A little band of bakers is busy turning out 32 hundred apple pies a day. But the Kroitzsh (pronounced “Kroich”) family doesn’t mind. These sweet treats have been the salvation for their Valley View Apple orchard in south central Maine for the past 15 years.

Jim Kroitzsh is President of Valley View Orchard Pies. He says that in the early 1990s the apple market started to plunge. Some Maine growers could never quite recover. Rather than giving up, growers like Jim Kroitzsh decided to turn their fruit into something more. In this case, pies. That decision has led to sweet success.

Valley View Orchard Pies uses Jim’s mother’s recipe which was her mother’s recipe. Nothing much has changed over the years. The company uses the same time-tested ingredients and the pies are pretty much made by hand.

A three-car garage has been turned into a professional kitchen. The mixer works 200 pounds of dough at a time. Another machine rolls it out into uniform squares for each crust. Still, the real secret is in the apples harvested August through October on the 60-acre farm.

Crisp Macintosh apples are used for the filling which consists of sliced fresh apples with sugar, seasoning, and a hand-covered crust. Once baked, the Kroitzsh family personally delivers the pies to customers throughout New England.

Another family in southern Maine has also had to innovate to be successful. Years ago, the McDougal family decided to let the public do the picking. At McDougal Orchards west of Portland, the farm is teeming with families filling their bags with fruit during the late summer harvest.

McDougal Orchards is located on a portion of a 450-acre tract bought at a tax auction for fifty-two pounds ten shillings by Joshua Hanson in 1779. The land has been farmed in various ways by his descendents ever since. Today that’s three generations of McDougals—including Bob, wife Pat, children Even and Ellen and their children. Ellen says when her father went from wholesale to “you pick” in 1972, fellow growers were skeptical saying there wasn’t enough money to be made. But the McDougals proved them wrong and can turn a profit by charging 75 cents a pound to pick in two different orchards.

A visit to McDougal Orchards truly gives you a well-rounded farm experience and the family wants to keep it that way. So it’s participating in the Land for Maine’s Future Program. That means no matter who owns the property in the coming years it will remain a farm.

So from preservation and “you pick” to pies with that homemade touch, these apple growers hope to keep their fruit, their farms, and their families part of the Maine landscape for generations to come.

Additional information:
Take a virtual visit to the two apple farms featured in our story by going to www.valleyvieworchardpies.com and www.mcdougalorchards.com

According to the University of Illinois Extension web site, which has bushels of interesting apple facts, the top producing apple states are Washington, New York, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Apple trees take four to five years to produce their first fruit. Some 2500 varieties of apples are grown in the United States while 7500 are grown worldwide. The "Delicious" variety is the most widely grown in the United States. (How can there be so many varieties?

Apples are a member of the rose family and are fat, sodium, and cholesterol free. An average apple has 80 calories and is a good source of fiber.

On average, Americans eat around 20 pounds or 65 fresh apples per year. But if you add in our consumption of processed apple products like dried apples, applesauce, and apple juice, the total doubles to more than 42 pounds per year.