Welcome to this amazing tour of an apple orchard from an Agricultural middle school in Italy from Chief Storyteller Cat Bonadin!
Editors Note: This is another transcript of the YouTube shared above. We will be doing these for all of the Italy videos and any videos in the future. Also stay tuned from personal guest posts from our guru Elizabeth. The author of this post is Cabra Cuerno because he did the transcriotion. Thanks!
Hey, guys! It’s Catherine with the Homestead Guru.
We are here at an Agricultural Middle School and High School in Northern Italy.
Right now we are in their orchard, as you can see we are standing in front of a row of apple trees.
Now, if you walk this way with me and take a look, you’ll notice that this are a variety of different species. This right here are Granny Smith, those of us in the United States we know this is more kind of a bitter, sour green apple, right?
Apple Pollination Facts Learned at the Agricultural Middle School
Well, this is here, they don’t grow these for the fruit, they actually use this as a pollinator tree. So, these other apple trees without a pollinator tree would actually produce much smaller fruit, so they use this to cross pollinate with the other trees, so they have a larger apple, a larger fruit.
What to Expect at an Agricultural Middle School
So, as we walk through you can see they have all of these different species here. Keep in mind this is a learning school, right? So, every single tree has the name of the plant written next to it, so that way students can come. They are learning how to care for the plants, they’re learning about the plants, how they grow and how to keep them healthy and alive.
Wanna learn more about apple farming, consider buying this book!
What’s an agricultural middle school without kids?
As you can see there’s some children here helping right now, as we speak. This is a really awesome project.
Something that I noticed as we were driving through Italy is that the apple trees are prone to be very narrow, because they plant them very close together.
Unique Agricultural Practices for a Unique Location
Space is an issue here in Italy, there’s mountains all over, there’s a lot of people, and so their apple orchards are not like the ones I’m used to see in the United States with the giant trees that are spaced out pretty far.
They actually keep these very close together and, I don’t know if you can see here, where they have this support wires here, that the plants are growing in between. You know? It’s very different, and in doing this it allows them to have a higher capacity of fruit production per square foot, so, as you can see, there are a lot of apples growing right here in a very small space, so this is something that I found to be super, super interesting.
And as we were driving around Italy it was like, “we gotta get out of the car and look at these apple orchards because they’re so different”.
Cat’s Husband went to the Agricultural High school!
And Paolo informed me that, you know, “Hey we were going to my agricultural high school, they have these here.”
So, here we are (at the agricultural high school), we are checking them out.
Now, we have done some in depth interviews in Italian, I don’t speak Italian, so I’m giving you the summary, here in English. Most of our followers don’t either.
But for those of you who speak Italian these interviews are gonna be posted in full on our Facebook page, on our YouTube channel, the Homestead Guru for both, and our website thehomestead.guru.
We would love you to subscribe to our email list so you can continue to get more great videos like this.
Hopefully at some point we will get those translated, either dubbed over or subtitled in English, but, for now you got my summary, which I now you’re enjoying, and you will Paolo’s in depth interview with one of the teachers at the school, who is overseeing this entire operation.
Thank you for tuning in.
Check out this recent transcript shared by us! Has 2020 Whooped You?
Learn more about secondary education in Italy!
Hi, Catherine! it was great interview.