hard cider

How to Make Bradford/Callery Pear Less Invasive.

/ elizapples / 1 Comment
Bird predation given fruit width.png

In my last essay, In Defense of Bradford Pear, I showed the above chart from Australia that correlated fruit size with bird species. Similar charts or descriptions have been found in publications from New Zealand, Spain, Japan and in the US, as well. Based on the correlation of fruit consumption with fruit size, I’ve decided to elaborate on the last essay in order to practically address Callery/Bradford pear invasiveness in the US in the best way I can.

Cedar Waxwing eating Pyrus calleryana in winter. Photo from Pilot Online

Due to Callery’s fruit size attracting our native songbirds, like American robins, cedar waxwings and gray catbirds, we can’t stop them from eating the little pears and pooping in marginalized areas like fencelines and worn out pastures. To think we can kill enough Callery pear to make a difference is a lesson in futility because 1.) We live in the United States and you can’t go kill a neighbor’s tree in the name of INVASIVES if they don’t want you to and 2.) Each tree produces thousands of fruits. So, with that said, here are my top solutions to sustainably make Callery pear less invasive and more useful.

1.) Citizen Breeding. What makes Callery pear invasive is its ability to produce copious amounts of small fruits, which birds then eat and distribute all over the place. It seems logical, then, to want to try and breed larger fruits into our populations of Callery in order to stop the spread by birds. In order to reduce invasiveness by around 80%, all it takes is getting progeny from the Callery/Bradford trees to produce fruits that are around an inch (25mm) in diameter. How do we do that? Allow them to hybridize with larger fruiting pears so the seeds dispersed by birds will have a higher likelihood of growing larger fruits…thus halting the invasion cycle.

What is needed to hybridize these pears and get them larger? For starters, you’re going to need a collection of pears that bloom at the same time as Callery, which is quite early. Russian/Cold Climate and early Asian pears are likely your best bet for this, so I went through the GRIN database (taxpayer funded genetic repositories) and have made a starter-list (there are a bunch more):

PI 541904- Seuri Li
PI 45845- Yaguang Li
PI 437051- Jubilee (cold hardy)
PI 541925- Kor 2
PI 267863- Pingo Li
PI 134606- Tioma (cold hardy)
PI 278727- La Providence
PI 278731- Sivaganga Estate
PI 307497- Seu Ri
PI 292377- Ranniaia Mleevskaia (cold hardy)
PI 541760- Chieh li x Japanese Golden Russet
PI 278729- Samy’s Estate
PI 541761- Chieh Li x Japanese Golden Russet 2
PI 541905- Szumi
PI 127715- Krylov (cold hardy)
PI 541326- Angelica Di Saonara
PI 324028- B-52 (cold hardy)
PI 541290- Mag 1 (cold hardy)
PI 132103- Shu Li
PI 312509- Tse Li

Appreciate this list? Help fund this type of work and more by purchasing charcuterie from www.hogtree.com.

You can request free scions online from September 1 to February 1 of every year from GRIN. You can also probably buy many of these cultivars online. From there, I highly recommend you share scions of these for free every winter, as I plan to do, in order to help infuse larger fruiting genetics into Calleryana.

You might notice there are a bunch of Asian pears in that list and you might think: Eliza, those pears are super fireblight susceptible! And you are right, of course, but think of it this way: MANY trees that are listed as fireblight susceptible are actually quite tolerant to FB once they are established and reaching sexual maturity. With Callery being an amazingly fireblight tolerant rootstock, this should help to get your topworked trees past the first 2 years of heightened susceptibility so they can start to fruit. Once these Asian pears intermingle with Callery, there are two possible outcomes:

1.) The hybrid offspring are more fireblight tolerant than the grafted Asian pearent’s tolerance

2.) The hybrid offspring is less tolerant to fireblight than the grafted Asian parent’s tolerance and will probably succumb to the disease and die on its own.

Either are a win-win, really.

Next, you’re gonna need to go into your pear thicket and do some cutting and grafting. There are two scenarios I see often:

1.) Field full of Callery: If you have a thick field of calleryana, I would recommend getting a forestry mulcher in and cut/mulch rows into the existing Callery stand. Then, run the mulcher to cut out trees within the rows left standing so the remaining are at 15 foot spacings. Top the trees you’ve left behind above deer browse ( throw into the alley and run over those, too, with the mulcher) and graft on the early blooming large fruited cultivars.

2.) Fenceline/Border with Callery: This is the scenario We’ve been dealing with over the past few years along the farm fenceline. First thing I do is flag the trees I want to keep, which are at 15 foot spacings along the fence. Then we cut out and chip all the non-flagged callery trees using my neighbor’s chipper (I mulch my orchard with callery pear wood chips). While we are cutting out the non-flagged trees, I go ahead and also cut the tops out of the flagged trees. I pick a height that is above deer browse height and also has a lot of clear wood without branches, because that helps with grafting. In April (I’m in zone 7a), I make fresh cuts on the remaining pear trees and topwork all of them to fruiting cultivars. We’ve been doing this for 3 years and 2018’s topworked pears will be producing fruit this year.

