Mar 28, 2022 – Watch the full video from Up North Live here.

Two K Farms produces both wine and cider on the Leelanau Peninsula.

These apple trees and grapevines cover the 80-acre Two K Farms on the Leelanau Peninsula. Spring is a busy time preparing for the growing season.

“As you can see, we’re pruning our Pino Noir grapes right now. We’ve already pruned apples that’s one of the first crops we pruned. But we’re prepping the ground hopefully the ground thaws a bit,” said Koskela. “So, in April we’ll be doing planting of 2000 apple trees so hopefully, we can rototill the ground and fertilize it. A lot of the prep work is done now so we were successful growing season.”

As with most farmers, they are at the mercy of mother nature.

“Last year there was not a lot of precipitation in the spring. Luckily, we had some of the June but now we had a decent snowpack,” said Koskela. “And we’ve had a lot of precipitation the only real issue is the ground is frozen it has nowhere to really go so, flooding could be an issue.”

Temperature also has an impact on apple and grape crops due to the temperature swings in January and February which didn’t present the best conditions.

“We want to gradually increase the temperature, 30’s 40’s in late March and 50s into April so that we have a nice bloom where it’s not these high temperatures where a lot of disease can happen,” said Koskela.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says that Michigan will have above-average precipitation and slightly above average temperatures for spring.