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Pennsylvania Correspondent
Although using a lot of PYO cuts labor costs, the operation does have to spend a lot on advertising to get the pickers out. “We send out personal invitations, and use radio and television ads,” said Haas. “I was out to lunch yesterday with the television salesperson. We advertise on cable television - on the history channel and the weather channel - and our ads focus on the season.”
Nearly all the cherries are sweet varieties, with about l0% sour cherries, “which might be 50% too much of those,” commented Haas. Most customers prefer sweet cherries, and the orchard offers recipes for sweet cherry pie on three-by-five cards. Cherry harvest season typically lasts from June 20 to July l5, although heavy rains can cut picking to only a week, and with exceptionally dry weather, picking can last a month.
Cherry Hill provides seven- to eight-foot stepladders, enabling pickers to reach all but the very top cherries. The trees are on Gisela 6 dwarfing rootstocks. “We initially went with Gisela 5, which produce smaller trees, but we’re moving up a little in size,” Haas commented. “In our heavy, wet soils, we like the trees a little bigger. I’d rather see a more vigorous tree and a little bigger fruit size.
“We’re planting Gisela l now, which yields a 60% to 75% size tree. And we do some mechanical topping to control tree height.”
Crows are a problem. “We bought three dozen owls last year and distributed them, and we got a dozen inexpensive radios. None of it helped much. The crows are so bad, they’re pecking holes in the apples, and at Park City (a nearby mall) crows are pecking holes in the rubber roofing.”
Cherry Hill grows 50 acres of peaches and nectarines. Loring, Glow Haven and White Lady are customer favorites. The operation has planted some Flamin’ Furies, “and what we saw looked good,” said Haas. With the trees ordered for this year, they’ll have about 300 Flamin’ Furies in the orchard.
Haas is taking a “wait and see” attitude to the plum pox virus. As the crow flies, he is only about 50 miles from infected Adams County orchards. “They’ve hired several people to work full-time on the problem,” he said. “They will have to determine just how widespread the virus is.” A large percentage of the state’s peaches are in Adams County, parts of which will be under quarantine.
Cherry Hill’s fruit operation also includes 50 acres of apples, two acres of apricots (“We produce a good crop two out of five years,” said Haas), and two acres of plums. Apple plantings include 4l varieties, most on M-9 or Budagovsky 9 rootstocks. “We have three or four different sizes that we use. Unlike with cherries, we don’t mind having smaller apple trees. More is known about managing these apple rootstocks than the new Gisela cherry rootstocks.”
For pollination, Cherry Hill gets in 200 hives of bees from Florida. “We distribute the hives as evenly as we can in the cherry orchard,” said Haas. “By apple pollination time the bees have gone two weeks in the orchard and colonies are strengthened. For apple pollination, unless we have extremely bad weather during apple bloom, we don’t move the hives. The apple trees are a half-mile from the cherry trees. The bees seem to find the apple blooms without being moved.”
If he had to grow only one apple, Haas said, six years ago he would have chosen Rome. “It’s the easiest to grow. You don’t need cross pollination, so you can plant it in a block. It peels easily because it’s uniform and consistent in shape.”
Haas’ personal favorites now are Fuji for a sweet apple and Blushing Gold on the sweet-tart side. He even has 20 trees of Arkansas Black. “We won’t plant any more,” he said. “I thought they’d be decorative to use on wreaths, because they’re dark and waxy. But the flavor is not competitive.”
Cortland has enjoyed a renaissance at Cherry Hill.
“Earlier strains didn’t get a lot of color in our climate,” said Haas, “and it was a slow seller. Then Hilltop came out with Redcort, and sales increased. The regular Cortlands we planted in l98l are gone already. Redcort came out in l982. I’ve heard that Adams County Nursery has an even redder strain,” he added. “I think we’ll see new strains of Fuji and Gala come along to improve their cosmetic appearance. I just hope new strains don’t lose any of the eating quality.”