Topworked fenceline callery pear to a local french heirloom cultivar. This was grafted in April of 2021
Topworked fenceline callery pear to a local french heirloom cultivar. This was grafted in April of 2021. This is a smaller tree. I’ve topworked 7″ trees as well with amazing take.

This is totally doable and the result? An orchard of pears! You’d have to cut the tree down anyway if you were going to spray it, so why not turn it into a producing pear tree of value? My neighbors even pitched in to help us cut and chip in the name of supporting my vision and also getting rid of the fruiting portion of the Callery trees.

In two years, your top-worked pears will be flowering and the bees will mingle between surrounding landscape Callery/Bradford pears that weren’t able to be cut down and the large-fruited cultivars you have grafted. With callery pears being pollinated with the list of pears above, your chances of getting larger fruit to come up from the fertilized seed will exponentially increase, limiting its invasiveness if the fruit is an inch or larger in diameter.

2.) Use them as rootstocks! Every Callery pear growing is automatically the best pear rootstock around. For all of you people out there who are inundated with deer pressure, graft to the Callery pears to any pear you’d like (or Winter Banana apple) above the deer browse line. Sure, you’ll get lots of leafy re-growth off the trunk for a few years (which the deer or other livestock eat as tender shoots), but its also really easy to remove new growth with your hands or slightly older growth with pruners, and new shoots don’t have thorns. You’ll start to get fruit in 2-3 years.

One of the main reasons why Callery didn’t catch on as a rootstock, aside from root propagation failures and hardiness, is that they don’t produce dessert fruit (fruit meant for out of hand eating). This is the same reason why we’ve lost SO MANY fruit cultivars in the last 100 years. If you weren’t a dessert cultivar chosen by the cooperative extension to be grown in the early 20th century, you were phased out. However, in today’s markets, I believe large fruited Callery pear hybrids really have a chance in fermentation, specifically cider blends and perry (cider made from pears). They are high in sugar (over 16% brix on average for the 200 or so hybridized trees I’ve evaluated), and run the gamut in acidity, tannins, aromatics and unusual characteristics. Since these trees are so disease and pest tolerant, which allows them to grow and produce copious amounts of fruit without the hand of humans or chemicals, they stand to produce the most sustainable fruits and alcohol in humid temperate climates. We need more people working with them in order to make this happen because they aren’t apples and they need their own methods.

If you’d like to see more essays in general (I literally have 75 in draft form and many more in my brain), my time will need to be supported. You can do this through the donate button above or buy my company’s charcuterie from HogTree

The last essay left me with a bunch of hate mail and loads of baseless claims. In future essays, I’ll be debunking many of these claims in order to try and bring about a full picture. With that said, please send your strong opinions to fruitandfodder@gmail.com

Of Note: throughout the South and Southern New England, I have been noticing spontaneous hybridization in the “wild” between P. calleryana with P. communis (French) and/or P. pyrifolia (Asian). These trees have much larger fruits, usually golfball sized or larger, and are often loaded with fruits dripping from the trees because Callery genetics are heavy lateral bearers (perhaps an indicator phenotype for these hybrids). No research that I can find has evaluated the genetics of these larger fruited callery-like pears to see what exactly they are crossed with, but I’m happy to help supply specimens if anyone out there takes an interest.

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The Launch of HogTree

/ elizapples / 11 Comments

Last year I went through a collapse. The best I can describe it is the imagery of me walking down a dirt road while being shot with arrows. I tried to pull them out and fight back with the first few shots, but more shots  continued to hit and sink into my flesh. By late fall, the fight was gone in me. I was bleeding out and in a dark place. I had no choice but to let the darkness envelop me.

During this period of time, I questioned myself, my life, my passions. I felt hollow. What was it all for? If I am to pursue my passions, will I always suffer like this? And how much more can I handle before it’s no longer worth it?  As these questions floated by me in the darkness, I heard a voice whisper: “Eliza, you are here to love apples.”

It wasn’t the first time and I have a feeling it won’t be the last time that apples pull me out of depression. Slowly and incrementally, I started to give myself time to think about the things I loved and the patterns of my life. With each passing day of thinking about what I loved, business plans emerged. Caution and negative feelings turned into strategy. Conducting a personal inventory on what I had in my possession turned into talks, workshops, and mulberry trees for sale. When put all together, HogTree emerged.

HogTree Logo

First of all, what is HogTree? 

HogTree is a diversified orchard system designed and synched to the rotation and feeding of livestock while also growing commercial process fruit. Imagine a paddock filled with trees that drop fruit/nuts at the same time. Now imagine many paddocks incrementally dropping fruit from May through November. That is HogTree.

