I know of two fruit CSAs in the Portland area, and they do mostly apples. One is Queener Farm and the other is the Home Orchard Education Center. I was amazed to watch a couple ladies sorting apples at HOEC. The really buggy ones were tossed into a wheelbarrow and the others were packed in boxes very quickly. There was no attempt to really look at the fruit for insect entry holes, and the manager said their market didn’t care because they were so excited to get to try so many different fruits. I don’t know, but maybe Temperate Orchard might be doing a CSA in Mollala, too?
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We have 2 acres that are planted with an assortment of fruits and now we’re expanding into high-density apple and asian pear. This summer, excellent growing year, we sold openly on marketplace (Facebook) and even had a U-pick one Saturday. $1/lb was a hit and we could have easily sold for $1.50. There is a market in my area and we’re only 15 min from the nearest town (We had people drive an hour away.
My suggestions are 1) Plan for water and an automated system BEFORE anything else. 2) Plan your rows for equipment [spraying, carts, a tractor, people walking casually, etc…] 3) Research HEAVILY the varieties that will grow well in your area and aren’t a DIVA variety. Sure, you can plant ENYTHING, but some of those trees aren’t going to be easy to grow without weekly care. 4) It’s a heavy investment and there are no guarantees. We’ve had good years and MANY bad ones. The more you have, the harder it is to take care of, however, some trees will produce while others won’t and it will balance out somewhat. …
Best wishes --David
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[quote=“If you’re reading this I wonder why.”
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Welcome to the community David! I’ve suggested to many customers of mine that the area that you live in would be a great place for them to relocate to when they leave where we all are. I wish that I could pull up tent stakes and relocate as well.
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It’s tough for fruit at times, but my gosh it’s beautiful here! I want this to be the last move.
And thanks for the welcome
–David
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We have 7 acres of peaches. About a half acre of apples with another 1/2 acre just starting to come into production. A half acre of thornless blackberries (ordered another 1300 blackberry plants for this spring). Half acre of tart cherries. Acre of tomatoes. Acre of pumpkins.
Everything but the tomatoes and peaches are Upick. We would do Upick tomatoes except very few people want to pick them. Customers want to pick peaches, but they knock off so much fruit, it hasn’t been worth it.
Plus they don’t know how to pick peaches and end up picking stuff shaded, or too early, or pick the wrong trees, etc. The peaches don’t taste good and they think it’s the grower’s fault. In reality they didn’t pick the right ones.
99% of our customers are very respectful. I’ve had a few customers who steal from me. Almost no one leaves trash laying around.
I don’t have trash cans because I don’t want someone deciding to clean their car out and fill up trash cans. Even with no trash cans, people rarely leave any trash.
I’ve had a few people show up high. One of them was probably high on meth and had a plan to rob me (long story). Most everyone who shows up high or drunk is still pretty friendly. Almost all my customers I consider friends. They send me cards for Christmas, bring me gifts (like homemade jam or other food). My wife and I went to a celebration of life the family invited me to, after one customers died this summer. Customers honk and wave if they drive by my farm stand.
So that’s mostly my experience with people. We used to do lots of farmer’s markets. We don’t do any farm markets anymore. I sell everything at the farm gate. The most enjoyable part of my job is interacting with people.
I would echo jcf. Grocery stores expect to buy stuff too cheap. Likewise with restaurants.
Honestly, I don’t get super excited about school groups. They generally buy very little fruit, and all the kids tend to waste and eat a lot of fruit, which doesn’t get paid for. It might be different if we charged an admission fee, but we don’t.
A couple of our biggest concerns. One is being sued. Some people view lawsuits as a sort of lottery windfall. We don’t have liability insurance. MO and KS passed legislation protecting agritourism sites from liability if a customer gets hurt on your farm (even if another customer does something to injure them.) We have signs posted and our site is a registered agritourism site.
Still it doesn’t stop a lawyer from filing a nuisance lawsuit to hope to settle for some money. I’ve not heard it happening to any other specialty crop growers in my area, but it could happen.