Delicious is still the customers’ favorite at the market, “but others are coming along strong. It’s a horse race. Red Delicious isn’t head and shoulders above the rest like it was before.”
Haas does not press his own cider. Three years ago, with the E. coli scare, Richard found a source making pasteurized cider, and began offering customers a choice of pasteurized or unpasteurized, with the price 25 cents higher for pasteurized - “what we were paying extra for it,” Haas said.
“People hardly bought the pasteurized,” he continued. “So we dropped the price to a dime over unpasteurized. We were eating l5 cents on each container. That helped sales a little. Local folks apparently weren’t worried about the E. coli scare.”
Last year, Cherry Hill’s regular supplier went to pasteurization. “We were pleased,” said Haas. “There is very little taste difference between pasteurized and unpasteurized. Selling pasteurized puts a safety net under us, and gives us two to three weeks’ shelf life.”
When their cider supplier makes a delivery, he picks up a load of Cherry Hill’s cider apples. Haas asks them to try to put a little more Red Delicious in Cherry Hill’s cider. “I like to have a sweeter blend,” he said.
Overall, Cherry Hill sells about one-third of its fruit PYO, one-third wholesale, and about one-third retail in the market. The operation can store l5,000 bushels of apples, and Haas likes to be sold out of their own fruit by March l.
Cherry Hill grows about 35 acres a year in white and bicolor, sweet corn and pumpkins, planted on pieces of fields on the big farm that are low and wet, and therefore not suitable for fruit production. Because the soil is slow to warm there in the spring, they farm out three to four acres of very early sweet corn under plastic to a grower with sandier, more elevated ground. Their own sweet corn harvest starts July l0 to l5.
Pumpkins, and sometimes sweet corn, are planted in herbicided rye. They’ve gone with the rye mulch because it gives clean pumpkins without the necessity of taking up a lot of plastic at the end of the season. “We mow the rye about May 20, using a cutter bar mower,” said Haas. “Then we let the rye regrow for several weeks until it gets about six inches of growth, to give weeds a chance to germinate. About the beginning of June, then, we spray with Roundup to kill both the rye and the newly germinated weeds.
“If we sprayed the Roundup in May, we’d miss a lot of yet-to-germinate weeds. This leaves a good, clean bed without weed competition. Herbiciding about June l, we would plant no-till about June l0. The cover crop does cause the pumpkins to come up more slowly, but we’ve been doing it this way for seven to eight years, and it has worked well for us.”
Hayrides to the pumpkin field bring in customers in the fall, and a number of schools come for educational trips. “We show a Johnny Appleseed video geared to first, second and third graders,” said Haas. “The kids get to pick an apple and bring in some pumpkins for their classroom. They see the cold storage and watch apple grading. Then they get cider and pretzels and some dot-to-dot pictures to color.”
One of Haas’s big interests in the past 10 years has been in transferring ownership of Cherry Hill’s assets to the next generation. “I’ve accomplished that,” he said. “There’s a time to gather stones, and a time to cast them away.” His son Tom has never worked anywhere else. “It’s delightful to see a son interested enough and responsible enough to pass the operation on to,” he commented. “I still work long hours, but I don’t work as hard physically as I used to.”
As a young man, Haas himself worked for the operation for seven years before buying 32 acres in March of l970 from absentee owners. He has needed to be fast on his feet as the business grew. Today the operation includes 270 acres that were not a part of the farm he originally purchased. He moved to a 218-acre dairy farm in l980, which he began converting to a fruit farm when he was already in his mid-forties.
“All the trees on both farms were planted under my leadership,” he said. “We started with peach trees, because they come into bearing sooner.” In l98l, he built their present, attractive market.
“The objective of dealing directly with customers through PYO and a store has been my goal since college,” he said. “We had a project in a hort class in college to design the operation we would sometime like to own. What I visualized 40 years ago was a market, a cold storage, and a packingshed that looks a lot like what we have now.”
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