I have mulberry cultivars that will drop fruit from May through July. I have around 30 apple cultivars that, when put in order, will drop fruit from late June through November. I have special genetics gathered from notable Quaker horticulturalists like J. Russell Smith, John Hershey and Yardley Taylor to add to this system as well, including: persimmons, chinquapins, chestnuts, pears, pecans, oaks and hickories. In essence, HogTree is a practical arboretum designed to preserve rare or otherwise unwanted cultivars in order to feed livestock…and more.

Screen Shot 2018-04-05 at 10.30.50 AM

Summer drop scheme for apples in my area.

Why would you design an orchard to feed livestock? Because that’s the first income layer. If you are going to start an orchard, you’ll need to make some income during the time it takes for the orchard to start bearing (This is also important when trying to get a loan from the bank).  Some people grow annual vegetables and I think that’s perfectly fine, however I do not want to spend all of my time bending over. I’m a much happier person if I reach up rather than down. I also want to incorporate an income stream which will help manage the orchard throughout its lifetime. After a few years of having pigs in orchards, I’ve discovered that pigs do the job of an unskilled intern and deposit fertility in the process.

What about the second layer? That’s commercial process fruit production. Interspersed within these paddocks in inventive ways are cultivars which grow well for me in this area and have a high quality in value-added markets. These fruits will be mostly managed by livestock with a few steps of intervention coming from humans. Though it’s 5-6 years out, I’ve already promised this fruit to amazing makers/friends/business people who will not only treasure this fruit and turn it into the best product they can, but who also give a shit about our impacts on this earth and humanity. My fruit will go towards producing products with a positive and aware message.

Ugly Apples

Before I go to the next layer, I also need to put out a disclaimer. When I first got into apples, I wanted to grow alllll the varieties. I wanted to find uses for them all, so people could feel as rich as I felt when having access to hundreds of varieties/tastes/textures/uses.  I started growing heirloom apples for cider because they otherwise had no market due to natural cosmetic blemishes/weirdness, but were too special and delicious to me to not be given a purpose. In growing them for livestock first, process second, I’m giving them a new niche.

Is there a third layer?  Yes, the nursery layer. This year I’m selling the Hicks Everbearing Mulberry along with what we think is Stubbs Everbearing Mulberry (positive ID coming next month (May)) through HogTree. Both were championed by J. Russell Smith and John Hershey for being the original “Hog Trees,” with each tree responsible for feeding pigs and chickens for 3+ months in the South.  I sold 250 newly grafted trees in January, which are shipping out now, but this coming winter I will be selling hundreds more as 4-5 foot tall trees. In the next few years, I’ll start to sell the apples, chestnuts, chinquapins and persimmons that are part of my drop scheme. HogTree is an orchard system.  In selling these trees, I’m selling the order in which they belong in the scheme.

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Fourth Layer? Of course!:  Talks. Workshops. Tours. Helping people to learn from my mistakes. U-Pick (If you have a system designed to efficiently rotate livestock through, humans are no different).

There are more layers, but this is the 5 year layout as of right now. Now to reality!

What do I have right now? I have an 8 month lease on 10 acres in Loudoun County, Northern Virginia. The 8 month lease is so I can prep the ground for orchards to go in this winter with pigs (an annual income), while also keeping  a healthy dose of caution related to land tenure. In 8 months, the landlord and I should be able to see if it’s a good fit and will then discuss a long-term lease.  I’ve been burned badly in regards to land tenure and much like being in a romantic relationship, I do not feel comfortable planting trees which will be around for my lifetime after the first couple dates between me and the landlord. Working with pigs as my first activity on this new property feels safe, whole and doable.

10 pigs will be arriving in early May from David Crafton, of 6 Oaks Farm. He is a passionate wealth of information and all of his pigs are from pasture genetics, so they contain the necessary gut biome to raise them in an orchard-in-the-making setting. He has been working for years to develop his own breed, the Carolina Forest Spot Hog, but in waiting for this breed I’m receiving a heritage-breed mix from him largely consisting of a large black x tamworth cross and bluebutt crosses. The goal is 200+ pounds of delicious marbled red meat in 7 months with them eating 90% pasture/fodder. I’m excited to work with them.

rsz_screen_shot_2018-04-22_at_42052_pm

With that said, this timeline is how I currently predict HogTree will be developed in the next few years:

Year 1: The land is responsibly “pigged,” removing grubs, spreading minerals/nutrients and planting cover crops after them in order to prep the ground for orchard plantings. This is also a trial run for a long-term lease with the landowner. These pigs will be supplemented with some off-farm feed (non gmo peas, barley and whey mostly) because they are working to transition a blank canvas/pasture into an orchard and will need some supplement to grow within my 7 month time frame. HogTree the nursery sells mulberry trees online.

Year 2: (If pig year 1 pans out, otherwise repeat yr 1 on new piece of property), I will be planting fodder trees and fruit tree rootstock. Considering fodder trees,  I have the genetics for trees whose leaves are as nutritious as alfalfa and way more drought tolerant, providing high digestibility/minerality and nutrition when the grass starts to underperform. These trees will be harvested annually starting in year 3. HogTree continues to sell mulberries online.