The other thing which concerns me is that I may killed or severely injured by someone trying armed robbery. Many years ago a lady selling peaches was stabbed by someone who took her money. Because of this, I carry a loaded 9mm. It’s concealed, so most customers don’t even know I carry.
We do a large percentage of our business as credit cards, but we are sort of out in the sticks, so sometimes the credit card thingy doesn’t work. So we do some cash business.
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We don’t let anyone u pick peaches either. We pick everything tree ripe and do a pass over every variety every 2 days, u pickers would just strip everything that’s a week or more away.
I highly suggest you do u pick on the tomatoes if you can. We had several Saturdays of over 1000 pounds u picked off a half acre this year. Our season was pretty long this year, but our falls are rather cold and wet and we still had a lot of people desperate to pick in late October when most of the fruit was not so great. Looking at the numbers, we had just over 1000 u pick tomato customers over about 2 months.
We do all indeterminate strung on a trellis style we used for beans originally that just has cotton string running up and down. We don’t do any pruning so we leave about 4 strings per foot to train onto and train every other week until the end of July, then just let it go, so the labor commitment is not high. We usually do all the picking for the first 3 weeks or so since there isn’t enough to satisfy demand then once the plants have more than we can pick we start u pick.
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We encourage people to pick tomatoes, but most people just aren’t that interested. Pretty much anyone who wants to grow tomatoes here, grows tomatoes themselves. Most of the people who buy tomatoes, either can’t physically do the gardening, or aren’t interested. So they don’t want to pick either.
I have a few customers who want to pick their tomatoes. We are more than happy to let them.
It just doesn’t take much space at all to grow a good amount of tomatoes. Our area is still rural enough that lots of folks grow their own tomatoes, then give bunches away to their friends and family.
We sell most of the tomatoes we grow, but we can’t always sell all of them.
It seems like when kids go back to school a lot of people sort of view summer as over. They will come out for peaches, but not for tomatoes after the kids go back to school.
Those are some pretty good numbers you are getting off a half acre. 1000 lbs. in one day is pretty good off a half acre.
We don’t work our tomatoes that hard. We plant them in cages, then just let them go mostly. We don’t prune them. I’d like to prune them, but we never seem to have enough time.
We mulch them with a backhoe which has a mechanical thumb. It takes about 25 big round bales of hay to mulch them. We have to spray them to control stink bug and early blight. We also have to do some hand weeding throughout the season. I try to keep that to a minimum, but we still have to do some of that. SWD doesn’t seem to bother our tomatoes too bad.
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My orchard is small and intended to be as much for my family, friends, and neighbors as for sales. Even so, given the maddening rezoning process we completed over the past year and the way several neighbors opposed us, I’m trying to go through all the right steps.
Got this in the mail yesterday and I’m really celebrating that I’ve gotten this far in my endeavor.
I can see my niche will be harvesting old Southern varieties, grafting classes, and sales of grafted trees. Throw in education and some gratis offering of trees for the community food preservation initiative. Too many big orchards and farms around here to ever compete for volume.
Not self sustaining financially but what I lack in sales, I will gain ten fold in self gratification and joy in what I am doing.
Enough for me.
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That sounds a lot like my plan. I want to teach what I love and otherwise have peace and quiet most of the time.
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That makes sense then. We’re just outside of a small city, so most of our customers don’t have much land.
I’ve pruned before, but it’s just not worth the labor. If you get enough off the land you have to satisfy demand there’s not much reason to try to maximize yield. We sold about 20,000 pounds last year and there was probably another 10,000 that didn’t get picked. So why invest the labor to produce yield that won’t get sold, plus we would need more plants and transplants are getting more and more spendy.
SWD will definitely eat rotting or damaged tomatoes and probably lay eggs in them as well, but they won’t touch intact ones. They don’t touch our peaches either, but they decimated our cherries for a few years until we figured out how to handle them. Our summers are bone dry, so we don’t really have any fungal issues in the tomatoes thankfully.
