"Ninety-seven percent of insects are good guys. The habitat supports insects that help protect his crops. But we've come to the conclusion that there are advantages to not being so eager," he said. "We've seen a lot of native pollinators come back," said Rasch, who brings in commercial hives each year to pollinate the fruit trees.Ĭutting back on summer mowing helps the pollinators as well, Rasch said, walking through grass filled with purple clover. "People just love them," Rasch said, adding that the flower gardens also are a popular place for photos.īees and other pollinators love the flowers too. They also can walk across a bridge and wander through rows of sunflowers they can pick. A flower garden bursts with colors across a quarter acre with blooms that visitors can cut or buy in the farm market. "It's developed its own momentum."Īs Rasch walks through the Iowa City orchard, he talks about some of the additions that have resonated with visitors. "It's sort of a slippery slope," Rasch said of his family's growing business, which attracted about 265,000 people last year at the Iowa City orchard, market and restaurants. And what we do in that year has expanded." Then it crept out to six months and now it's year-round. "We used to be open three months of the year. We wanted to expand how long we were open," said Rasch, who spent the summer planting apple trees, strawberries and raspberries at the orchard site on the west side of Middlebrook. The family wanted to make the operation more sustainable, both environmentally and financially, said Rasch, who bought the orchard with his wife in 2009. The plan for the new orchard grew organically as Katie and Jacob Goering, the children of Rasch and his wife, Sara Goering, joined the business, bringing their own skills and ideas. "It looked like it wasn't going to happen," he said until Middlebrook's developer added 160 acres to the project. We've dreamed about expanding to Des Moines for a long time," Rasch told the Des Moines Register, adding that he searched for a year without success for a location close to the capital that had scenic rolling hills, ponds and woods. ![]() The goal is to connect people with food and "the land it came from," he said. "The rest will be in fruit trees, berries, pumpkins, flowers, vegetables, but also in prairies and places that are left to express themselves naturally," Rasch said in a video Thursday announcing the project. Wilson's Des Moines metro orchard will sit on 115 acres, with about 30 of them devoted to pasture for livestock. The $800 million mixed residential, retail and commercial project is centered on farming, with the orchard joining a giant community garden. Now, the nearly four-decades-old Iowa City mainstay is taking root in Cumming, a town of about 500 people just southwest of Des Moines, planting a second orchard and building a restaurant and event center in the state's first agrihood, a 900-acre development called Middlebrook. ![]() Moving beyond a traditional "you-pick" apple orchard and pumpkin patch, the family's added strawberries, raspberries and blueberries zinnias, dahlias and other flowers weddings, music and other special events a cider business livestock operation and farm-to-table restaurant and barbecue smokehouse. The warm, sweet apples are among roughly 100 varieties that are the heart of Rasch's growing family business. CUMMING, Iowa (AP) - Paul Rasch pulls a couple of Red Free apples from the trees at Wilson's Orchard & Farm, about 5 miles northeast of Iowa City's downtown.
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