Smith Orchards owner Scott Smith cited a few reasons why he has enjoyed selling his fruit at Volker Ritzinger’s Park City Farmers Market for the past 20 years.

“I like working with Volker because he’s all about growers, and the reward is you have a great place to sell,” Smith said.

Another reason is how Ritzinger handled the coronavirus pandemic by not only abiding all state and local laws, but also making sure the market’s vendors wore masks and instigated social distancing in order to keep the market going.

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“When COVID came, other markets limited what we were doing, and our sales everywhere else dropped to about half,” Smith said. “But here in Park City, I’ll never forget it, we doubled our sales in 2020 and quadrupled in 2021.”

I was the youngest, the baby or the caboose, whatever you want to call it, out of five kids, and I wanted to do this as soon as I could.” Scott Smith, Smith Orchards owner

Fruit lovers can meet Smith and his family at the Smith Orchards booth every Wednesday this summer from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Park City Farmer’s Market that is set up at Park City Mountain’s First Time lift lot.

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Meeting fruit lovers is one of the perks of the trade for Smith.

“You get a lot of people here who enjoy fruit,” he said. “You get the homegrown people, the locals, and then you have people from the East and West coasts, who are in town doing timeshares, who have tasted fruit everywhere. And they talk about how the tastes are different even though the fruit may be the same.”

Some of Smith Orchards’ offerings include cherries and apricots, as well as hybrids called apriums, pluerries and peachcots.

“Apriums are an apricot and plum hybrid,” Smith said. “A guy named Floyd Zaiger in Modesto, California, hybrids the fruits, and we have 10 different varieties of his we raise.”

Pluerries are hybrids of plums and cherries, and the name peachcot pretty much describes what they are, Smith said.

“Peachcots came about more than 70 years ago when they crossed peaches with apricots,” he said.

Smith Orchards grow all of these fruits, as well as melons and cantaloupes, on a 51-acre farm located in Provo.

“We have about 16 acres inside of deer fence for fruit, and it’s the oldest fruit farm in Utah County according to the Farm Bureau,” Smith said. “For what we raise, it’s perfect. We sell a bit wholesale to restaurants, and for a lot of years our apricots go as far south as St. George or Las Vegas.”

The Smith family has owned the farm property since 1855.

“My great, great-grandfather James H. Smith came across the plains with a company of pioneers, and he arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in October of 1847,” Smith said. “They lived in Cottonwood Canyon until 1855, and then he came to Provo.”

Smith’s other great-grandfather, Peter Wilson Conover, built Fort Utah, which eventually became Provo.

Conover’s daughter married James H.’s son, Henry V. Smith, who was born in 1855, shortly after James H. acquired the land that would feed Smith Orchards.

“Henry V. had my grandfather Jessie Lawrence, who was born in 1889, and my dad, Jessie Norman was born in 1920,” Smith said. “I was born in 1955. So there are five generations who had the farm.”

While Smith was growing up, his grandfather, Jessie Lawrence, oversaw the farm, which contained more than 240 acres.

“Grandpa shipped most of what they raised and harvested out of state, but they did have a fresh market where we would set up at the side of some roads,” he said.

Two of those hot spots included a KOA in Heber and along Canyon Road near Kamas, according to Smith.

“Ken Johnson owned a KOA in Heber, and we would make two trips a day,” he said. “And the stand along Canyon Road was before they built I-15.”

Although Smith had been involved with the family farm since the day he was born, he began manning one of the farm’s fruit stands when he was 5.

“I was the youngest, the baby or the caboose, whatever you want to call it, out of five kids, and I wanted to do this as soon as I could,” he said. “My dad thought I was a pretty good salesman, and he let me run the booth all by myself.”

At that time, no one worried about child abduction, Smith said.

“Things were different back then, and I was probably too ornery, anyway,” he said with a laugh.

These days, Smith Orchards use new technology to maintain their organic and GMO-free fruit.

“I’m so grateful for all we can do with irrigation,” he said. “With micro emitters, you don’t waste a drop of water. You don’t have erosion, and you can go three or four times as far with what you irrigate.”

Expanding the reach of water is important because the farm’s cherry trees alone will drink up 50 gallons a day, according to Smith.

“You have to bank that much water in the ground because they have root systems that go 20 to 40 feet,” he said. “If you don’t have that, it doesn’t size the fruit up.”

That, in turn, affects photosynthesis and carbon, Smith said.

“Carbon is what makes the fruit sweet, so if you can work with the carbon cycle a day or two longer on the tree, it will pack the flavor in,” he said. 

Smith’s insect control, which he calls integrated pest management, is also organic.

“The micronutrients and spray we use on the trees disrupt mating of the bugs like cherry flies,” he said. 

Smith Orchards use what is called GF 120 Naturalyte, an organic compound that attracts fruit-destroying insects.

“We don’t spray it on the fruit,” Smith said. “We spray it on the foliage, and we spray the scaffold limbs. The goal is to attract baby flies because once they get into the GF 120, that’s as far as they go. And If you don’t have adult flies, they can’t mate.”

All of this technology wouldn’t make a difference if the fruit isn’t harvested. And the effort to get the fruit to the Park City Farmer’s Market on a Wednesday starts on Tuesday with a water turn, during which Smith inspects the irrigation system.

“We start about 2 a.m. and clean the filters to make sure we’re getting all the water we can until about 3 a.m.,” he said. “Right now we have a problem with heat. Hundred-degree days don’t jibe with fruit. So you have to be on top of water. Then we turn the water back at 5 a.m.”

After eating breakfast at 6:30 a.m., the family begins to pick the fruit and load it into bins.

“Unless you do it on a large scale, you don’t pick the whole tree at the same time,” he said. “Because of photosynthesis, the fruit on any tree will get ripe first on the south upperside, and then it will get ripe on the southwest side and then on the top.”

The next morning, the family loads the bins of picked fruit into the truck.

“We leave Provo around 8:30 a.m. and get to Park City at 9:30 a.m.,” Smith said. “We’ll sort the fruit when we get here and set up the stand, and we go through probably 60 tons of fruit a year.”

Getting the fruit from farm to market is a family affair that includes Smith, his wife Ginny,  daughter Alice Overson, son-in-law Michael Overson and their toddler son, Bodhi Norman Overson.

“Bodhi’s a good sport, and I’ve never seen a kid who is as good natured,” Smith said. “He goes everywhere, and he’s even with us in his play tent when we’re picking in the orchard. “

Sometimes Smith’s other son Scott comes to help out from time to time.

“We have another son, Jessie, who lives in Vermont with his wife Sam,” Smith said. “So, this is basically 99.9% of how we do it, and it’s nice to have such a great place like the Park City Farmer’s Market to do it with.”