Today in the orchard
Ike Kerschner’s breeding selection 16-9-81. It’s excellent!
Today Ike Kerschner of North Star Orchards in Cochranville, PA came to visit the farm. Ike and his wife flew to southern Maine in their Piper Cherokee and drove up to the farm with his brother and sister-in-law. I’ve known Ike for about 25 years, having met him while attending the annual “Stump Sprouts” apple meeting in western MA. His fruit CSA was the inspiration for “Out on a Limb.” One year at Stump Sprouts he explained how they organized their CSA, and I instantly knew it was a great model. We started ours a year or two later. Ike is also a meticulous apple breeder. Last summer and fall he sent us fruit from two dozen of his advanced selections to taste and evaluate. That was incredibly fun. This spring we grafted several of them here on the farm for further evaluation. As they are released, we’ll be helping to get them out into the wide world. We topworked our two favorites (16-9-21 and 16-9-81) into the BRC where we hope to get fruit within the next 2 or 3 years. (By then they’ll have names!)
We did get some orchard work done today as well. Laura and Skylar continued to work on “DIRK,” our apple identification key and spent much of the afternoon weeding the nursery.