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Enjoying this thread. Learning new places to sell and the personal experiences with each is valuable information.
With my orchard I went 50% nut crops. In my opinion they are slightly easier. Not as much demand, but can be held to sell long after the apples, pears, ect. have all been sold. Extending the sales season.
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Hey Robert:)
I initially wanted to join the blueberry growing zeal, but with the glut, downward price, and perishable nature, thought it best to diversify. If you have tons of nuts, dry them and relax. There’s time. 
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Grafting parties with your cold storage pears & products as treats.
I’m betting you’ll have return customers. Maybe sell more pears and plants. Need to imagine such an event to get a feel for the flow of activities and expectations time wise.
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As a guy who wants to spend his hard earned money on fancy fruit instead of earning money from fruit, let me offer my opinion: Your skills are more valuable than the literal fruit of your labor.
I live in the suburbs of Cleveland, OH and struggling to keep a one acre orchard productive because of a lack of knowledge/experience/time. I would gladly pay 5 figures per season for ‘orchard management’ to someone who knows what they’re doing. I’m talking higher skill plant care - planting/grafting/soil and disease care/general troubleshooting, not the grunt work of mowing etc that can be done by a landscaping crew.
No capital costs, no paperwork, no quotas, no marketing/sales. Just optimize for taste/health as if you’re growing for your own family.
I don’t think it would be hard to find a handful of similar customers in the outskirts of any major city where there is a good balance of wealth/population density and available land.
I posted a job ad here a few year ago, and got crickets… There is demand for this skill if anyone is looking to cash in from their hobby.
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I hope to one day make cash out of my pecan nuts at least. In the meantime I have made a Permaculture landscaping practice turn into a substantial part of my income, especially since I have a shop and live in a summer beach town with an extremely short season.
I am slowly creating a following of people who come to my talks once or twice a year, which I organize with a great meal by a very good chef, and where I also sell plants from my nursery which is not commercial. The nursery basically supplies my own place and produces plants for my landscaping projects, but it´s very informal.
So the trick is multiple income streams as they teach us in Permaculture, right?
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I retired from an agr. research facility over 10 years ago only to plant 5 acres of grapes. That provided some income but as I get older I’ve scaled back to some low spray varieties. I planted some quince (a dozen trees) and they have provided some income selling wholesale. Four years ago I began grafting some heritage apples, pears, and some more quince- nice winter/learning project. Snow collapsed my hoop house this past Dec (we had over 4’ in just a few days here in NE Ohio) but if damage to my young trees isn’t too bad I’ll have about 500 trees to plant out or sell for some income. I also don’t want to deal with the farmers markets and PYO liability makes that undesirable. Hoping to sell some fruit at a roadside stand at a neighboring winery and wholesale to local wine/cider/perry producers. I have a buddy who has a couple of stills so I have an outlet for surplus and blemished fruit. Not a lot of income at this point (some from the older vineyard production). My losses resulting from expenses and depreciation have helped with my tax liability… Local seasonal labor is the biggest hurdle and I don’t see that getting better. That’s what I’ve been doing. Best of luck with your project!
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Have a couple myself, but want to add more. How bad has the FB been on yours? Have you found much demand for them? There is a pretty good foreign population here, so guessing I could at least sell a few. @grapeguy
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Welcome @grapeguy! You might have set an unofficial record for longest forum membership before your first post! 
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This is what I hope to do someday: consult. PM me if you’d like to chat. I’ve been looking for practice, but the last family I tried to help repeatedly did the literal opposite of my advice.
Laura
I was at a community event and enjoyed talking to folks who came up and told me how their grafted trees were doing.
I sold grafted trees at that event and signed up about 30 people who were interested in a new event. Those are new folks and I still have original grafting folks to notify.
While I’m enjoying the experience, I’m trying to be smart. I incorporated as an LLC, have the participants sign an accept risk form, and talk a lot about safety. By offering alternatives to grafting knives like grafting tools and me grafting for them, I’m getting some participants that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to reach.
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