doesn't really show that much
but we'll run it anyway.
Here, let's wait on this one,
go ahead, yeah go ahead.
We'll show it anyway.
It's not very much here.
Oh, it won't go?
Okay.
So,
so that's how we got the trees planted.
Oh I was gonna comment on
using row markers versus GPS.
We were gonna go with GPS,
we were all set,
because it really sounded really cool.
And it looked like it would really work good, right?
But after, you know, on our tractor,
isn't GPS capable,
we have smaller tractors like
most of us have,
we're not row crop farmers,
so we don't have that kind of tractor to use.
And by the time we looked at buying,
not buying, but renting GPS capable tractor
just for our planting,
and doing all that kind of stuff,
we thought, you know, row markers,
we've been successful using row markers
for a long time.
Lots of different kinds of plantings.
And it was thousands of dollars
to rent that tractor and do all that stuff.
So we ended up going with row markers.
And I'd say it worked really good.
You can go out into that planting there
and with a tape measure,
and you're not gonna be more than an inch
off here or there of 11 feet.
So I wouldn't hesitate to,
even if you're getting to 11 feet
and you gotta be more and more precise,
on flat ground,
row markers work just fine.
Support system,
we took some of the things that Mario has said
over the years and Terrace Robinson,
you know, we're the,
we're going tall spindle,
and they're the tall spindle heroes, right?
So we wanted to make sure that we take
what they say very seriously.
So we wanted to get our support system up
as fast as we could get it up.
So we had 16 foot posts,
and we've put,
we've built a lot of trellis over the years.
Our oldest tall spindle trellis systems
are, you know, 10, 12 years old.
So we've built a lot of trellis.
With this many posts what we decided to do
was do it the way all the guys in Michigan
were telling us we should do,
the way all the people in Europe do it.
Is just to use an excavator and vibrate the posts in.
So if we're able to play this video,
it kind of shows, this is when we very
just started putting them in.
So what it is is that's a
fairly big excavator.
The big minis, are the biggest
that are mid sized like a cat 308
or something like that,
barely makes it on top of a 16 foot post.
And then when you put a vibrating plate compactor
on top of that,
you can make it,
we went to a cat dealer and actually tried it.
And you can make it, you can put the blade down
and tip the thing back, all that,
and get up on top there,
but you don't have much room for air there.
So this cat still fit down 11 foot rows
so we went with this.
And just a plate compactor,
we welded a ring on it,
we just rented all this stuff.
Welded a ring on it and started driving posts in the ground.
It works really slick.
There is a complicating factor here
in that this ground is extremely rocky.
If you get down 2 1/2 feet here,
you've got a rock shelf
about that thick through the whole dome,
it's like a dome in Eau Claire,
in the Chippewa River Valley.
And you have to get through that.
It doesn't seem to matter much for trees,
but it does when you try to put posts in the ground.
So what we ended up doing was
we had a rock spike called the Penetrator 6400,
(audience laughing)
and it's laying on the ground there,
unfortunately you can't see it.
What we do is take, Mark's the guy in the excavator
Andy's the guy on the ground there.
This is our trial run here.
We drive that rock spike in the ground,
break ourselves a path through the rocks,
pull that out, and then put posts up
and drive that into the ground.
So we usually don't have to do that.
If you didn't have that kind of rock,
you probably didn't even have to turn
that vibrator on,
you just push that post in the ground.
In Galesville this would go really fast.
So this took us about 4 weeks,
and we drove, 40,
well 5,000 posts.
And really you could almost beat half that time
if you didn't have to do the rock spike.
So, pretty slick deal,
Mark's the one that did
almost every one of those posts
except for the straightest three.
The straightest three posts in the orchard I did.
(laughing)
I'm the only one who actually broke posts
too I think, aren't I?
But, I had to do it a little bit, you know,
so I could claim something.
But it worked out really well.
These things, I know many of you have seen it,
they are straight.
The other thing that was a little different for us
in our previous trellis systems,
we didn't really, we wanted them straight down the row,
but we didn't really care if they lined up
you know to be really pretty like a vineyard.
You know, the other direction.
Well with hail netting,
they gotta be straight in both directions.
So you don't have a choice,
if there's a rock there,
you can't move your post over, it's gotta be in line.
So you have to figure out a way to get through
that spot.
So that's why this becomes important.
So this thing is lined up every which way.
So it looks really cool.
So, whether or not it will be covered
with hail net someday,
time will tell.
We also got the irrigation as fast as we could.
This is the only real picture that I had.
So we put all of the, our supply lines,
it's a very elaborate system,
all of our supply lines are underground.
