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Closed for the 2022 Season
2023 Season Hours:
Opening Day: Friday, May 12, 2023
Open Monday – Saturday 9 – 5 pm
Closed Sunday
Closing Day:
Saturday, October 28, 2023
Opening Day: Friday, May 12, 2023
Open Monday – Saturday 9 – 5 pm
Closed Sunday
Closing Day:
Saturday, October 28, 2023
Our orchards have a long history, but today our farm consists of over 1,300 acres that span over 30 miles of the peninsula. Our primary focus is tart cherries, which make up most all that acreage, although we also grow about 20 varieties of sweet cherries, 25 varieties of apples and 3 varieties of pears. You may be wondering, how many trees is that? It’s approximately 175,000 trees! Depending on the year, our farm can produce 10-15 million pounds of tart cherries. Our market, bakery, canning company and local community of door county get priority on our fruit, but most of our crop is shipped nationally for a variety of applications.
How do we harvest the cherries?
While all the fresh cherries sold in our market are handpicked, so that we deliver them to you in the absolute best condition, most of our tart cherry trees are mechanically harvested. We use two machines, called the shaker and the catching frame, that work in unison to shake the tree for just a few seconds and catch the fruit. The fruit is conveyed into tanks of cold water (this is key), then trucked to our processing plant. The processing plant is the place where the fruit is de-stemmed, sorted, pitted and packed. The fruit is sent to be frozen and then sold throughout the year.
Our apples
We are also passionate about growing apples! We have about 25 varieties, with our largest acreage being Honeycrisp. We have a lot of new apples plantings using high density planting with dwarf trees. Unlike cherries which can be machine harvested, apples need to be handpicked.
Pest Management
At Seaquist Orchards we use Integrated Pest Management (IPM) principles as our growing practices. IPM is an effective and environmentally sensitive approach to pest management. It uses biological information to efficiently control pests while reducing the reliance of pesticides. What does this mean in everyday terms? Well, we work hard (with the help of UW Wisconsin Extension) to monitor and identify damaging pests and diseases and find methods of prevention (typically using tree sprayers). Our main goal is to spray as little as possible and grow high quality fruit.
IPM allows us to farm in a way that produces the highest quality fruit but has the least amount of impact on our people, land and environment. While we are not an organic farm, both organic and conventional farmers use IPM and in many scenarios we are even able to use organic pesticides as they work as effectively as conventional.
Every year we continually improve our knowledge of understanding fruit pests, and we continually educate ourselves on the practices of IPM through a close partnership with UW Extension, meetings with industry leaders and a close partnership with other orchard growers. We are constantly learning and improving our farming practices here!