Petrofka Bridge Orchard

Ten years ago, when Anne and I drove north of Saskatoon on highway # 12 to check out this “50 acres of river shore piece of land for sale”, we decided that day that we had to buy it.

We could not resist the scenic view of the gentle slopes on each side of the North Saskatchewan River with the very old and large cottonwood poplar trees.

In 2001 we decided to break up a 4 acre of open natural grass by our home.  It only took 2 meetings with Rick Sawatzky, of the Domestic Fruit Development Program, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, to make our decision to support the University by joining their co-operator group and start a small apple orchard of 100 trees made up of 4 different varieties of their apples under research and testing.         

Today we have 3 separate orchard areas totalling 14.5 acres with 4000 trees. In 2008 we will have 1400 trees producing apples and our productive tree numbers will increase by approximately 600 trees per year.

It is a young orchard growing older every year.  We are not Certified Organic, but as long as Anne and I are in charge, no pesticides of any kind will ever be used on our trees or on our apples.

In addition to investing in our orchard for the past 6 years, we have now decided to protect them by building game fences around the 3 orchards.  In 2007 we also felt the need to construct the white with red roof building that you see as you drive up and down highway # 12.  This facility was constructed to accommodate the storage of many tons of apples that will be processed for our Apple Cider and a small part of it as a concession in order to accommodate all our visitors.

We will have our Grand opening in August or September of 2008 but our plans is to open our concession by June 1, 2008 and offer you, our customers, several vegetables, fruit and other products from the Blaine Lake and Waldheim district.