Orchard

Wanted: June Ripening Apples (and Pears)

/ elizapples / 3 Comments

IF YOU HAVE INFO ON ACTUAL TREES RIPENING APPLES/PEARS IN JUNE IN ZONE 7 OR COLDER, COMMENT ON THIS BLOG!!! 

Summer apples are rarely of interest to most apple growers and consumers. Compared to their later season kin, they bruise easily, are often described as lacking texture (or “mealy”), low in sugar, and having a very high acidity. They might not seem very fun from this brief description, and I’ll go into detail of why these apples are fun for me in a bit, but first: Light hearted stereotypes of people who find/have found summer apples to be exciting:

1.) Elderly people from New England & other places labeled “Cold as Hell”

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Picture taken from a google search

In my own personal experience, 90% of people over the age of 80 know of the Russian cultivars “Red Astrachan” and/or “Yellow Transparent” because of apple sauce. These are the first popular apple cultivars to ripen in New England and have a relatively thin skin that disintegrates when cooked down into sauce. That disintegrating skin quality, by the way, is a big factor defining a “sauce apple.” If you have to peel it before you cook it/have to use a food mill to get the peels out: It’s not a true sauce apple.

I made some apple sauce this year from an old Yellow Transparent tree in Northern VA (Apples cored, halved + Pot + Stovetop) and my tasting audience (employees of Southern States Cooperative), thought it was too acidic. I, the person who subsists on apples for months out of the year, thought it was great. But I’ve realized that my area in Virginia has lost much of its culture surrounding summer apple sauce. In New England, it seems to still be alive…for now.

2.) People alive in the early-mid 1800s

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A woman from NY reaching for a Yellow May apple from VA, as her trees are still in bloom.

In researching early ripening apples in my home state of Virginia, I’ve run across several accounts of growers from Southern Virginia selling “Yellow May” (a June Ripening apple for them) to New York markets for a pretty penny. Turns out, before the Russian cultivars (like red astrachan and yellow transparent) hit the scene, people in the Northern states were hankering for apples in June and buying them from the South. They probably ate them, rather than making sauce, because I don’t think texture was as big of an issue as it is now (thanks, apple lobbyists).

Why am I looking for June ripening apples?

Quick answer: For animal fodder

Long answer: It is my ambition to create animal paddocks based on drop times of fruit. WHAT THIS MEANS: I will one day be able to rotate animals from paddock to paddock and have that synched with drop times. Their feed will entirely be the grass growing in the orchard and the dropped/shaken-off fruits from the next level up. I’ve done quite a bit of work/collection for the later months, but the early months are much harder.

WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR?

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Anyone north of Virginia, in mountainous areas, or familiar with the USDA plant hardiness zone map 7a/7b*: If you know of an apple that produces in June and can get access to it/provide contact info to me, I would love to hear about it. The perfect scenario is this:

1.) I’m provided with some background info on the tree you’ve identified as a June bearing apple. This includes location, what you think it might be called, when in June it bears (early June/late June) and any other info you can find (bloomtime is something that comes to mind, but not that important). This is so I can keep notes on your selections and credit you in the future! Pictures are also a huge help.

2.) You can either take scionwood from the tree or get me the contact info so I can write/call the owners and see about getting some scionwood from this tree. I will gladly pay for your time and effort. Please, before taking scionwood, reach out to me so I can make sure we are on the same page as to what scionwood actually is.

3.) You mail the scionwood to me and I compensate you and credit you in future descriptions and work!

Other items of note:

I DO NOT CARE HOW THIS APPLE TASTES/TEXTURE/SMELLS/LOOKS. AT ALL.

I DO NOT CARE WHETHER OR NOT IT GETS BAD DISEASE (but would love to hear about this if you have info)

I DO NOT CARE IF IT HAS A NAME OR NOT

I DO NOT CARE IF IT IS GRAFTED

I DO NOT CARE IF YOU ACTUALLY HAVE A JUNE BEARING PEAR. That’s amazing, too, and I want to hear about it.