Year 3: The fruit tree rootstocks will be topworked (grafted). In addition to pasture, the pigs will be eating tree fodder and early season mulberry fruit by this point.  HogTree sells summer apples and mulberry trees online.

Year 4: Pigs will hopefully start to taste their first apples off some trees. They will continue to eat pasture and leaf fodder from the trees. The full gamut of fruit trees will be available through HogTree.

Year 5+: Pigs will be fed/fattened/finished off tree leaves, fruit, nuts and pasture. Harvests for process fruits will begin.

*In order to make this vision and business plan work, I will need the investment of consumers. That means I am opening up a waiting list for 20lb box/quarter/half/whole hogs for the 2018 year. Please realize that in buying this pork, you are supporting the future of HogTree’s orchard system, which will show the important links between animals and orchards. Please consider buying pork from me if you want to see HogTree set this orchard system into motion. Click here to get on the waiting list!*

Update: Support my writings and more through the purchase of charcuterie at www.hogtree.com

HogTree Logo

Rootstocks: Do they impact flavor?

/ elizapples / 16 Comments

Earlier this year, as I was doing some research on the effects of grafting apple varieties to Malus angustifolia (southern crabapple), I kept running across interesting accounts of noticeable changes to the apple varieties when grafted to crabapples. One of these changes is in flavor, which is what I’m writing about today.

This is the original snippet that sparked my interest. Why? Because this dude back in the 1800s is telling me that when he took the Bethlehemite apple, a dessert/culinary apple from Ohio, and grafted it to a crabapple rootstock, he got something different from the original variety. The grafted Bethlehemite apple had developed some astringency. Astringency is the key word here.

OMG, DID THIS GUY TURN A DESSERT APPLE INTO A CIDER APPLE BY GRAFTING IT ONTO A CRAB ROOTSTOCK?

This thought has rumbled around in my head for the better part of this year and whenever I had a moment to sit at the computer and not read my emails, I researched this topic a bit more. First, I went back in history (via google books) to find more testimonials of these findings. Here are a few:

1867:

1871:

1873:

1889:

 

I could go on, but there are many, many testimonials in favor of rootstock having a flavorful impact on the grafted variety. There were some naysayers, who basically just said “this can’t be so” and changed the subject. But all in all, my historical research has been in favor of a rootstock’s ability to change flavor in apple varieties.

Eager to pursue this topic, I started looking up scientific papers on the subject and started with this, Cornell’s research on nutrient uptake by different rootstocks.  The thoughts and questions of the horticulturalists back in the 1800s seem to still align with the questions of today, as seen in this conclusion:

screen-shot-2016-12-04-at-7-57-50-pm

“The ability to match the nutritional requirements of a scion cultivar to a specially tuned rootstock…” COULD, in my opinion, create a cider apple out of a friggin’ dessert fruit.

Positive, I kept up the research and found considerable evidence in citrus fruit that rootstocks can change the flavor of the fruit. Here. Here. And Here.

This study, which looked at an apple rootstock’s impact on triterpene (cancer and immune disease prevention chemical compounds) found this:

“The largest differences in triterpene content were found between rootstocks. The results showed that both at harvest time, and after cold storage except the first harvest time samples, the apples from rootstock MM106 had significantly higher triterpene content compared with those from M9; … Selecting suitable rootstock might increase the triterpene content in apple peel in practice production.”

And this study on different rootstock’s impact on peaches showed that the variety ‘Suncrest’ on Julior (rootstock) and GF677 (rootstock), followed by Ishtara (rootstock), produced fruit with the greatest antioxidant activities and total phenolic contents. The ‘Suncrest’ on Citation (rootstock) and, especially, Barrier1 (rootstock) had reduced nutritional values of the fruit.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN? 

Right now, everyone I know who is planting a cider orchard is planting on known rootstocks like the MM series or the Geneva $eries. With these rootstocks, we know what size of tree we’ll get and we generally know when it will start cropping apples. This is valuable information because we want order and sense in our orchards. We also know the disease tolerances of each rootstock, which have been known to convey some resistance to the apple scion, and that’s all well and good. There are many knowns of these rootstocks because they’ve been extensively studied…for dessert fruit. But what about cider fruit? How many rootstocks have been thrown out in university trials for imparting astringency to an apple? Probably a lot. But what if this is what we’re after?!

If someone came to my farm peddling their wares and told me that they could take my dessert apple and turn it into a cider apple with one of their amazing magical rootstocks, I would buy it. I’m sure it would be a hit. This is why we have started in on the private research of grafting apple varieties to different rootstocks for the purpose of flavor/nutrient evaluation (as well as growth influences, which is another blog entry).

Currently, my partner and I have Malus angustifolia (southern crab), Malus baccata (Siberian crab), own-root, M7 and M111 trees grafted in our nursery to the same variety. These will soon get planted out at the farm in an area set up for evaluation. This, I believe, is another untouched frontier whose findings could be incredible for the future of growing superfruits, having value-added rootstocks, and growing with lower inputs.

