A fresh pick: Ladoga LaBlanche Orchard near Bedford is open

A southern Iowa man is working to make the fruits of his labor profitable and give visitors a tranquil experience on his 10-acre orchard.

Steven Wainwright, 69, of Prescott, has maintained the Ladoga LaBlanche Orchard – 7 miles west of Bedford on state Highway 2 – for more than three decades. For the past 2 years, he has opened it up to the public to share the experience of harvesting the freshest apples, pears, cherries and peaches in the area.

Wainwright is pastor of Prescott Christian Church, and his wife, Cynthia, works full time at Greater Regional Medical Center in Creston.

“I have found that people come here and find this a very peaceful place, almost like an outdoor sanctuary where people can get away from the stresses of the world,” Wainwright said.

History

Wainwright said his great-grandfather, Arthur Wainwright, homesteaded the orchard in 1875. He planted hundreds of trees and would take his harvest to the Ladoga Train Depot, about 2 miles northwest of the property.

After the original orchard died out in the late 1930s, it was resurrected by Wainwright and his father, Edgar, in 1981 when a tornado severely damaged the property.

“The weather in this part of the state is very unstable compared to other parts of the state in the sense that we are more likely to have late freezes in the spring or early freezes in the fall,” Wainwright said. “When you have a freeze, then it gets warm, then it freezes again, it is really hard on the trees.”

Today he has more than 1,000 trees and replants about 150 trees each year to keep the orchard thriving.

“I think because of my great-grandfather and my dad’s experience with orchards, and him going to the orchard near here (as a child), it kind of got in my blood,” Wainwright said.

Wainwright has experimented with creating some of his own varieties of apples using a method called grafting. He takes a limb from an apple tree and using grafting tape, he secures it to the root stock of another variety of tree.

“What happens is that branch becomes the tree that you harvest it from,” Wainwright said.

He added the biggest benefit of grafting is the tree typically grows to the size of the root stock, but has the characteristics from the branch attached. So an apple tree that typically grows really tall could be modified to grow shorter with this method.

Other times, mutations occur and the new tree has a heavy mix of characteristics from both trees. Wainwright has an apple tree that produces an apple he calls Wainwright’s Gold. It is a mix of a crab apple and golden delicious.

The apples can handle about 29 degrees before the cold weather forces them to soften and fall to the ground.

Wainwright added a red one-room schoolhouse in 2013 in honor of his mother, Mary Helen Wainwright, who still lives on the property. She was an educator in Taylor County for 60 years, from 1936 to 1996.

“There used to be a country school house almost every two miles,” Wainwright said. “In Taylor County alone, there were over 130 schools at one time.”

He is currently working on building signs to mark the locations of the one-room school buildings in Taylor County.

Visiting

The site is open Fridays and Saturdays, and by appointment the rest of the week.

Ladoga LaBlanche Orchards hosts an average of 400 students each year. They tour the site with Wainwright, learn about the history of the orchard, and get to pick their own apples.

“It was Johnny Appleseed’s birthday on the day we visited (Sept. 26), and (Wainwright) dressed up like Johnny Appleseed for the kids,” said Rene Rogers, first-grade teacher at Bedford Elementary School. “He took the kids through all of the orchards, and each kid got to take about half a dozen apples home.”

Visitors can see all of the trees in bloom in the spring. Normally, the peaches, apples and cherries are the first to be picked around mid-July. The harvest season continues through mid to late October with a pumpkin patch, pears and late-harvest apples.

Apple prices vary from 62 cents to 90 cents a pound. Price is dependent on how large the order is and whether visitors pick the apples themselves.

Wainwright said the Jonathan variety is the “Cadillac” of apples. It is traditionally used for baking and has a pink tint when it is ripe.

“He went through all the apples and which ones were good for eating right off the tree or better for baking,” he said. “The kids loved picking the apples.”

His trees have produced apples as large as 2 pounds, and 16 inches in circumference.

Each year, Wainwright helps to organize a massive harvest for food pantries in northwest Missouri. Members from the United Methodist Church in Maryville, Missouri, and sorority members from Northwest Missouri State University help to glean a portion of the orchard.