Cider Apple Pride
Kyle Nagy’s Superintendent and Orchard Operations Manager.
This is the Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center.”
Nowadays there’s definitely been a resurgence in hard ciders in the U.S. and you can’t make a really good hard cider out of Fujis and Honey Crisps, so a lot of these heritage varieties are specific for cider production,: said Nagy.
They sell their apples and cider locally, and also donate produce to the Bonner County Foodbank.
“And the we also work with different apple groups in the Pacific northwest such as the Lost Apple Project where they’re trying to find some of these heritage varieties that we thought were extinct but are still in existence on some of these old homesteads in the region,” said Nagy.
“One of the things we want to be able to do research out of here is season extension techniques since our growing season is so short.
Having 70 different varieties our harvest starts in the middle of August and goes through are first frosts. So, we’ve had some years that we’ve harvest apples all the way to Halloween.
A couple of years ago we started the Heritage Orchard Conference. We started out as an in-person conference here in Sandpoint, and then with covid we ended up moving to a webinar series. And what I was happy to find out is that we’re having international reach, so last year we had attendees from 16 different countries.
We host a lot of classes and courses through the University of Idaho extension. Here in Bonner County the office is nearby but we have this big, beautiful facility here, so we hold of lot of our classes out here now. And then we also have tours in the fall.
