Community: Growing Maine — Treworgy Family Orchards
Transcript
Narrator:
University of Maine Cooperative Extension helps farmers and food producers bring you the local foods you love. These are the stories of the families who are “Growing Maine.”
Matt Pellerin:
So it started with Gary and Patty. Gary’s first profession was he worked as a merchant marine and so he would take long shipping trips oversees.
Patty Treworgy:
He was away more than he was home and our daughters were growing up not knowing their daddy. He shipped until ’85 but in ’82 we started seriously looking at other businesses.
Matt Pellerin:
And finally they found farming.
Patty Treworgy:
In 1984 we planted 1,400 semi-dwarf trees. They all died.
Gary Treworgy:
I had no experience with growing trees — growing anything. I read and you can read all you want but until you do it you really don’t quite get it. So that environment fostered roundheaded apple tree borer. I contacted Extension and they came out and looked and they did they looked into it quite a bit and they said you’re probably better off just take them all out and start over again.
Patty Treworgy:
Gary was all done with farming. He was going to sell the tractor, sell the tiller, the bush hog.
Gary Treworgy:
I put it all up for sale.
Patty Treworgy:
And nobody bought a thing.
Matt Pellerin:
A few years later Patty convinced him to try again.
Patty Treworgy:
Our first step was we planted 1,400 trees. That was too much.
Matt Pellerin:
And this time they only planted one acre of apples.
Robin Pellerin:
I remember actually the first customer that ever came we were just all so excited it had finally happened we sold something to someone.
Patty Treworgy:
Our intention was to have a pick-your-own apple orchard.
Gary Treworgy:
But people really enjoyed the experience and picking from the ground is very fast. They would come out and have their apples within like 10 minutes and then they would say “what else can we do?”
Patty Treworgy:
People would say, “When I get my apples I like to get my pumpkins.” So right out back here we planted maybe not even a ¼ acre of pumpkins and we harvested probably 10 of them we decided after that we could do it. My advice is if you think it is a good idea try it don’t be afraid of trying it and then if you really like it then go bigger. But start small. So we put a gift shop in and then we put an ice cream shop in then the corn maze came in 2001. And along the way our daughters were in their early teens and the animals started coming.
Matt Pellerin:
Whenever we start something new we always try and start at a medium or small size rather than a huge size so we can allow our experience to catch up to the size of our operation.
Patty Treworgy:
If we’re going to start something new, we have to decide so who it going to be in charge of this, who is going to own this.
Matt Pellerin:
Early on when things were smaller a lot of that was really informal but now as things have grown we have to have very specific roles.
Robin Pellerin:
We have farm meetings. So we all get together on an afternoon or an evening and talk about what is going on and those big picture questions that are easy to lose sight of.
Patty Treworgy:
Did you compare ice cream sales with last year’s ice cream sales? Just ice cream not anything else.
Jon Kenerson:
Well it is hard because we’re counting things differently like pizza. I could but it’s not a simple line.
Patty Treworgy:
The other thing that Jon noticed was that our payroll is in better shape this year than last year.
Matt Pellerin:
There’s a few ventures that we have started recently that I think are going to grow a lot and we’re learning our mistakes and we’re ready to expand and really develop a business out of those. Beyond that, we have a lot of kids so we’re hoping that they will come up with dreams and ideas about what to do with the farm and we can kind of facilitate them going through the same process that we have been through.