Sweetland Orchard is owned by Mike & Gretchen Perbix and operated with the help of their families and friends. Our Growing Practices The orchard is our back yard, where we spend our time with our daughter and our dogs and where our chickens and turkeys range. We try to use as light a footprint as possible when it comes to pesticides: we use synthetic fungicides to manage apple scab in the spring and early summer, and we use traps and organic, OMRI-listed insecticides to manage insects during the summer. We don’t use herbicides at all and we use as many management practices as we can to reduce our reliance on synthetics.