By NUSHIN RASHIDIAN and JOEL MEARES
George Vurno lives by the weather. The owner and manager of Masker Orchards, a pick-your-own apple orchard in Warwick, N.Y., checks hour-by-hour forecasts on his computer and turns to the Weather Channel, Channel 12, CBS, and NBC twice a day to answer a question that is constantly on his mind: Is it going to rain?
Whether it is growing season or picking season, he needs to know. Right now, it is picking season at Masker Orchards, located about 55 miles northwest of Manhattan, and people are coming by the thousands to pluck Vurno’s ripened apples.
To keep them happy and fed and spending while they pick, 69-year-old Vurno orders soda, hot dog rolls, hot dogs, cider, ice cream, pizza, and apple pie which he sells at the entertainment square at the bottom of the hillside orchard. In the entertainment square, a collection of converted barns, visitors can roam a pumpkin patch, ride a pony, walk through a haunted house and gorge on apple pie, cider and strudel.
“The only way to order them,” Vurno says, “is to know what the weather is going to be.”
If it is going to rain, people won’t come, and food orders go to waste.
Vurno is a tall, broad shouldered man with a tanned and stubbly face. When he smiles, he could pass for former New York City mayor Rudy Guliani’s twin brother. He was fooled last week because he expected rain on Sunday and decided to place half orders. It didn’t rain and he was short on supplies. This week, Vurno wasn’t expecting rain on Sunday, so he put in a full order. Now, the weather is telling Vurno that it is going to rain and he doesn’t want to be fooled again.
“Maybe I’m better off only half ordering,” Vurno says, laughing wheezily.
Vurno will be doing a lot of weather watching between now and November, when he will begin pruning the trees in preparation for winter.
Warwick’s official apple season began Labor Day and, on a good weekend, 20,000 cars carry residents of New York and neighboring states through the tree-lined hillsides of Orange County to Vurno’s 200-acre orchard. Masker made the switch from commercial orchard to pick-your-own in 1971 and was the first to do so in New York. For no admission fee, pickers park their cars among the rows of 15,000 apple trees–McIntosh, Cortland, Empire, Red Delicious, Jonagold, and Ida Reds—and eat as many apples as they’d like. Upon entry, they recieve plastic bags that they can pack with apples they pick, but don’t eat, and they must pay $24.95 for every bag they fill as they exit the farm.
Vurno is nervous because the low temperatures in June and July broke records along the northeast, and rainfall is running 50 to 100 percent higher than normal around the region, according to AccuWeather.com.
“It was a lot more expensive,” Vurno says of this year’s growing season. “We had to do a lot more maintenance in the orchard because of all that rain.”
Two of Vurno’s biggest costs were mowing the excess grass and grading the rain-damaged roads that lead customers through the orchard—Cider Lane, Strudel Lane, Pie Lane, and Sauce Lane.
One benefit of a wetter season is bigger apples. They draw customer attention and give Vurno a chance to make back some of the money he lost re-paving roads and repairing damaged trees because fewer of these large apples fit into each of the half-bushel plastic bags customers receive upon entering the orchard. But customers won’t have a chance to be in awe of Vurno’s apples if the rain keeps them away.
It is a lack of control that frustrates Vurno, a former Brooklyn trial lawyer who bought into the farm in 1969.
“When I was a lawyer, I had the illusion that I was in control,” Vurno says. “Now that I’m a farmer, I know absolutely positively I am not in control. The weather and mother nature are in control.”
And so is the economy. Recession-struck suppliers have raised their prices for everything from fertilizer to machine parts to hot dogs. Three years ago, potash fertilizer cost Vurno $425 a ton; this year, he paid $950 a ton for 15 tons.
“That’s $7000 to $8000 just out of one little stinking item,” he says in disbelief.
And medical insurance has increased for his six full-time employees, three of them named George, which Vurno pointed out means “farmer” in Greek.
The increased costs for Masker Orchards have been passed on to its customers. The price of a half-bushel bag that carries roughly 20 pounds of apples has increased since last year from $19.95 to $24.95. Now, because of higher prices and larger apples, customers are paying more than ever for less fruit.
“We saw $24.95 a bag and thought ‘Wow!’” says Keith Santos, whose family traveled from Brooklyn to visit Masker for the first time last year, and came back this year to picnic among the apple trees.
Keith’s mother, Stella, chimes in, “May as well buy the apple pie; it’s already baked!”
Tom Bakalis, who also traveled from the city to pick apples, says he definitely noticed the prices.
“I think the bags got smaller, too,” he jokes. “I’m going to see how many I can squeeze in.”
Even the price of a hot dog has gone up a few cents. Sean Dolan, who recently lost his job as a roofer and has been coming to the orchard from Pearl River, N.Y., for four years with his wife and two daughters, noticed the change.
“It’s like being at a Yankee’s game; ”$2.50 for a 30 cent item” he said.
But Vurno insists that he has tried to keep prices low, and prides himself on carrying high quality products.
“We’re trying to hold the line,” he says. “We’re trying to keep it an economical day in the country.”
Vurno’s pies, strudels, and cider are made off-site using Masker apples. He meets cider delivery trucks and takes several gulps before accepting any bottles. Vurno spent years searching for a family that had the best recipe for his apples before offering apple pies at his farm.
“I wouldn’t serve crap,” he says. “I needed something special.”
The customers come back year after year.
“We’ve been coming here a long time,” says Cheryl Cacioppo, of Kinnelon, N.J., who has been returning to Masker with her husband, Paul, for 16 years.
Paul started coming to Masker 30 years ago and now brings his young son and daughter each year to share with them a tradition that was passed onto him. He remembers knocking apples down from the tops of the highest trees with bamboo poles the orchard once supplied.
Nicole Cosimano also started coming to Masker Orchards when she was a child and started working there at age 12. She is now 31 and the office manager of the farm, overseeing 100 mostly teenage workers who direct traffic, sell food, and operate the entertainment square during the picking season.
“We used to just have apples and we had three lanes,” she remembers.
Newcomers to Masker enjoy it, too. Leila Franklin of Patterson, N.J., brought her two teenage children apple picking for the first time this season because she picked apples as a young girl.
“I am teaching them what we used to do,” says Franklin. “There’s clean air, it’s safe, everybody is enjoying themselves.”
At the top of the hill, near where Franklin is standing, you can see parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. The orchard is surrounded by green, rolling hills and tall trees blushing red and orange. But at the bottom of the hill, at the corner of the entertainment square, Vurno sits in a little blue house that serves as his office, and he continues to worry. After the expensive, rainy growing season, he needs the sun to shine so that people will come to Masker. But Vurno doesn’t know what to expect this season.
“In ‘05 we had a beautiful crop and it rained every weekend in October,” says Vurno. “We had this one system that kept coming back and forth. It would go out to sea, then it would come back, and it seemed to come back every weekend. We had half the number of cars and a crop that went to waste.”
Vurno’s outlook changes as often as the weather, and there is only one thing that he knows for sure.
“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow and that is going to kill us.”