One of the reasons is that this is a sandy soil area,
so irrigation was really important here.
So all of our headers, all that stuff's underground,
it's split up into three zones.
There fortunately was already a height capacity
while on this property, when we bought this orchard, so,
so being able to supply the water
wasn't that big of a deal for us.
And we had this thing up and running
four weeks after those trees were in the ground.
And fortunately they got a couple of nice
shots of water in between there from mother nature.
So we worked with John Nye,
many of you probably know Trickl-eez.
Kind of helped design our system and all that kind of stuff.
And just to put in a plug for Trickl-Eez,
they really were very helpful.
And this has a fertigation pump,
so very simple system,
so we're able to put whatever it is
we want on these trees in very timely fashion.
So the first few years here of growing Pazazz,
things that I think are important.
And we're just,
I'm gonna be repeating a lot of what Mario said yesterday,
but fire blight management, extremely important.
I have a little later slide about fire blight, but,
the year before this planting,
and I think there's a couple of guys from Minnesota
in the room here that actually experienced this.
There's a pretty significant outbreak of fire blight
on these new trees.
And they lost a pretty significant number of trees
to fire blight right off the bat.
And I'm sure that they would echo the same thing,
you know, take,
if you can have access to like a new weather system
or even your own spectrum weather station
or something like that,
you know, become very familiar with blight,
understand when the risk times are,
and do not hesitate to use streptomycin
and blow 'em.
And for me, I mean I've seen it,
it definitely makes a difference,
but you gotta be good at timing.
You can't be screwing around.
So, I would take that very seriously
when you've got a big planting,
any planting, if you wanna really protect your trees.
NOAA, you don't have to be a member of anything
to go on to NOAA.
If you've got a NOAA weather station close to you,
you just gotta go on their website.
The data's all there, so.
And if you wanna buy,
if you're gonna get a weather station,
you know just contact them,
they're 18, Joe how much was it
last time you checked?
Was it $1800 for a weather station?
- [Joe] $1800 and up.
$4300, - $4300, so it's a spendy deal
so you gotta like, you know,
what size are you and how close are you,
you can all go together and buy one
and have one in the local area.
But really pay attention to fire blight management,
we'll talk about what,
we talked about it yesterday,
tree training, we stripped all the leaders on these.
Second, well first year of course,
we took all the fruit buds,
or not fruit buds but flowers off as fast as we could
to focus on growing the tree.
Some of the things we didn't do in the first year
because of the scare of the fire blight
that was going on in Minnesota,
because we didn't push these trees very hard
in the first year, and I'm kind of regretting
that a little bit, I wish we would have,
we did in the second year.
But I wish we would have done a little bit more
in the first year.
We did do a little bit of branch bending,
but we found we really didn't have to
do a lot of that on our test planting
to get the kind of structure we wanted.
But we did do some, I mean,
talk about time consuming.
That is the big challenge.
So we're still torn whether or not
we're gonna do more branch bending
in the third year.
Weed control, you know,
when do you think a field
that's been in corn and beans for years
and years and years with excellent weed control,
never seen a weed in there.
You could get away with a little while
after you plant the trees,
not even,
by the time we turned around with posts
and doing irrigation work,
we're like where the heck did all those weeds
come from?
You know, and we were fighting it right from the get go
with weeds, so,
I don't have any great advice for you,
but weed control and what's the right level
of control and all that kind of stuff
continues to be a huge challenge for us,
and one that we'll keep working on I guess.
The other thing is,
those little buggers like that
fresh leader material on young trees,
so, you know,
we had a lot of issues keeping up
with aphids and leaf rollers
and that kind of stuff,
trying to get in there and screw up our terminal bud.
We really wanted to keep these trees growing
as much as possible.
So that's another thing to really watch out,
and then like any tree really,
in those first years, if you're gonna crop them,
be ready for, you know,
fruit the size of pumpkins,
they can be quite big.
So getting that crop load management right
is pretty important.
So also, in the second year as I mentioned,
we did go back into pushing the trees kind of hard,
so we started fertilizing.
We used the Black label Zinc product
that CPS has,
and then we did three applications of
a 28% UAN,
nitrogen to get the trees moving,
and they got moving, so,
we ended up probably
in the 30, 24 to 36 inches of growth
in the second year.
Getting the trees attached to the wire
in a real timely manner is important.
And you know how it goes,
we were talking about mistakes yesterday.
We use those, we've used all sorts of trellis
clipping things over the years,
rubber bands, and u-clips
and we're kind of backing out of using u-clips,
and no matter how much you show people
the right way to put those things on,
there is a right way to put those things on.
