Hey guys! My name is Sarah Gruntmeir and I’m a rising senior here at Cornell. I come from Oklahoma, and have a wheat and cattle production background. This summer, I’m working at Cornell Orchards with the pomology faculty on a variety of fruits. I chose this internship due to my previous (and current) love of eating apples and touring orchards. The first few weeks of the job have included weeding, training trees, battling groundhogs, setting up infrastructure for trees, and working on various research projects. Research projects at the orchard have taken me across New York State, where I have learned about crop load management strategies, positioning and training practices, and tons more. This internship has given me the opportunity to learn about a different side of agriculture than my background provided and given me hands on experience in a field that interests me.

Here are a few pictures of the fruit crops I’ve spent time with!

(The above picture is from LynOaken Farms. This is a farm we traveled to for crop load management research in western New York. This research experiment was conducted with Cornell Extension. In this picture, I am thinning the tree to a specific number of fruit previously determined by researchers)

above: yummy strawberries from insect exclusion and fertigation trials. I even got to take home a quart after the data was collected!

above: blueberries becoming more ripe by the day!

above: apple thinning to remove clusters and help the tree reduce biennial fruiting patterns

above: hearty kiwis, which, to my previous lack of knowledge, grow well in New York!

Stay tuned for future posts, where I’ll explain in depth the many aspects and projects included in my internship!

-Sarah Gruntmeir, 2018 intern