Photo: Chaiel Schaffel (WBZ NewsRadio)
STOW, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — Standing in what could best be described as an idyllic New England wonderland, it takes a close inspection to see anything strange about the apples at Honey Pot Hill Orchards in Stow.
But strange they are.
Some of the fruits are mottled, pitted and scarred with divots and bumps.
“It’s technically russet, which is a form of cell damage. It’s just skin deep,” said Chelcie Martin, who runs the 4th generation apple orchard with her father Andrew. “There’s nothing actually wrong with this apple, it just looks funky as heck,” she continued, holding up a Honeycrisp.
Martin said workers on the farm have been affectionately comparing the scarring to the human rear end, but she thinks it also looks like a pumpkin’s grooves.
As with most things in agriculture, the weather is what gave some of these apples their rugged character. A late freeze in mid-May of this year overtook the entire area, maiming fruit all over the state and the entire New England region.
“We’ve never had a freeze that late. Ever. We have 85-year-old farmers say they’ve never seen anything like this before,” she said.
The worst of the damage is in low-lying areas, where cold air sinks. Ironically, this is something of a recurring problem for Honey Pot Hill: the 70-acre orchard is built on rolling hills, so they have methods to keep the cold air moving like giant wind machines.
About 15 percent of the orchard’s apples were damaged, but Martin said that’s comparatively minor. Farther north in New Hampshire and Vermont, some farms lost almost all of their lucrative apple crop.
She credited the size of the orchard with being a great help: though some of the trees were in valleys, others higher up were relatively unscathed. Other farms in the Massachusetts apple belt (loosely around I-495 west of Boston) told WBZ NewsRadio they lost as little as five percent of their apples.
Martin has been on a social media mission this summer to let customers and pickers know that the damage doesn’t indicate anything about the health or tastiness of the apple.
“This isn’t insect damage, you’re not going to find a worm in this apple. This is perfectly good to eat, please don’t throw it on the ground,” Martin said. “It’s important, I think, for people to understand why their food doesn’t look perfect,” she continued.
For her, this year is a microcosm of everything challenging about farming in New England, where growers’ livelihoods are subjected to the temperamental and often devastating whims of nature.
“We were up for 36 hours on the night of the freeze. Setting fires, making sure our wind machines were working, having emotional meltdowns…for farms like us to survive, it relies on the public to understand how difficult it is. Shopping local is becoming more important as properties like this become condos,” she said.
Farmers in the state’s burgeoning, multi-million dollar agritourism industry are leaning hard on apples after a difficult summer for other crops. Local peaches were completely wiped out by an early deep freeze, and other crops in Central Mass. were taken out by flooding in July. The season has been bad enough for the state and the United Way of Central Massachusetts to start a fundraising campaign to support the growers. $3 million has been raised so far, but there were at least $15 million in damages.
Despite it all, Chelcie Martin says she’s never thought about giving up farming. There’s still plenty of apples here to go around. And picking season is just getting started.
WBZ’s Chaiel Schaffel (@CSchaffelWBZ) reports.
Follow WBZ NewsRadio: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | iHeartmedia App | TikTok