Stoney Ridge Orchard
StoneyRidge Orchard is located in Erin, New York. It is a well-established family owned orchard. The main products are apples. Click here for more pictures of the orchard and your apple trees.
StoneyRidge Orchard strives to produce only the highest quality apples and apple cider. The secret to producing the best tasting apples and cider is to spend time on the little things from using a variety of pruning styles to harvesting by hand.
Apple Tree Varieties For Rent
Seven deliciously distinct apple tree varieties are available for you to rent. Read below for specific information on each variety available. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have about your variety of apple tree.
What you will receive when you rent a tree:
- Gift box filled with 48 beautiful apples from your own tree
- One gallon of apple cider made from the apples grown on your own tree
- Personalized Rental Certificate
- Four personalized gift bags
- Quarterly E-Newsletter
These are the apple tree varieties we offer for rent:
- Empire Apple Trees
- Macoun Apple Trees
- McIntosch Apple Trees
- Cortland Apple Trees
- HoneyCrisp Apple Trees
- Gala Apple Trees
- Ginger Gold Apple Trees
Visit http://www.rentanappletree.com to rent your tree today!
Health Benefits of Eating Fruit
Fruit is one of the most healthy and natural foods in existence. There are thousands of different types of fruit available to eat, all of which provide us with strong health benefits. Fruit contains a large number of naturally occurring vitamins, minerals and plant phytochemicals that help benefit health. It has also been shown that eating the whole fruit or juice is best to gain the benefits rather than taking supplements to provide each nutrient separately.
It has been recommended that we should be eating at least 5 pieces of fruit every day in order to gain the full health benefits of eating fruit.
Potential health benefits of eating fruit
- potential for weight control
- more energy for exercising
- reduced risk of cardiovascular diseases
- reduced risk of developing cancers
- lower blood pressure
- potential to lower cholesterol
- reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes
- potential to slow down age process
Fruit can also benefit many people wanting to lose weight. Energy consumption is thought to be mainly influenced by the palatability, fiber content, density of energy and the variety of foods. Eating fruit has the benefit of affecting some these factors. Fruit is also low in sodium so they help reduce the chance of gaining water weight. Providing you are eating about one-third of the diet as fruits & vegetables, you should notice rapid weight loss because the ample fruit consumption helps fill the stomach faster encouraging less high calorie foods to be consumed. The total calorie consumption will automatically reduce even if we are eating plenty of fruit and vegetables. There is such a variety of fruits available that many can be freely eaten without consuming too many calories thereby controlling weight more effectively.
Gaining the benefits by eating more fruit
It can be quite easy to slip 5 pieces of fruit into the diet. Here are some tips:
- Add dried fruit to breakfast cereal.
- Prepare fruit salads to last few days.
- Eat an apple before leaving for work.
- Eat small pieces of fruits 30 minutes before/ after light workout.
- Drink more fruit juices.
- Find recipes that contain fruit.
- Always have a bowl of fruit in or near TV.
Fruit tip:
Eating a piece of fruit before each meal can help reduce total energy intake!
Cinnamon Pear Frozen Yoghurt
Review:
This is so delicious and refreshing! Today I made it again and removed half of the mixture out of the ice-cream maker about half-way through the ice-cream making process. I put it in pop-cycle molds to make some frozen yogurt pop-cycles.
- 1 (15 ounce) can pear halves
- 2 cups vanilla yogurt
- 1/3 cup white sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
Directions:
- Drain pears, reserving 1/2 cup of juice. Puree pears in food processor or blender.
- Combine pears, reserved juice, yogurt, sugar, cinnamon and allspice in canister of ice cream maker. Freeze according to manufacturers’ directions.
Nutritional Information:
Amount Per Serving Calories: 111 | Total Fat: 0.8g | Cholesterol: 3mg
Rent an Apple Tree
Are you searching for the perfect gift for a great gift for the upcoming holidays, or perhaps a birthday or anniversary? Or, maybe you have always wanted your own apple tree, but do not want to spend all that time and effort to care for it yourself? Or, maybe you love locally grown apples from New York State but live too far away?
Why not rent your own apple tree from a family orchard in upstate New York?
This way, you get all the benefits of owning your own tree without all the work. Plus, the apples and a gallon of cider are shipped right to your door!
We take care of the tricky jobs of planting, trimming, and harvesting the apples for you. You get to enjoy the fruits of our labor!
