The Philips Fruit Garden is gearing up for apple picking days when thousands of people come to pick apples and pears in September. One bummer for the orchard is that the extreme rainfall of late has left its mark here as well. More than four hundred apple trees have been drowned.
Philips Orchard
Anyone walking through the Eindhoven orchard will not immediately notice that something is wrong. The thousands of trees are looking good, with apples and pears in full glory. They are almost ripe enough. They can be harvested in September.
But on one section of the property with a total of 23,000 trees, you can see that the rainfall has taken casualties. The green leaves here give way to rows of withered trees. A shriveled apple on a bare branch shows that the tree still did its best to deliver something.
Huge amount of rain
“Here they’ve been in water for months. They just stopped growing,” said Philips Fruit Garden director Carlos Faes. The tremendous amount of rain has killed the trees. “I’ve been working here since 1991 and I’ve never had water on the plot. This year there was three times as much as normal.”
Often attempts were made to pump the water away, but then it came right back again. It is no coincidence that these very rows of trees failed. “This is the lowest part of the plot,” Faes explains.
Groundwater can’t get away
“At fifty centimeters depth there is loam here. The groundwater seep through the loam so it retained in a kind of pond. If you pump it away, a few hours later it just comes back up from below. The groundwater pushes the oxygen out of the soil. Then the smaller trees die.”
Over four hundred affected trees must be taken out. Then the ground has to recover. The damage is around fifty thousand euros. The apple-picking days will continue as usual from September 7. “In full glory,” Faes emphasises. “We have enough apples and pears on the trees. A percentage has been lost, but that percentage is small compared to the whole.”
Source : Studio040.nl
Translated by: Anitha Sevugan
