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About Noto Fruit Farm
Noto Fruit Farm, began in 1978 with one major objective that was, and still is, to provide our customers with the highest quality fruit at the lowest possible price. We take pride in growing the best fruit in our area.
Located approximately one mile South of Lake Ontario in Williamson, we offer a wide variety of apples, peaches, pears, cherries, nectarines, blueberries, plums, raspberries and blackberries. All of our fruit is tree / bush ripened and individually hand-picked.
Our Apples are hand picked from the tree and fresh water washed, polished and sorted for the best quality.
We wholesale to local grocery stores and Farm Markets. Additionally, we offer direct sales to customers at Farmers’ Market and at our Farm especially during our U-Pick Cherry, Blueberry and Raspberry season. We begin our season in early July with our sweet and sour cherries and end picking our Granny Smith Apples in November.
We keep apples in CA (Controlled Atmosphere) storage which enables us to provide many varieties throughout the winter and into early spring. With the aide of new storage techniques, we will be able to fulfill our goal to have our “Pride of NY Apples” available throughout most of the year.
Growing quality fruit
These smaller trees are easier to maintain and harvesting is also more efficient. There are several key tasks required to keep the trees in optimum condition for growing quality fruit. These annual tasks include:
- Pruning - This allows for good sun exposure resulting in good fruit color as well as size.
- Thinning - Removing the smaller size fruitlets in their early growth stage allows the remaining fruit to increase in size.
- Soil & Leaf Analysis - Samples collected annually are sent to Cornell University for analysis. Cornell recommends the fertilizer, which is custom blended for each fruit variety and applied at the recommended rate.
- Integrated pest management (ipm) - we also closely follow Cornell's integrated pest management (ipm) procedures which protect beneficial insects and reduce chemical spray requirements.
- Monitoring - We employ a fruit specialist consultant who closely monitors our orchards. The next step is to get this quality fruit off the trees and to our customers.
- Select Picking - on the first picking, we select pick only tree ripened fruit (largest most colorful), leaving the remaining fruit to mature for the second or third picking. This procedure promotes a higher yield of quality select fruit.
- Washing & Polishing - our fruit is quality control inspected prior to the washing and polishing procedure and again prior to packing. We do not wax our apples. Apples that are not shipped during harvest are sent to either regular cold storage (short term) or controlled atmosphere long term storage. Identical quality control, washing and polishing procedures are followed when apples are taken from storage.
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