A warm summer helped produce an encouraging crop of apples downtown this year.
Joe Poor said “it was a very good year” for the 37 apple trees he helped plant around town in May 2011. The trees yielded about three dozen apples, he said, “a pretty good crop.”
The sun also helped them grow. Poor described how a small, stubby tree at the post office is “coming along pretty good.”
The apple tree at the Sheldon Museum also yielded a big crop of yellow transparents, said museum worker Blythe Carter. “We’ve had a pretty good number of apples the last three or four years.” She added that the “quality of apple was better this year.”
The apples ripened faster than in previous years and were, on average, bigger.
Rob Goldberg had a different experience at his orchard. “We had a relatively small apple crop,” he said. The trees, around 20 different varieties, yielded one and a half boxes of apples as compared to the 10 boxes he’s harvested in previous years.
Goldberg cited low pollination in the spring as the possible cause for the drop. “Winter was hard on the overwintering, bumblebee queens.”
Apple trees in town fared well because in open areas there are more flowering plants to attract pollinators, he said.
Honey bees typically seek five plants: fireweed, clover, dandelion, thistle and raspberry, Goldberg said. All but fireweed were introduced to Alaska and occur more frequently in town than on the forested peninsula where he lives, he said.
His greenhouse orchard, however, “grew tremendously” he said, with some of the trees growing to almost 15 feet in height with apples on one of the trees, a William’s Pride. The apples, he said, were large and red and sweet, particularly when compared with the William’s Pride apple trees outside the greenhouse whose produce was smaller and not as sweet.
Goldberg said that due to the heat, the apples ripened so that the white seeds turned to brown and they were much sweeter. “Heat puts sugar in the fruit.”
Goldberg’s greenhouse is “an experiment,” he said. The greenhouse allows him to maintain varieties of apple trees that wouldn’t normally ripen in Alaska’s climate. “I’m counting on the extra heat to be able to ripen these apples,” he said.
Poor said he’s hoping to get the state to replace trees damaged by construction work this summer.