HANCOCK COUNTY — Helen Roney was certain it couldn’t happen two years in a row.
“There’s no way,” she remembers thinking. “And I was wrong.”
Apple blossoms are usually bright and flowering this time of year, but most of the ones at Tuttle Orchards are dark and shriveled.
A temperature of 26 degrees in late April will do that.
For the second consecutive spring, a late freeze has devastated the thousands of trees lining the orchards northwest of Greenfield. While there will be a lot fewer apples to pick there this fall, the business still plans to have plenty available for customers after buying them from elsewhere. Those behind the multi-generational family enterprise are confident they’ll once again overcome the setback with the help of how diversified their business has become.
The National Weather Service recorded a low temperature of 26 degrees for the Indianapolis area on April 20, setting a record for that date. The next day saw 2 inches of snow, also a record.
Tuttle Orchards has 18,000 apple trees — 6,000 of which were recently planted — on about 45 acres.
Mike Roney is the third generation of his family to run the business, a responsibility he shares with his wife, Helen Roney, and their children.
The couple said last month’s severe temperature drop occurred after many of the apple trees’ flowers were pollinated.
“The pollen has to get down inside the flower and that becomes the core of the apple, and the apple grows around it,” Helen Roney said. “So if that blossom dies, then it kills the flower.”
They stand little chance against below-freezing temperatures.
“The core inside where the seeds are developing — if it freezes too cold it’ll kill that, and then that will fall off,” Mike Roney said.
While the fruits of their labor will be diminished, they’re not bitter about it.
“It’s a bummer,” Helen Roney said. “But it’s life.”
This year’s crop-crushing late freeze wasn’t only the second in as many years for Tuttle Orchards, but the third since 2012.
Mike Roney said while it’s not uncommon for lingering cold during springtime to negatively impact apple orchards, situations as devastating as 2021, 2020 and 2012 are rare.
“Usually you lose part of a crop because of cold, but usually the top of the tree may be fine because the cold air goes clear to the bottom; all kinds of things that can happen,” he said. “But this last freeze I don’t ever remember, well, that much snow this late, for one.”
Some flowers didn’t pollinate until after the cold was finally through, however.
“There are some late blooms,” Mike Roney said. “There’s a good chance that we’ll have maybe some apples, so it’s not a total loss. We will see. I don’t like to be totally pessimistic. Hopefully some of these late blooms will develop.”
It’s too early to tell how many will stick, Helen Roney said, adding the business will buy apples to resell and use in their products, like their popular hand-dipped caramel apples.
“Last year we could purchase apples from the northern part of the state and Michigan on a weekly basis,” Mike Roney said. “We got real good friends up there. They’re wholesalers, so they can kind of coordinate. Hopefully that works this year to some degree.”
Despite last year’s late freeze, some late blooms allowed for visitors to head out and grab apples off trees through Tuttle Orchards’ U-pick service.
“People were still finding apples out there,” Helen Roney said. “And it’s better to do U-pick because they don’t mind, where if I hire a picker, they don’t want to pick two apples per apple tree. But a U-pick person, they don’t care. You’re out there for the experience.”
The couple said they’re well equipped to handle what the apple crop loss will do to their overall business.
“We’re diversified,” Helen Roney said. “We have the cafe, we have the greenhouse, we have insurance.”
The cafe serves meals Monday through Saturday year round, and the greenhouse is stocked with flowers and plants. A store on the grounds offers produce, apple cider and other groceries. Tuttle Orchards also grows pumpkins, a variety of vegetables and opens a Sunflower Trail in the summer.
“We’re not just an apple orchard,” Helen Roney said. “We do a lot of other stuff.”
While growing apples is likely the first thing people associate with Tuttle Orchards, the soil there also sprouts produce like tomatoes, celery, zucchini, squashes, cabbage, spinach, onions, carrots, snow peas, green beans, potatoes, melons and peppers.
Many of the vegetables are grown in greenhouses, where environments can be controlled.
The business uses many of those goods to provide a service through which members can sign up to get a supply of produce on a weekly or monthly basis.
“It takes a huge amount of produce to … have enough stuff variety-wise, that people can take home and utilize it for a week,” Mike Roney said.
The service requires a lot of planning to ensure supply meets demand.
“My big job in the spring is to grow a lot of the vegetable stuff from seed,” he added.
There are other draws as well, like the doughnuts made in the cafe using a variety of flavors, including, of course, apple. Mike Roney said they proved to be a blessing last fall when U-pick was so sparse.
“It was up to close to 15,000 to 20,000 doughnuts a week,” he said. “Because of the fall season, people want cider and doughnuts. They go together. Little things like that can really help you make it through those rough situations.”
The apple orchards not only serve a significant part of the business’s product offerings, but visitor experiences as well.
“It’s not necessarily apples, it’s the fall season, because it encompasses a lot of the tourism part,” Mike Roney said, adding autumn Saturdays can draw attendances in the thousands. “But you’ve got pumpkins, you’ve got other things, you do hayrides. It’s a huge season.”
When he looks at how much Tuttle Orchards has evolved over the decades, he can’t help but wonder how his grandparents, who started it all, would feel.
“It would really be amazing to see what they’d think of it,” he said. “It really does make you appreciate a lot.”