Apple trees can be rented for you personally, for a loved one, or to remember a special occasion or to honor an upcoming event!
A gift box of apples and a gallon of cider from your tree will be sent to the appropriate recipient. The gift box of apples and cider are personalized because they are harvested and made from your own tree. We also issue a beautiful personalized rental certificate that is mailed along in the gift box. Plus, we include four personalized gift bags for your use.
Growing Apples
Part of the pleasure of growing apple trees on your own property derives from biting into freshly-plucked fruit. So getting a bumper crop from your orchard in fall, eating a few of the fresh fruits and storing the rest away — well, this approach somewhat defeats the purpose of growing apple trees. There’s a better approach: staggering your crop.
By “staggering” your crop, I mean growing apple trees that are early-season bloomers, mid-season bloomers and late-season bloomers. By taking this approach to growing apple trees, it’s less likely you’ll be forced into storing away some of your produce. Instead of having an excess of fresh fruit all at once, your harvesting will be spread out over three periods, with a more manageable amount to consume fresh at each harvest. Growing apple trees using the staggered approach also aids your landscape design efforts: just as the blossoms of one group fade, another will take up the torch. The following are examples of varieties, based on blooming season:
- Growing Apple Trees That Bloom Early:
- “Beacon”
- “Ginger Gold”
- “Paulared”
- “State Fair”
- Growing Apple Trees That Bloom Mid-Season:
- “Cortland”
- “Gala”
Apple Orchard takes a bite at Organic
PLEASANT MOUNT – An apple orchard on a Wayne County farm predating the Civil War may find new life as an organic operation.
“You take a chance with any agriculture,” said Dolores O’Neill, who operates a commercial orchard about 13 miles north of Waymart. “We are solely dependent on Mother Nature.”
In 2008, Mrs. O’Neill hired Roger Hill, a market gardener and orchard keeper from Wayne County, to maintain her apple grove and convert it to sustainable practices.
“He’s willing to do the work, and it’s more than I can handle now,” said Mrs. O’Neill, 69, who worked at the Penn State Cooperative Extension office in Honesdale before retirement. “We haven’t used any chemical materials here since 2007.”
She also sees the growing market potential of organic produce.
“There’s a big demand for organic,” Mrs. O’Neill said as Mr. Hill provided tips on sustainable orchard practices to about 30 people who toured the grove in a program coordinated by the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture.
Sales of organic products will blossom to $36.6 billion in 2015, from $21 billion in 2010, according to MarketsandMarkets, a research and consulting company based in Dallas, Texas. In 2008, Pennsylvania organic farmers had sales of $212.7 million, according to the most-recent U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
“The organic market is growing much faster than the aggregate all-food category,” said Stewart Ramsey, an agricultural economist at IHS Global Insight, a Boston-area consulting and market forecasting firm.
The orchard sprouted from a farm that has been in the family of Mrs. O’Neill’s late husband, Jim, since 1842. She and her husband planted the four-acre grove in 1982 and began selling apples in 1989. In a good year, the orchard’s 320 trees produce about 400 bushels of nine apple varieties, including Cortland, Empire, Macintosh, Northern Spy and Honey Crisp. Most of the apples are sold from the farm, Mrs. O’Neill said.
Mr. Hill said he has put about 400 hours this year into the orchard, pruning and cultivating the trees and correcting the soil biology. He is trying to eliminate pests and diseases with natural methods while avoiding chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
“It’s a slow process,” said Mr. Hill, who said the farm eventually may seek organic certification.
Despite its growing popularity, organic products only accounted for about 3 percent of total food sales in the United States in 2008, according to most recent USDA data.
Organic fruits and vegetables bring a higher price than conventionally grown produce and the number of certified organic farms in the state totaled 420 in 2008, a 60 percent jump from 2000, according to USDA.
“Organic is still largely in it’s infancy,” Mr. Ramsey said. “When you start from almost nothing, to get to relatively large percentage growth is relatively doable.”
Mrs. O’Neill lost her 2010 apple crop to a June frost and said she has not calculated the costs of converting from traditional to organic practices.
“You don’t do it to become rich,” Mrs. O’Neill said. “We will never break even.”
Apple orchards, though, usually are high-volume fruit producers, creating a sense of optimism at the orchard this spring.
“Apple trees are the human beings of the plant world,” Mr. Hill said. “They produce 10 times more than they need.”