So far, the science and the observations are there. There’s much more to learn, but why not start in on the fun?

 

watercore: a natural additive for hard cider in the south

/ elizapples / 3 Comments
I remember my first encounter with the “serious physiological disorder” called watercore. I was at an heirloom apple event in New Zealand, staring at a table full of old British varieties trying to decide which one to buy and eat first. I settled on a little russeted apple called Pitmaston Pineapple and once in hand, I took a large bite out of it.  The inside, to my surprise, looked like this:
watercored_cox
Photo Credit to Adams Apples
The taste was very sweet. A different kind of sweet, though, and it took me a year to come back around to figuring it out. This variety of apple, along with many other varieties, is susceptible to a “disorder” called watercore.
To the dessert grower, this “disorder” is bad news. Most people don’t want to bite into an apple which appears to have a water-soaked flesh because we’ve been taught that anything other than the usual white-crisp-juicy is to be avoided. However! I’m here to tell a different story, potentially one for the watery underdogs. A hopeful cider apple story.
First, let me give you some background on watercore…
To the apple industry, watercore is considered a “nonparasitic disease,” where the apple appears to have a water-soaked flesh. This “disease” takes shape in all apple growing regions of the US and seemingly has a few variants:
  1. Caused by a lack of water or droughty conditions
  2. Caused by a combination of genetics, the fruit being mature or overly mature, and sunscald due to intense heat.  
  3. Low calcium in your soils (which could go back to genetics since there are some calcium hungry cultivars, like Albemarle Pippin, which is known for watercore)
Why is it considered a disease? The brunt of it comes down to long-term storage. Apple packing houses aren’t able to store the apples with severe watercore because the tissues will eventually start to break down, causing the flesh to turn brown (and thus marked as unsaleable).  Another reason why it’s a bit of a bother to the apple industry is detection. Aside from some relatively recent research on detection methods, watercore has remained undetectable by the apple industry without the use of a knife (or teeth) to cut into the apple.
Like with the other apple diseases affecting the US, those with watercore are deemed as waste and dumped.  In my affinity for looking at common diseases as heroes of value-added products rather than boons to the established industry, I’m excited about watercore. Here’s why:
430-120176image20water20core20120correct
The area above that looks water-soaked is actually where the apple has flooded its air spaces with a solution of sorbitol,  a non-fermentable sugar alcohol which is not technically a sugar. According to Claude Jolicoeur’s Book, The New Cider Maker’s Handbook, sorbitol has a sweetening effect that amounts to about half the effect of white sugar. This means that when a cider or perry (cider made from pears) is fermented dry (the yeast eat almost all of the available sugar and convert it to alcohol), the presence of sorbitol would still have a sweetening effect on the dry cider (because it doesn’t ferment).
The idea of a completely dry cider with a nice, fruity, slightly sweet finish is very appetizing to me and happens to fall in line with my low-input management thoughts from fruit to bottle. Here’s my thought process (and some background story) on this one:
A long time ago, I was helping out in a cider house and they were sending a finished cider through a sterile (sulfited) filter to both strain the yeast from the bottle, but also to prevent any yeast that managed to slip through from reproducing.  I was asked to taste the water being sent through the filter to detect the sulfur taste and the very moment when that sulfur water hit my lips, I was struck with an immediate and very scary asthma attack. That day I learned that I’m in the 1% of Americans who are actually allergic to sulfites and ever since, I’ve been a canary in a coal mine with respects to unbound sulfites in alcohol and suffice it to say, I’m not a fan of the additive. It has ruined many a cider/beer/wine for me due to my lungs closing up.
But why the use of a filter soaked in sulfites in the first place? When a cider is fermented dry, there is little fear of the cider/bottle of cider becoming unstable because all of the sugar in the cider has been consumed and turned into alcohol.  If cider is bottled and has both alive yeast and sugar, the cider will continue to change in taste as the yeast convert the sugar to alcohol and more carbon dioxide is being created, which has been known to cause exploding bottles. In this situation, the sterile filter was being used because the cider was going to be backsweetened (the addition of sugar after fermentation) with apple concentrate to give the final product some sweetness (Americans love sweet). To recap: Backsweetening + yeast= off flavors and potential explosions. Backsweetening + filter + sulfites= a sweetened cider with less fear of re-fermentation.
What does this have to do with sorbitol and watercore? A higher presence of sorbitol in a cider means my cider can be fermented completely dry (free of sugar) while maintaining a minimal sweetness without fear of re-fermentation. Eliminating this fear of re-fermentation means that I can eliminate sulfites from the back end of my cidermaking process.
Watercore= Higher Sorbitol Content= Residual Sweetness in a Dry Cider With Less Chemical Inputs. ding. Ding. DING!
Ok, so let’s say that I’m sold on experimenting with this sorbitol/cider thing and I want to grow fruit in order to make this product. Being in the South, I have a lot of hope for achieving such a thing because the causal agents are: Intense heat, lots of sun (sunburn), low calcium, droughty conditions, and genetics.
In designing an orchard and keeping sorbitol production in mind, I would entertain the idea of going towards more of a dwarf set-up, perhaps even a trelli$ set-up on a southwestern facing slope. We’re talking steaming hot, dry, with the trelli$ed fruit being exposed to intense sun.  On top of that, the apple system would be on irrigation which would allow you to regulate the amount of water and when to apply it. I’d also layout the orchard in a way which would drain quickly (maybe even a keyline design ;-)). Next, I’d choose varieties which are prone to watercore and also those that tend to hang on the trees rather than drop (which is a good genetic trait for apples in the South, anyways). Apples heading towards being overripe are at risk of watercore, so those that hold on are perfect candidates.
If you wanted to experiment with trying to intensify sunlight into a non-trellised tree, I would still try and have super quick water drainage off your site and have a SW aspect, but you could also try some extreme things like spraying all the leaves off your tree in late summer. I’ve done this for reasons of reducing vigor by using a 501 biodynamic prep, which I sprayed in late summer and managed to burn a BUNCH of the leaves off the tree…on purpose. I think the trick with this is in having a very vigorous tree and also determining the point of no return for apple ripening (if such a thing exists). The spray I applied in mid-August slowed the ripening scheme, which doesn’t help my sorbitol thoughts. However! It makes sense to me that reducing the leaf load on the tree would certainly help the sun scald situation.
I’ve never heard of anyone trying to grow apples with watercore on purpose, but why not? In straying from dessert fruit growing, managing for a certain product like cider could give regions like the South a distinctive taste in their products. We often think about this in terms of varieties and landraces,  which are certainly a part of it. But let’s try and capture our environment and create a truly unique product which describes our place in every way.
*This essay has been in the works for far too long and I decided to push it through today. I’ll likely go back over it an link to things stored on my computer and correct spelling/grammar.*

