Del Feigal is a Washington apple grower relentless about developing ideas to grow great fruit efficiently. Last year, Feigal, president of orchard management at Auvil Fruit Company, was selected to receive the 2015 Silver Apple Award, delivered last month at the Annual Meeting of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association.
Feigal has a considerable reputation as an orchardist whose experiments have led to growing practices adopted by others. “Del has been very innovative in his pruning and cropping systems and in irrigation,” said Mike Robinson, general manager of Double Diamond Fruit in Quincy.
Feigal was featured in the Good Fruit Grower back in 2006 about orchards of the future that dealt with his work to grow a consistent fruiting wall.
He planted apple trees 20 to 22 inches apart, trained to a modified Tatura trellis with 13 feet between rows and 3 to 4 feet between the tops of the canopies. His trellis was built with six to eight wires, about 18 inches apart, with the top wire at 12 feet high.
He trained one limb to each wire on either side of the tree trunk to create a consistent fruiting surface, tree to tree and row to row. His goal was 40 bins in the third leaf, and full production of 80 bins per acre from the fourth leaf onward.
Feigal wanted to build the canopy as fast as possible with high-quality fruiting wood, so that the main focus would be on using horticultural tools to grow high-quality fruit, rather than on growing vegetative wood and trying to get the trees to fill the space.
This shows an approach that others have followed.
Feigal has experimented with just about every major variable in growing, from computer-controlled irrigation systems to using platforms for harvest. Last February, he began something new: pumping heated water into soil to manage how trees emerge from dormancy.