I ONLY CARE IF IT BEARS IN JUNE. Come one, come all…get in touch with me if you know of a June apple bearing in slightly colder climates.

*The reason why I ask for zone 7a/7b or colder (the lower the zone number, the colder) is so I can extrapolate. If someone in zone 5 has a first week of June apple, that could very well be a mid-late May apple for me. May apples in Northern VA are non-existant as far as I know, and I’m also very interested. The earlier the bearing, the more diverse of a diet my animals get earlier in the season. 

 

 

 

 

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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.

 

 

why I dislike the term “silvopasture”

/ elizapples / Leave a comment

(I was writing another essay today and found myself going off on a rant about the term “silvopasture.” I decided to remove it from my essay and make it a new post…so here you go). 

For close to a decade of my life, I was either a student of forestry or a forester throughout the US and Germany.  I studied and worked in a variety of forested environments, and eventually made the transition from forestry to horticulture. The two realms, forestry and horticulture, originally came together for me was when I started learning about the lesser-known tree and plant species which produce medicinals and food within the forest and forest edge. I became quite good at foraging for food and medicinals while on the job and the idea of managing a piece of property for fruits and nuts became much more exciting to me than managing for timber. The transition from forester to horticulturalist began when I started to transition from forager to farmer; from forest to orchard.

An orchard is an intentional planting of trees or shrubs that is maintained for food production. Orchards comprise fruit, vegetable, and nut-producing trees which are grown for commercial production. Orchards are also sometimes a feature of large gardens, where they serve an aesthetic as well as a productive purpose.

Now on to this term: Silvopasture

Silva in latin means forest or woods. Pasture comes from the latin Pastura, meaning feeding or grazing. Together, you get grazing/feeding in forest or woods.

When I first heard the term “Silvopasture,” I assumed it was the act of thinning or planting a forest for timber/firewood and beef/pork/mutton/poultry, etc production. And in some cases, it is. But I have to address the other cases where silvopasture has become a term for planting fruit and nut trees on a pasture for some form of commercial fruit and nut production and introducing animals to the scene.

An intentional planting of fruit and nut trees is an orchard. For centuries, people have grazed their animals through their orchards because it makes complete and total sense on a practical level. Animals are an integral part of management in my opinion and weird health fears and scaling up are likely to blame for the elimination of grazing.  In the rest of the world, though, animals are still in orchards and it isn’t called silvopasture. Here’s a recent photo-example from Kyrgyzstan: A dwarf apple orchard with beasts in it.

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Or an olive orchard with goats in it in Northern Italy:

Both of these systems pictured manage for a tree crop and a meat crop (and grass crops). No timber will come out of these systems, and prunings take the place of coppice wood (which could be used as firewood). (Note to self: Pruning vs Coppicing is an interesting topic to revisit in a future essay).

How very American of us to first remove animals from orchards on account of scale and fear, and then put them back in and rename the system.  My dislike of the name silvopasture isn’t just in the semantics, though… This renaming thing we Americans do is directing people away from sources of valuable information. Information like how to grow these trees for tree crops on a moreso commercial scale is a practice studied in horticulture rather than in forestry. Though it’s nice to have feet planted in both realms, the difference is important! I know, because I’ve worked and studied in both.

If you want to pursue growing fruit and nut trees in a field/pasture for the commercial harvest of fruits and nuts while also incorporating animals into your management and income stream, try search terms like “orchard grazing” or “hogs in apple orchards” or “cows in cherry orchards,” etc.  With this knowledge, you’ll likely get a lot more out of your time spent on google, like THIS.

Sincerely,

Eliza the ORCHARDIST

However, I did see it worded in the UK as “Silvopastoral Orchard Agroforestry,” which is totally fine because all of the descriptors and origins are there.

[end rant]