AUDUBON, Minn. — It’s a humid-soaked 80-something in the shade, yet 65-year-old David Gottenborg clips through the Gottenborg Apple Orchard like a turbo-charged Johnny Appleseed.
His visitors are already dripping with sweat, but Gottenborg seems completely unscathed by the heat. After all, he routinely plants, tends and harvests hundreds of apple trees while also maintaining his full-time chiropractic practice.
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“Right now, between the clinic and this, I will work an insane amount of hours,” he said. “But it’s no different than a farmer who is harvesting.”
He stops to pluck an apple — so red and perfect that it looks like a prop — from a slender tree. He hands it to me, although my hands are already full with a notebook and cellphone for recording.
“Now this is the one we’ve been waiting for. Look at this apple. Taste that.” He says it with a conviction that makes it impossible to do anything else.
I obediently bite into the First Kiss fruit, a new University of Minnesota variety which is crunchy, sweet-tart and so juicy that it drips on my clothes.
“You see that?” he said, triumphantly. “(David) Bedford at the University of Minnesota, that’s what made it. It took him 16 years to where you just had to do that — you wiped your shirt.”
But there's no time to lollygag. Gottenborg is already on the march. “Let’s walk,” he announced. “I haven’t awed you yet.”
We spend the next hour touring the place, with the enthusiastic orchardist periodically plucking apples from trees and pressing them into my already-overflowing hands.
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Then again, one doesn’t spend 20-some years developing an 8,000-tree apple orchard without cultivating bushels of knowledge and energy.
Gottenborg believes his orchard is the largest in the area, although there’s an older orchard located in Cormorant, about 11 miles southwest of Audubon. He offers 10 different varieties of apples and has no trouble selling them.
Last year, the orchard produced 11,000 pounds of SweeTangos — his bestseller — and 6,000 pounds of Zestars.
“Last year, we couldn’t make it until October,” he said. “In nine weeks, they were gone.”
Now Gottenborg is ramping up for his busiest season on the orchard, which is on his family’s farmland, located at the west end of Audubon Lake Road, just a few miles south of Audubon.
Gottenborg Orchard will be open Labor Day weekend and every weekend through October from 9-5 daily.
Visitors can buy already-picked apples or pick their own.
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'That was an apple moment'
Gottenborg is a self-described man of action — someone who sets his sights on something and pursues that goal without a shred of doubt or indecision.
It was that laser focus that planted the seed to launch an apple orchard.
An elderly client walked into Gottenborg’s Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, clinic in 2001 and gave the chiropractor Zestar and Honeycrisp apples grown on the older man’s small orchard near Detroit Lakes.
“I grew up with Red Delicious like we all did,” Gottenborg recalls. “ My dad gave us a box, my grandma gave us a box, and after a while, it was punky. And when I ate that apple, it was like, ‘Could you get me 25 of these?’ I’m the kind of person that when I experience something like that, I have to do that. That was an apple moment.”
He started out planting 50 trees on his father’s land and continued expanding and learning each year. He traveled, read and learned much by trial and error.
Today, his knowledge of apples borders on Googlian. Visitors learn everything from the easiest way to test apples for starch-to-sugar ratio to how the Chestnut Crabapple tree produced sweet fruit called “lunchbox crabapples” because they were small enough for northern Minnesota miners to stuff into their pockets.
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Gottenborg plants crab apple trees in alternate rows among the trees, as their long blooming period covers any possible pollination gaps.
Over the years, he learned to prune strategically in early spring to guarantee apples grew early, plentifully and yearly. A cut in the right spot basically telegraphs to a tree where to grow a branch. “It releases hormones that will tell the tree what to do a year from now,” he said.
He planted young trees like SweeTango or Honeycrisp that are grafted with cold-hardy Russian rootstock so they can survive the bitter Minnesota winters. “If you just used a Honeycrisp root system, it would never live,” he said.
All of his trees produce eating apples, which command a higher price (about $3/pound, or $120/bushel, vs. cider apples, which cost just $8 a box).
Any fruit that drops early is sold to Renae Mitchell of Juice Box Fargo for juicing. “This year, I don’t know if I’ll have apples for her, just because I don’t have many seconds,” he said.
The apples of his eye
Gottenborg marvels at the condition of this year’s crop, as many of the apples have remained blemish-free. Some of that is due to Gottenborg’s farming methods, which includes applying organic copper instead of common pesticides. And some of it is due to fortuitous weather. (Last year, a hail storm peppered the fruit while it was still small and left dents and dings.)
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He anticipates top sellers this year will be the perennially popular SweeTango, a cross between the sweet, crunchy Honeycrisp and the tart Zestar. “It’s the king of Minnesota apples,” he said.
U of M researchers also married the Honeycrisp and Zestar to create a completely different variety, which is also available here. The Kudos apple is a rich-red fruit with tropical overtones, “like a mango,” Gottenborg said.
Another variety, the SnowSweet, is so highly anticipated that it sells out within a week. The SnowSweet is a cross between the Sharon and the Connell Red. It bears a plummy skin and flesh that is “whiter than paper,” Gottenborg said.
“When you pick it right, it tastes like a caramel apple,” he said. “It’s got this buttery taste.”
By mid-September, Gottenborg also will debut his first crop of First Kiss apples, the Minnesota variety he showed off at the start of our tour. The First Kiss is so new that its trees aren’t available yet to the public. He anticipates the apple that manages to be all things to all people — sweet but tart, crisp but juicy — will be popular.
“This is a pure eating apple,” he said. “If you like Honeycrisp crunch and take a bite of this, it has the juice, but it has tartness that a Honeycrisp doesn’t have.”
Weekend visitors to the orchard this season will have plenty of activities to choose from. Gottenborg has recruited Louis Stetz, past owner of the Tastee Freeze in Pelican Rapids, to make and sell his apple pies.
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Another main attraction is the massive apple press. Gottenborg first spotted it while visiting a California winery, and offered to buy it when he learned the vintners planned to retire. It took a lot of logistical finagling to persuade a trucker to bring it back to Minnesota, but now it is here and fully operational — in all its steampunk glory of chutes and ladders and conveyers and bins. Visitors can take home a free bottle of cider after watching it work its magic. “It’s almost like Willy Wonka,” Gottenborg said, grinning.
He will host the orchard’s third annual Applefest Saturday, Oct. 5, which includes live music.
F-M folks also can buy his apples at LadyBug Acres Veggie Barn, 2110 S University Drive, Fargo; Hildebrandt Farms, 349 Main Ave. E., West Fargo, and Saturdays through October at the Red River Market in downtown Fargo.
They also can order online at Red River Harvest Cooperative at https://www.redriverharvest.com/
When the season is done, Gottenborg will close down the orchard — and get ready for next year.
"When I come here, I'm farming in a sense," he said. "Is it quiet out here? I like that, because I have a busy life. There will be a day when I stop chiropractic, but I'll be out here my whole life, the rest of my life."
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