Welcome back to another Farm Friday with Hawkins Gebbers! This week, Hawkins shares why Central Washington is the ideal location to grow apples, cherries and pears.
Video Transcript:
“Hey it’s Hawkins, it’s September 23rd and I got you out here in a beautiful orchard above Brewster and this is a Farm Friday. You guys asked a lot of questions and one of the main ones was where do we grow? Where are we actually at? Let’s start, I’ll draw you a map. This is the state of Washington, the peninsula comes back up. The State of Washington’s kind of a big square. The Cascade Mountain Range runs here and it creates a beautiful rain shadow for the Columbia River to run straight through and we farm on all these fertile slopes on either side of the Columbia from the border of Oregon all the way up to the border of Canada. We actually have two types of soil and they’re both very fertile. One is basically comprised of broken down volcanic lava the other one is granite, but man they both really grow apples and cherries and provide the tree everything it needs. We live in a desert so everything out here that’s green depends on that fresh water down there and right now we’re about 650 feet above that water and we have intricate systems to pump and maintain that water pressure all the way up here. We’re really blessed to be on these gentle slopes and have endless sustainable fresh water out of the mighty Colombia and its tributaries.”