 

 

Nature’s Secret: We May Have Totally Underestimated Scarred Fruit

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marred-apples-market

A spin-off article from yesterday’s NPR article on eating ugly fruit, this time on weather.com! I’m so psyched this is getting attention. It’s only the beginning!!

Let’s face it: ugly fruit gets a bad rap. It’s often left behind at grocery stores and sold at steep discounts at farmers markets. More often than not, it gets tossed on top of an ever-growing pile of wasted produce.

But it turns out, these ugly fruits are fine to eat – and they may even be more nutritious.

 

Read more: Here!

Beneath An Ugly Outside, Marred Fruit May Pack More Nutrition

/ elizapples / 1 Comment

 NPR wrote an article about #eatuglyapples AND IT ALL STARTED WITH THIS BLOG! 

Unsightly scars on the outside of fruit might reflect higher nutrition within.
April 26, 20163:13 PM ET

Unsightly scars on the outside of fruit might reflect higher nutrition within.

Daniela White Images/Getty Images

When orchardist Eliza Greenman walks through a field of apple trees and gazes upon a pocked array of blemished and buckled fruits — scarred from fighting fungus, heat and pests — she feels a little thrill of joy. “I’m absolutely infatuated with the idea of stress in an orchard,” says Greenman, who custom grafts and grows pesticide-free hard cider apples in Hamilton, Va. These forlorn, scabbed apples, says Greenman, may actually be sweeter.

 

Read more, HERE.

Cider And Heirloom Apple Vigor: An Hypothesis

/ elizapples / 4 Comments

Recently, I was on the phone with a mentor and we were discussing hedgerows (my new pet project, aside from brewing all sorts of alcohol). With some of the species I mentioned, I was told that livestock would eat them down to nothing and render the hedgerow useless. After having a few tree species rejected, I frustratingly asked: “What if I planted my hedgerows with invasives like multi-flora rose, then?!”

Without any hesitation, my mentor said: “Invasives like multi-flora rose are very delicious to many animals, like my goats.  You might be suggesting invasive plants for your hedgerow because they are vigorous and seem to outcompete everything else, but try to think about vigor from another perspective. If plants with high vigor are also the most sought after by animals, don’t you think that vigor might be an evolutionary trait to survive browse?”

This is the first time I’ve heard this perspective on invasives and I’ve really enjoyed thinking about it. After some minimal research, I found out that the subject is still debated today by ecologists as the “plant vigor hypothesis.” Generally speaking, vigorous plants have higher nutrient densities than non-vigorous plants, so herbivores are more prone to eat them. However! If the very vigorous cultivars are able to put on a bunch of girth, many herbivores aren’t able to eat the whole thing because of their jaw size.

This, of course, has got me thinking about apples. Here’s why.

In many essays on this blog, I’ve talked about how I consider many cider and heirloom cultivars to be very vigorous as compared to most of the grocery store cultivars. Vigorous cultivars are harder to prune, occupy more space (so less trees per acre), have issues with vegetative vs fruit bud proportions, etc. In general, they are harder to grow.  After reading more about this “plant vigor hypothesis,” I wonder if there is a connection between vigor and nutrient density in apples cultivars?

