Day 1 of the International Fruit Tree Association’s 2025 Summer Study Tour of Ontario, Canada, is in the books.
On Monday, IFTA tour buses left London, Ontario, and headed southwest, through a flat and green region covered with fields of corn and other commodity crops. The region’s orchards hug the northern shore of Lake Erie, where they share space with vineyards, berry farms and massive greenhouses full of vegetables.
IFTA’s first stop was Thompson’s Orchards in Blenheim, a fifth-generation farm that grows 110 acres of apples, peaches and pears. Standing in a high-density apple block, grower Don Thompson highlighted his experiments with various rootstocks in the past few decades. He transitioned from Malling 7 to M.9 over the years and learned that Geneva 41 and Budagovsky 9 perform well in his soils. He gradually tightened his plantings, too, and finally settled on a 10-foot by 2-foot spacing, which helps reduce pruning and other labor costs. The use of platforms also has increased his efficiency and reduced his labor costs, he said.
Thompson touted the benefits of potted trees, which reduce labor costs and improve fruit quality. He uses mushroom compost as a soil amendment because of its positive impacts on tree growth and soil health, he said.
The next stop was Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Harrow Research and Development Centre, Canada’s national repository for fruit germplasm. The gene bank includes 800 apple accessions that encompass modern and historical cultivars, breeding lines, rootstocks and wild apples. There also are 200 pear accessions and a collection of cherry cultivars.
The final stop of the day was The Fruit Wagon in Harrow, where Doug and Leslie Balsillie grow 35 acres of apples, peaches, pears and other crops for wholesale and retail.
The Balsillies have farmed near the shore of Lake Erie for four decades, in a region that’s grown more popular with tourists over the years. Their main harvest is fresh apples for commercial packers and the Ontario Food Terminal in greater Toronto. They also harvest crops daily for their roadside wagon from May until November. They sell their crops at the Downtown Windsor Farmers’ Market, too.
“We do everything in a small way, but we decided we want to do it intensively, so that we can make enough money to make a living,” Doug Balsillie told the IFTA visitors. “And we raised four girls here.”
The Balsillies showed IFTA their trellised apples, peaches and pears. You can read more about them in future issues of the magazine.
The second day of the tour will visit the Niagara region. The third and final day will visit fruit operations around London. •
