Hi all,
I’m posting today regarding a new site that my mentor in the fruiting world, Jim Travis, and I have been working on behind the scenes for several years now. Jim ran an organic orchard growing apples, peaches, and Asian pears in the Mid Atlantic, Travis Organics. He retired early from a career at the Penn State fruit lab to start his organic orchard to see if it was possible to grow organic fruit in a really challenging climate and sure enough he did. He produced really high quality organic apples, peaches, and Asian pears for 7 years before re-retiring. He and I were connected 7 years ago and he’s served as my mentor for our own organic orchard (https://threefold.farm) ever since. He’s really a wealth of knowledge on all things orchard-related and I’m excited to share that with a wider audience.
A few years ago I encouraged him to share his knowledge as I didn’t see a lot of solid information out there on organic orchard production, especially at a commercial scale. He agreed and this handbook has been our passion project ever since. I wanted to help write the resource that I wish I had when I started out, and Jim was motivated to share what he learned.
The site is The Organic Orchard (https://theorganicorchard.org) and we plan to continue adding sections to it as time goes on (https://theorganicorchard.org/table-of-contents) for specific sections on specific fruits and to flesh out the existing material. As any of you who have tried to grow apples and peaches in the Northeast know, it’s quite a difficult task, so I’m hopeful that this will help folks along on that journey, whether you have a backyard orchard or are considering commercial production. This really isn’t a money-making endeavor (we’re self-funded as of now), we just want to share what we’ve learned so that other folks don’t make the same mistakes we did (or rather, that I mostly did) starting out.
We’d love to get your feedback on the site and the content and what we could do to make it better content-wise, organization-wise, or looks-wise. What do you like? What could be improved?