Hey y’all, my name’s Bethany and I will be a junior this fall. I am from Biglerville, Pennsylvania and I have a background in fruit trees, but specifically apples. This summer I am an intern at FREC, Penn State Extension’s Fruit Research and Extension Center, conveniently located also in Biglerville, PA. At FREC, there are 5 lead scientists, each conducting research on horticulture, plant pathology, agricultural engineering, or entomology. I am working as an intern for Dr. Schupp, the horticulturalist there. He works specifically with apples, pears, and peaches, but mainly with apples because they are popular in the surrounding area. Within apples, I noticed that he has mainly been working with different types of thinning, pruning, and tree training to produce the most amount of apples. Additionally, he is also working on some interesting projects with the agricultural engineers for automated pruning and picking.

I spend most of my days outside, tending to the trees or modifying them to the produce the desired result. Recently, I have been thinning and pruning a lot of peach trees, thinning apple trees to define a strong terminal bud, and clipping up the recently planted Ever Crisp and Premiere Honey Crisp apples.

Pictured above is the NBlosi, a scissor lift with a shifting platform that allows us to easily reach into the trees. On the right are the Gala apple trees that we trained.

Further, I have also become fascinated by the different bugs around the orchard; I usually take a picture of them and show them to the entomology interns during lunch. I’ll post some of my favorites below:

Pictured above on the left is a leather wing, also known as a soldier beetle. In the middle is a common leaf beetle that caught be by surprise. On the right is a praying mantis nest that I found pruning.

Every year, Dr. Schupp hands his summer interns their own project to take charge of. This year, we get to run a project that deals with a new club variety of apple called Sweet Cheeks. However, it has many fruit finish issues. Our job is to determine whether the russetting is early or late onset and suggest ways to prevent it. I am excited to explain about it more in my next post!