Man if you walk away and just forget about it,
you come back,
they're gonna be putting them on wrong.
And it happens to us over and over and over.
So make sure you get those u-clips
on there right, it makes a big deal,
or big difference.
So we continue to work on that,
we'll be attaching trees now to the third wire this year.
And then,
in the Fall, late Fall,
probably a little later than we really wanted to,
then we painted all of the tree trunks,
we painted them with white latex paint,
and we did put a little bit of Thiram in that paint
as a,
hopefully a little bit of a mouse deterrent as well.
Are we almost out of time here?
So, I'll try to speed up here,
so the end of the year, that's what the trees look like.
Trunks painted, attached the wires,
all ready to go,
they grew their average on all of those trees
is about 7 feet,
so we're a foot away from the 4th wire.
This year we'll get that shot up above that
fourth wire hopefully.
We're aiming for 10.
And then get them all attached up at the top there,
start fruiting them this next year as well.
That's what they looked like earlier this week,
or last week on the bottom there.
We'll do a little bit of
maintenance, try to get rid of things
like that branch right there.
Some of that kind of stuff,
but not do too much this year to the tree,
just let them go and try to take advantage
of maybe getting a little fruit on some of these
bigger branches this year,
get these things to start paying for themselves.
Continue leader training,
we're gonna stop nitrogen,
we're trying to really learn more about
this whole calcium nitrogen ratios
on fruit as it pertains to scalding,
and maybe a better pit as well,
lot more work to be done on those.
But we'll be in the 5 to 10 apples.
Whether or not we try some hail net this year,
we'll have to work, I see Laurel's back there,
we'll have to maybe work with Laurel a little bit
to see if we can figure out
how to get some hail netting put up
just as a test kind of situation.
These are a couple videos,
but unfortunately you're not gonna be able to see these.
This is the apples from this year
running down the pack line over at,
in Elgin, Minnesota at Wescott but,
it's just starting out in the water dump.
I'm sure there's no mystery at all in that
water dump.
This is them headed down the line there.
You know they look pretty nice looking apples there.
Scalding wasn't much of an issue on these apples
that I saw when I was there watching these apples
run down the line, I didn't see very much of it.
But I know, and then,
at the end of that day,
that pack out, this is them all ready
to head out to a grocery store,
this particular whole group here was headed
to Hy-Vee.
The biggest challenges.
Scalding,
we've got a ways to go to figure it out,
we've been up and down a little bit over the years,
some years worse than others,
that kind of stuff, we're pretty sure
that the storage protocol
of getting those apples off the trees
and through that storage protocol
is really, really important for these.
But it's a work in progress.
Some of the data of taking fruit samples in July
testing what are the nutrient contents
or the mineral contents of that apple in July
to predict how well they're gonna store,
that's work that's just starting.
And we'll need a few years to put together some data
to really say where do we need to be in July
with our full year sprays of calcium,
and whatever else we might be putting on
that helps predict how well that apple's
gonna store into January.
But those are all things that are work in progress
as it relates to Pazazz.
Fire blight, I think I maybe have talked
enough about fire blight,
but so far we've escaped,
that right there is a
a Honeycrisp tree in one of our other plantings,
I just needed a picture of fire blight.
Okay, there's the gang,
that's the gang that did all this work here,
Andy?
Is Andy here?
Andy's back over there, Andy was our project leader,
he's really the one that made sure that whole thing
all came together and we got all the trees
and the posts and, you know,
finding 5,000 16-foot posts
during that time when everybody's scrambling
to put trellis with long posts
was a challenge but we were able to get them.
And get them all in the ground.
Mark's the one that was really responsible
for getting all these trees in the ground
and getting that trellis built.
And the other guys that did a lot of work there,
these are all our regular guys
that work for us all the time.
So,
okay, so,
that's what it looks like driving a tractor,
narrow tractor down 11 foot rows.
When the trees are just barely planted.
I should have put another picture in here
in our Chippewa orchard that has
a six-year old
3 by 11 Honeycrisp planting
that's a little out of control.
That, driving a tractor down is a little like,
where am I going?
So that's why I was asking the questions
about how do you fix a tall spindle orchard
when it hasn't been pruned properly?
Just a couple of other,
the pretty,
we're growing posts there.
Get all those flowers off
and you get 'em in the ground like that.
And then just the Pazazz marketing stuff.
Hey, are you as excited about 2016 as I am?
It's gonna be a great year.
I heard that there was not gonna be any hail this year.
(audience laughing)
Thanks everybody, I hope you all have a wonderful year.
(applause)