Herb and Liz Teichman

People are accustomed today to buy them from the grocery store where they are firm, crisp; much like carrots. When they come out to the farm here, they taste a nectarine that was ripened on the tree, and it’s amazing. You need to eat a nectarine in the bathtub with the plug in because it is so juicy.

Most times, we were lucky in making a profit, but during the early [19]50s, we began to see where there was a threat of disturbance in our marketing through labor and through costs and chemicals. All these things had a bearing. The media picked up on certain chemicals and it made a disruption in our income during some times through my lifetime, as well as did labor strikes. So we went into direct sales in 1969 and 1970 for the full year. We’ve been in direct sales, and retail is the primary outlet. It’s actually gone from retail sales to entertainment farming. When people come here from outlying areas like Chicago is a hundred miles from us, they’ll drive in, they’ll want to pet the pony and see the wood lots and wild animals and have a good time, let their kid romp and play, and while they’re here, they’ll buy some fruit. And that’s the thing, it keeps the skids lubricated so we can live one year to the next.

When people go to those markets, they are looking for freshness and personality, and your personality reflects in the flavor of the fruit. If you meet with the people, talk to them, get to know them, trust them, they trust you. Then there is a greater bond in the flavor of the fruit. I’ve often used that example because we raise old varieties of apples. We grow over two hundred different varieties of apples.

We had an apple machine that would pick off the ground; it would pick apples off the ground for juice. It didn’t work because of debris on the ground. You just couldn’t mass-pick up apples. You have to manually separate those that are good quality and poor quality, and so it didn’t work.

People have a lot of confidence in a family farm. They can pick it, and they get it better tasting because it’s tree-ripened. It’s got the natural flavors, not like green unripe fruit.