Local orchard has good crop this year

By MaryHelen Swanson
Ah, October. The month when the morning mist turns the countryside into an oriental painting, diamonds glitter on the grass in the frosty moments after dawn and bright, red apples tantalize the palate.
The mist and the frost have come and now the apples, sweet and tempting, are waiting for you at an orchard near Rush Point.
Jim and Lois Ellsworth and their son Ken have a bountiful crop this year.
Trees filled with Honeycrisp, Haralson, Liberty, Macoun, Cortland and Freedom apples dot the countryside behind the Ellsworth home.
Why are they so excited about this yearís crop? In 2000, a frost wiped out almost all of their apples and last year the June 18 hail storm put an end to that crop.
But with Mother Nature in a more amiable mood this year, the apple blossoms set nicely and the apples grew well.
A unique name
The Ellsworths call their orchard Monadnock, an Abnacki Native American word meaning ìmountain that stands alone.î
Jim Ellsworth happened upon the name in a travel brochure at a rest stop in New Hampshire. The Ellsworths think it suits their orchard fine, it is on a rise and it stands alone as one of few orchards in the Rush City and surrounding areas.
How it got started
One day while working at Unisys, Jim looked around and saw that there were no old engineers at the place. And he started thinking about what else he might do in life. He decided that people will always need to eat.
His parents already owned the rural Rush City farm and so he asked them if he could start an orchard. It was somewhere in the mid-70s when the apple tree planting began.
Naturally, there was a bit of trial and error for a while. The deer ate the first 16 trees planted in the front yard. And Jim had to learn about spraying and grafting and controlling pests.
But the knowledge and skill of raising apples grew along with the young trees over the years. And in 1988 they were successful enough to start selling apples to the public.
Today, the Ellsworths have some 5,000 to 6,000 trees, secured behind tall fences to keep out the deer.
Tending an orchard
Maintenance of the orchard starts in March with intense pruning, in June branches are trained to wires, throughout the summer the trees are sprayed and the orchard floor is kept mowed. The orchard is also irrigated.
Spraying has become a more monitored procedure, noted Ken Ellsworth. Because of the monitoring - watching weather and studying insects - they are spraying about half as much as they used to.
An integrated pest control procedure consists of setting traps to determine what insects are present and need to be eliminated.
The monitoring, Ken explained, helps determine why we spray and when we do it. Spraying is not done just for the sake of spraying. Itís good for the environment and more economical, too, Jim said.
The Ellsworths have also done a lot of their own grafting, in fact, Jim figures theyíve done more than 75 percent of their trees. Grafting is done in February and the trees are set in cold storage until May. In about two years they are ready to go into the field.
Ready for customers
With their bumper crop of apples this year, the Ellsworths wanted the public to know they are open and ready for business. Lois has decorated their sales room and the apples are waiting in cold storage for weekend customers. They are open Friday, noon to 5 p.m., Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. all through the month of October.
Monadnock Orchard is located about half way between Rush City and Grandy on Rush Point Drive (CR 7).

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