It’s time for some Farm Education! ☀️🍐✏️
This week, 4th generation apple and pear grower Kaitlyn Thornton teaches us about pressure testing pears before harvest! 🍐
Pressure testing allows our growers to harvest pears when they are perfectly sweet & ripe, leaving you with the best piece of fruit possible.
Video Transcript:
“Hello everyone! It is almost starkrimson harvest time and as we approach harvest we start to do pressure testing. So we actually go through take samples all throughout the orchard and then we test the pressure of each of those pears and then we get an average. And that helps us estimate when we want to pick those pears! So the goal is to have pears that are not too soft that they get bruised up in the bin and the transportation side but you also don’t want pears that are too hard that they are not big enough and they don’t ripen right. So the pressure is actually an indicator of how much sugar is in the pear. So the firmer the fruit is the more starch it actually has in that piece of fruit and that starch will break down into sugar over time. And so what we’re looking for is about 13 or 13.5 pounds pressure. This is going to be optimal for harvesting and we’re getting pretty darn close!”
