About us
Kaleidoscope Fruit Ranch is a family-scale orchard, specializing in certified organic Spartan, Ambrosia, Gala, and Pink Lady apples.
We also grow small quantities of certified organic cherries, peaches, table grapes, quince, and prune plums. See our Sales page for more information on availability.
We are committed to growing food into the future. Some of our current and future planting projects include:
Hardy kiwis: Geneva, Ken’s Red (planted in 2021)
Table grapes: Coronation (planted 2023)
Pears: Bosc, Anjou (planted in 2023)
Seabuckthorn (trial begun spring 2023)
Walnuts (planned fall 2023)
Pears: Crimson Calais, Abade Fetale, Bosc, Anjou (planned spring 2024)
Apples: Airlie Red Flesh (planned spring 2025)
Our fruit ranch wraps around the edge of a precarious, sage-covered clay bank in Summerland, BC, within the Okanagan Valley fruit growing region.
Fruit Ranchers Devon Scott-Leslie and Katie Sardinha providing answers to all your burning questions at the Summerland Fall Fair Farmers’ Tailgate party, Autumn 2019.
“Family-scale” means that our orchard is sized and designed to provide a reasonable workload for us, together with one or two seasonal employees.
Farming only 10 acres makes it possible for us to maintain a high degree of knowledge of what is going on in our orchard. We make use of this knowledge to develop targeted, proactive, and precise solutions to pest and nutrient issues. This is how we do our best to respect the sensitive ecology of our diverse landscape.
Because our labour force is small and local, food production on our farm is relatively resilient to large-scale systemic shocks, which can disrupt the imported labour supply required on large farms. For this reason, family-scale farms like ours are integral to our regional food system.
The basis of organic agriculture is healthy soil.
“Healthy soil” is complex soil that supports a diverse microbial community. This microbial community, in turn, helps our trees obtain the water and nutrients they need to grow. Once a soil system has reached a healthy state, nutrient cycling can take place with minimal outside intervention. Getting to this healthy soil state is Goal #1 in organic tree fruit farming.
Goal #2 in organic tree fruit farming is promoting biodiversity on the farm. A more biodiverse farm system supports more pollinators and pest-controllers; these, in turn, improve pollination and prevent any given pest population from getting out of control. The more diversity is present in the farm ecosystem, the better! This, by the way, is why in organic farming we (almost) never aim to eliminate all of a given pest! If we did, what would that pest’s predators eat? Instead, we generally aim to reduce pest populations to below a threshold that is economically significant.
When pest populations do exceed that threshold, we use an Integrated Pest Management strategy to reduce the pest’s abundance.
Organic farming in the modern age is ecological engineering: part science, part art, with a dash of brawn.
Devon and Loki transporting compost.
Julie Sardinha, our Master Farmer
Kaleidoscope Fruit Ranch is certified organic by PACS. In order to maintain this certification, our farm undergoes a rigorous annual audit process in which we demonstrate our ongoing compliance with the Canadian Organic Standards.
