Turlock Fruit

Apricot harvest has finally finished so our full attention here at Turlock Fruit is fixed on the melon harvest.  The cool weather has set us back about a week from our projected harvest dates, but we will hopefully be back to a normal harvest soon.  Our first Orange Flesh are being harvested right now and it will be followed next week by most of the other varieties of mixed melons. 

On the honeydew front we are waiting for our first field to start up in the Firebaugh district.  When we are trying to decide when to begin harvest on a field we look at a number of factors.  The final decision is made using a tool called a refractometer.  We use this tool to tell us the sugar content of a representative sample of melons, ensuring that we will be able to harvest sweet melons to sell to the consumers.  But even before refractometers were invented, mother nature told us when a field was getting ready for harvest, even without looking at the fruit.  Melon vines will go through what is called senescence before they are ready to harvest.  The vine will stop blooming, leaves begin to turn yellow or slightly dry up, and there is very little vegetative growth in the vine.  In this picture you can see the yellow streaks beginning in our next field of honeydews to be harvested.  At this stage the vine is using it’s energy to finish the fruit sizing and ripening so that we can pick and enjoy the melons!

Our company has finished harvesting melons in the Imperial Valley and your humble blogger is now back home to fully focus on the Firebaugh melons.  The Imperial Valley is located in California just north of the border with Mexico and is the earliest melon growing region in the country.  We are able to begin harvesting quality cantaloupes from the first week of May until the middle of June.  This year was a challenge due to the cool spring weather, but all in all we had consistent quality throughout the harvest period.  We use a different label when we harvest down there, so if you ever see the Oak Flat label, that is a Turlock Fruit melon.

The next item to be harvested is apricots which are located at our northern ranch in Patterson, Ca.  Patterson used to be the home base for all of our commodities, but now we only have one orchard of apricots left there.  We grow two varieties of apricots.  One variety is dried and the other is used for jam as well as canned apricots.  Apricots are all harvested by hand and placed into bins.  Keep watching our twitter account for pictures of the Apricot harvest.

In Firebaugh, a cool spring has set us back some, but recent heat has really started to move things along.  These Hami melons look like they will be ready in a month. 

And our first honeydews in our Huron district are set for the first week of July.

Although melon harvest is the busiest time for us at Turlock Fruit.  May is also one of the most intense times of the year.  Right now we are diligently watching our cherries as they turn from what we call straw color to red, when they will be ready to harvest.  Normal harvest for cherries falls around the 5th to 10^th of May.  Cherry harvest is one of the most intense fruit harvests because they are so perishable.    We are also still in the heat of transplanting and planting seed for our melons.  As I mentioned in the last post, we transplant our honeydews and not our cantaloupe melons.  A few years ago we put in a trial plot where we transplanted cantaloupes to see how they would respond.  But in comparison to our direct seeded control plot, we found the transplants to have smaller size and reduced yield. As a result, for our main season time slot, we choose to plant seed for our cantaloupe instead of having them started in a greenhouse.  We are also in the process of mechanically cultivating our first plantings of both melons and tomatoes.  Cultivation has various positive effects for the plants.  It allows us to take out various weeds without using expensive herbicides.  It also aerates the soil also which promotes plant growth.  This time of year we are also wrapping up our asparagus harvest, which has been going on since March. As the temperatures rise, asparagus heads open up before we are able to harvest them, which makes them unmarketable.  Stay tuned for more updates on what is happening around the ranch.

Welcome to the Turlock Fruit blog!!  This blog gives us the opportunity to show our customers how we produce our melons and other commodities, as well as give others an insight into life in a westside produce operation.  This picture is from the first row of honeydews we transplanted yesterday near Huron, California.  Mechanical transplanting of melons is a fairly new practice here in the San Joaquin Valley.  Almost all tomatoes have been transplanted for years in our area but we have only been transplanting our honeydews for three years.  A crew of around ten people can transplant nearly 15 acres in day.  Transplanting has many significant advantages over direct seeding.



With the ever increasing cost of seed, transplanting virtually guarantees what we call a “stand”.  A “stand” means enough established plants in the field for a productive harvest.  When we direct seed, we have to plant nearly double the amount of seed than plants we need because they generally do not all come up, making it both expensive and risky.  Transplanting also allows us to avoid the seedling stage out in the field where plants are very vulnerable to insects and plant diseases.  This particular plant will grow produce honeydews to be harvested around the fourth of July.  Keep checking in for more as the growing season progresses.