Customers were impatiently waiting for their new apple harvest at Hermans Fruit in the Limburg Herten. "Our apples were early due to a smaller harvest this year. This meant that we didn't really have any of our own apples in store for two months. We started with the harvest of the Delbare apples last Monday. The customers love our apples," owner Jos Hermans says. The grower has a store and other than this mainly trades in Germany. "We grow around 20 hectares ourselves. Our main cultivations are Elstar, Wellant and Conference pears. We try to buy the other products for the store from local growers as much as possible and the rest comes from wholesale."
"We started picking the good, red apples of the early varieties this week. As of the 20th we will start with our main cultivation. This is slightly earlier than usual due to the warm spring. The quality of the apples is great: they are very sweet and very tasty. Only the colour is disappointing: they're a bit bleak. You get a good colour due to temperature differences, but it hasn't cooled down at night yet. Our varieties need a coastal climate instead of the internal climate we had. Hopefully it will be cooler for the next few days, so that the colour can turn," says Hermans. "We expect a good harvest this year, unlike last year, of around 90%. The harvest seems to be slightly lower in the rest of the Netherlands, but not for us. We are in the driest and often warmest part of the Netherlands and always need to irrigate here. This means we have little damage."
Although the grower is optimistic about the harvest so far, he is tense. "They announced a code orange with heavy winds and thunder. Our apples are almost ready and this would ruin the harvest, which would be awful for us."
For more information:
Jos Hermans
Hermans Groenten en Fruit
Oude Roermondseweg 161
6049 AD Herten