He said they had a good fruit set and the fruit size was good because of the warm weather this season.
Mr Hales was very happy to see the rain last weekend.
"As I have said before, water is the new gold. We always monitor our watering and we haven't gone over our allocation. We only water when AgFirst tell us to. They constantly monitor the ground water moisture levels.
"The rain helped with our fruit size. No more irrigating for that block of trees [where our celebrity tree is]. I couldn't have asked for better timing."
Since December our celebrity tree has had mandatory insecticide sprays and is "in good health".
Harvest timing is crucial. If the apples are picked too early they are too starchy and don't keep well in cool stores.
Testing begins around two weeks before picking.
"We maturity test by picking 20 apples which go to our lab. They are tested for four things, background colour, fruit pressure, brix (sugar levels) and starch.
Iodine is sprayed on the fruit and the blacker the apple is the less likely it is ready to harvest.
"Before picking all fruit are checked to make sure all rules are followed. This involves clearing the spray diaries to make sure all pre-harvest intervals (PHIs) are strictly followed. This allows our customers, locally and internationally, to have confidence in eating a quality, safe piece of fruit."
So our celebrity tree was picked on Thursday. There were 482 apples on the tree which Mr Hales said "was not bad considering it was done only with chemical thinning and not one cent was spent on hand thinning".
Mr Hales is also thrilled with the stonefruit harvest this year. "I couldn't have asked for a better season. We have New Zealand's largest individual nectarine orchard - that's pretty special."
This week Mr Hales and his crew also picked apples from a new style of twin trees on a block in Ruapahia Rd.
"It is literally a wall of fruit. The trees are only three years old and smaller in size than usual. There is 40 tonnes of fruit per hectare. That's pretty amazing. We used white cloth under the trees to reflect light back into the tree so the apples get full wrap-around colour.
"We are obviously flat out at the moment and have been since the beginning of the year."
However, Mr Hales didn't have a very good start to 2017. He stepped into a hole and partially tore his Achilles tendon.
"It was a terrible time but I'm on the mend now," he laughed.
We will be following our apples through the packing sheds and on their final journey.
Our tree:
* The imperial gala apple tree that I will be following through to the 2017 harvest is on a Johnny Appleseed orchard in Elwood Rd.
* Johnny Appleseed is owned by the Paynter family, who started growing apples and stonefruit in Stoke, Nelson, in the 1860s. In the early 1900s they moved to Havelock North and started growing in Hawke's Bay. The Paynter family are fifth-generation growers. In the 1970s John Paynter started the Yummy brand, which was to differentiate their stonefruit from other growers'.