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From an evolutionary standpoint, a correlation between vigor and nutrient density makes sense to me. Many wild crab apples in the US have much higher tannins (aka polyphenols, which =nutrition density) than cultivated varieties. This is from the many lifetimes spent co-evolving with insects and herbivores who are trying to eat them. From observing crabapples in the “wild” and planted in landscapes, it seems as if many trees have low vigor and perhaps this is because they have evolved to have an unpalatable deterrence for animals and humans alike?

In hard cider, many of the wild crabs are too much for our palates to handle and though very nutritious, they will cause a harsh and likely negative consumer experience. So what have we done? Over time, cider drinkers/makers/apple growers have selected cultivars to grow which are palatable to the consumer, but also contain enough tannins (or polyphenols, or natural defense) to give the cider some substance.  Could it be that in selecting not-so-astringent apple cultivars for eating/drinking, we’re unknowingly selecting for more tree vigor? If the apple cultivar hasn’t evolved enough to deter herbivores through astringent taste, then do genetics dictate that it must rely on vigor to survive? 

These sorts of questions make me excited and I’ll keep learning about these processes in order to try and uncover different management ideas that don’t involve regulating vigor through the use of dwarfing rootstocks, black magic hormonal potions like Apogee (which converts vegetative buds into fruiting buds), and planting in light soils. All of those management aspects, I suspect, are making the vigorous cultivars less vigorous/more fibrous/less nutrient dense.

Thoughts to be continued, but in the meantime here are a few off the top of my head:

Thought 1: Pruning extremely vigorous varieties like an herbivore in order to get faster fruit set?

Thought 2: Continuing to fruit explore to find mixes of wild x cultivated which hit high nutrient densities, palatability, and lower vigor.  (I’m writing a fruit exploring book about how to do this at the moment)

Thought 3: Making crabapples a significant part of my home breeding program.

 

 

Stress: The New Bittersweet? (A Radical Orchardist Part 2)

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It seems like it has rained every day for the past month in the Champlain Valley of New York and Vermont. Combined with 70-80 degree temperatures, the fungal population couldn’t be happier. It’s like one continual fungal feast over here, and I couldn’t be more psyched. Why? Because I’m absolutely infatuated with the idea of stress in an orchard.

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In A Radical Orchardist: Part One (which I encourage the reader to read before pursuing this essay), I re-introduced my thoughts about how apple scab, a fungal disease, increases the brix (sugar content) of the apple, which translates into a higher alcohol content once fermented. For hard cider purposes, I thought, perhaps we shouldn’t be spraying-late season fungicides for cosmetic fungal diseases like apple scab, since lingering fungicide residue has been known to kill the ferment (the yeasts) in the wine and cider realms. I also re-introduced the idea of managing apple scab as a value-added disease for cider apples, a thought that is about as radical as it gets these days in the apple world. A thought that I’m still excited to explore and understand in order to embrace it or dismiss it.

This year, I’ve been actively looking for scientific research on the effects scab has on apples, from a nutritional standpoint. I want to know how the apple reacts to scab; What does that fight look like? Does a stressing agent like apple scab bring about super fruits? This research is slow, mostly due to the fact that I don’t have access to any scientific journals, but it’s progressing and has me optimistic. The following is a report on my findings and thoughts.

Stress: The New Bittersweet?

My journey started when I found a paper about the effects of apple scab on the peel of an apple. The article, which can be found here and simply broken down here, stated that a peel covered with scab lesions is higher in polyphenols than one not covered in scab. What’s the big deal? Quite a bit, actually. This is a big deal. Screen Shot 2015-07-01 at 3.27.42 PMScreen Shot 2015-07-01 at 3.28.21 PM

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Phenols, such as chlorogenic acid (as seen in the top graph), are classified as antioxidants, meaning  that they tend to prevent or neutralize the damaging effects of free radicals in the body. Free radicals are chemicals that have the potential to cause damage to cells and tissues in the body.  Many of the phenols mentioned in the paper above are related to resveratrol (the polyphenol found in red wine which got a lot of news a while back for making wine drinking a life-saving activity). When researched in the skin of non-scabby red apples (aka: what you see in a grocery store), they were found to contain powerful antioxidant capacities, along with anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, and cardio-protective properties.

Now, take those phenolic values from the skin of the non-scabby red apple and multiply them by at least 3+ times. That new value is one coming from an apple with scab infection. To further push this point, this article suggests :

The way in which orchards are managed can influence the amount of phenolics, as shown by Veberic et al. (2005), who reported that organically grown apples had somewhat higher amounts of phenolics as compared with traditionally grown apples. These authors concluded that this is probably because organically grown apples face more stressing conditions, for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are not used.

Folks, this is superfood status and at the very least, people should try to source ugly organic apples and eat the peels. Research says that doing so might save your life someday.

