MOUNT VERNON — The Partners-In-Tourism is a series of tours and meetings arranged by the Knox County Convention and Visitors Bureau to help community leaders learn about the businesses and cultural attractions that draw visitors to Knox County. The partners were on the road Wednesday to visit Glen Hill Orchard for insight into one of Ohio’s most popular agricultural industries, apples.

Orchard owner Maureen Buchwald said it looks like 2009 is going to be a normal year for apples, bringing in a harvest of some 70,000 bushels of apples from the orchard’s 38,000 trees. Glen Hill grows 23 varieties of apples, but Buchwald pointed out that the bulk of her mass commercial sales are in just a few popular varieties.

She said that aside from some of the more upscale markets which seek out distinctive varieties, most retailers want what she described as “dessert apples,” highly sweet varieties popular for snacking. She said some of the old standards, such as the Jonathan apple, are fast disappearing.

“It’s because no one cooks at home any more,” Buchwald said.

As fewer people make pies, fried apples, apple butter or applesauce at home, they become unfamiliar with the tart taste of varieties that hearken back to the apple’s ancestral roots, which Buchwald said trace back to the misty valleys of Kazakhstan in central Asia.

Buchwald said she keeps some trees of less popular varieties specifically for selling locally, but that she has had to pull out some less popular varieties and replace them with new up-and-comers such as the Honey Crisp variety, which she said is popular but frustrating to deal with because it doesn’t keep well.

The harvest is a five-week period in September and October. Storage is a major concern for the orchard, which has four refrigerated buildings, some with air-tight rooms where apples can be stored without deterioration for over half a year after harvest. One building contains the processing line where apples are washed, inspected, sorted and packed.

One machine measures the weight and redness of apples in order to sort them into similar sizes for specific store orders. Cider apples are sent to a cider press in Carroll, then on to a pasteurization plant in Columbus before it returns to Glen Hill for sale. Government regulations require pasteurization of all commercially distributed cider.

Buchwald said her operation practices integrated pest management, which calls for minimal spraying of chemicals. The goal is not to eradicate all pests, but merely to keep them under control with the help of their natural predators. She said insecticide spraying isn’t often required, as Ohio’s wet climate makes destructive fungi a much more common problem.

As Ohio no longer has sufficient wild honey bees to pollinate an orchard, Buchwald said she rents bees from an apiary in Toledo every spring. Because the tree pollination has to happen in a short period of time subject to wildly variable weather, she also has to buy pollen from the state of Washington. This pollen is spread out in a trough at the entrance to the bees’ hive. When the bees fly out, they start the day already covered with pollen, assuring that every blossom they visit will get pollinated.

The biggest animal problem, Buchwald said, is deer.

“We wouldn’t mind if they ate a few apples, but the problem is they like to eat the shoots on the young trees, which kills [the trees],” Buchwald said.

Refreshments were provided by The Pink Cupcake, whose co-owner Beth Murdock talked about how she and Summer Meade formed the bakery after meeting each other in gingerbread house competitions for Food For The Hungry fundraisers.

Frequent Partners-in-Tourism attendee Wally Thomen said the programs were helping a lot of people like him get to better know Knox County’s attractions. He said he was very familiar with Glen Hill Orchard, but many places the partners have gone have taught him a lot.

“All those other places are things that you have no idea about until you go there,” Thomen said.