NORTHAMPTON — Picking apples is one of the rites of fall, with crisp, sunny mornings beckoning families out to the orchard to help gather in the season’s brilliant red and green bounty.
This year, though, pick-your-own opportunities will be limited because so much of the area’s apple crop was damaged or destroyed by a hard frost in May.
Park Hill Orchard in Easthampton was hit as hard as anybody, co-owner Russell Braen reckons. The orchard has no pick-your-own apples, and has had to buy some fruit from elsewhere to stock its stands.
“We have about 10 boxes of McIntosh out there,” he said. “They have stretch marks.
“Optimistically, we’re expecting 40 boxes. A normal year is 40,000. It’s a bad loss.”
Park Hill’s peach crop was a total loss, a fate that befell all orchards in western Massachusetts after a bitterly cold night in February killed the flower buds.
Braen said insurance he has on the peach crop would cover about a third of the loss.
Down the road at Bashista Orchards in Southampton, pick-your-own is also off the menu.
“Our whole pick-your-own orchard is at least a 90% loss,” owner Tom Bashista said.
That section of the orchard is on a lower level, which caught the worst of the sinking cold air on that May night. Higher up the hill, there are plenty of apples up in the treetops, but insurance would probably have something to say about sending the public up high ladders to pick them, Bashista said with a chuckle.
Along with the peaches, nectarines and apricots, all killed by the deep February freeze, Bashista also lost his entire cherry crop to the May frost.
“I had a bumper crop — it was going to be beautiful,” he said. “It was days away from being picked.”
Still, the orchard has many of its 60 varieties of apples.
“We are picking, every day since July,” Bashista said. “Thirteen or 14 varieties have been picked. They don’t all blossom at the same time.”
The ones that were damaged, but not killed, by the frost will still make good cider.
“There are plenty of deformed apples to crush into cider,” he said. “They look like gourds.”
The May frost took out about 40% of Quonquont Farm’s apple crop, manager Leslie Harris said, but the Whately orchard has fruit for picking.
“Perennial favorites like Cortland are all gone, but we got more of a Macoun crop than I thought,” Harris said.
The farm relies on direct sales, she said, and workers are able to put people in the picture and explain the surface damage caused by the frost.
Later-blooming varieties such as Golden Delicious, Rome and Northern Spy are largely undamaged, she said.
“Pick-your-own is our primary thing, and we’ll have that through the normal season, mid-October,” Harris said.
The farm is selling peaches “imported” from the Hudson Valley, she said, and cider pressed from the damaged yet still perfectly edible apples.
“We’re muddling through,” she said.
The loss was all the harder to take because the farm was heading into a banner year for apples, based on the bloom in May. Heavy bloom doesn’t always mean a big crop, Harris explained, but this year orchardists had already begun thinning the crop when trouble hit.
Peaches historically are a hit-or-miss prospect in most of New England — it’s on the northern edge of their growing zone. Frost in May is always a potential threat. But the problem was compounded by unseasonably warm weather in April, Harris said, which pushed Quonquont’s Macs into the pink stage two weeks earlier than normal.
Coming on top of a severe drought last year, it has been a challenging time for farmers.
“It’s been a tough season,” Bashista acknowledged. “We’ve already been saying, wait until next year.”