Now, to project these findings onto cider…

What makes a cider apple a cider apple? The quick universal answer most people know is that it’s in the tannin. Tannin is a collection of phenols such as chlorogenic acid, phloridzin, epicatechin and the procyanidins (source). Only the procyanidins are considered “true tannins” because they have the ability to tan things like animal hides and give the drying sensation we recognize as astringency (aka: the sensation you get when you stick an acorn in your mouth). For the most part, bittersweet apples have the most tannins, or phenolics, and dessert apples have the least.

https-::books.google.com:books?id=jZvqBwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA622&dq=plant%20polyphenols&pg=PA829#v=onepage&q=apple&f=false

https-::books.google.com:books?id=jZvqBwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA622&dq=plant%20polyphenols&pg=PA829#v=onepage&q=apple&f=false

A bittersweet apple, taken from this Serious Eats article, is described below:

If there is one style of apple prized above all others by American cider makers, it’s the bittersweet apple. Affectionately referred to as a “spitter,” these apples are low in acid, high in tannin, and impart the classic flavor of finer French and English ciders. At first bite, most would consider bittersweet fruit inedible. But what is ill suited for the fruit bowl is ideal for the cider press.

For the most part, America’s high acid, high sugar apple crop provides all the fuel for fermentation and puckering power necessary for a great cider. But what that fruit lacks is tannin—the molecules that impart astringency and provide a cider’s texture—and bittersweet apples fill this void.

https-::books.google.com:books?id=lATkBwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA106&ots=76WFijiMHz&dq=%22tetrameric%20procyanidin%22%20apple&pg=PA105#v=onepage&q=%22tetrameric%20procyanidin%22&f=false(image)

Ignore the yellow highlighting, and the column about gelatin

I hope your wheels are turning like mine were, but in case not, let me break it all down for you.

Cider apple varieties are known for their higher levels of phenolics, because those phenolics (aka tannin) distinguish them from dessert fruit. Those phenolics involved in making a cider apple a cider apple are also the same phenolics that increase in concentration when the apple is stressed with apple scab. If you refer to Figure 1 above, you’ll also see that in addition to high levels of polyphenols, a bittersweet apple is one with a higher brix. Let me remind this audience that this whole Radical Orchardist series started with the deletion of an article I wrote about how apple scab increases the brix in apples.

I’m no chemist, but it seems to me that stress has the potential to send some dessert varieties into the realm of a bittersweet. Now, how about stressing a cider apple? Is the increase in phenols due to stress worth it to the cider maker and the consumer? This study says that phenols in hard cider are absorbed, metabolized, and excreted by humans. Meaning, we’re getting the nutrients.

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phenolic content of apple leaves, healthy vs infected with scab. http://www.sipav.org/main/jpp/volumes/0108/010807.pdf

It makes sense to me. When stress occurs, the apple’s response is to pump the site of infection/attack full of phenolics (see graph to the right) . Look no further than your forest’s edge to find wild, highly evolved, inedible tannic crabapples that serve my point. The crabapples have evolved to contain these phenolics without provocation. The lesser-evolved dessert varieties, however, may need to be provoked through varying degrees of stress in order to produce a more nutrient-dense product, or one that more resembles a bittersweet cider apple.

What does this mean for management? Back in the first A Radical Orchardist essay, I irritated a few folks with the question:

What is a cider apple? Sure, you can have all the old French and English varieties like Dabinett, Frequin Rouge, Tremletts Bitter, Norfolk Beefing, etc, but if they are managed the same as dessert apples…are they really cider apples? I don’t think so.

And I still don’t think so. I believe that growing cider apples requires a completely different mindset than growing dessert fruit in order to make high quality, nutrient-dense, healthy organic hard cider. To me, a part of being a cider orchardist involves learning how to balance stress within the orchard through organic means. What do I need to give the tree in order to replenish the expense of fighting off an infection? What is the tipping point of too much stress? I whole-heartedly believe that these, plus many more, are the questions we should be asking. Imagine a world where the value of an apple comes not from its looks, but from its nutrient content. That’s what I’m aiming for with stress, and I believe there is value in that.

Please, those of you who are researchers…prove me wrong. I have admitted to the fact that I’m no chemist, and without academic ties, its completely reasonable that my understanding is flawed from the free book snippets and articles I find online. Send me a response with accessible PDFs, I’ll make sure to post it in a follow-up essay with reasons why I agree or disagree. Hopefully some great questions will come out of it and some university or private foundation somewhere will want to investigate.

In the meantime, the take home message is to #eatuglyapples and #drinkuglyapples. Embrace the scab, avoid the rot and challenge the status quo.

Postscript: Earlier in this essay, I included the following phenolics to define tannin. They were chlorogenic acid, phloridzin, epicatechin and the procyanidins. From this article, it states that apples infected with scab had:

  • 6.5 times more phloridzin than a healthy apple.
  • chlorogenic acid can be found in the first graph of this essay
  • epicatechin levels are in the following graph:
  •  Screen Shot 2015-07-01 at 7.26.50 PM
  • procyanidans are flavanols, which are widely cited by research papers to be the reason why some apple varieties are resistant to scab.