Apples Aplenty
It’s been funny weather today. First, hot and sunny, then a heavy downpour. After milking this morning I launched into a project I’ve been itching to do, but haven’t had the time, inclination or the equipment. That all changed with the temporary loan of a GPS system.
It took me most of the morning, and some time after lunch to tramp through the woods and damp underbrush to log and record the location of over 100 apple trees around our farm. It was a rough Spring for apples this year. It was very warm and mild so the trees began blossoming and then we got a morning of freezing temperatures. This didn’t kill all the fruit tree blossoms, but by some accounts it wiped out upwards of 50% of the fruit crop. That seems to be born out by trees on the farm as well….
I kept to trees mainly on the edgesour land, along the fence rows. These are horribly shaded by the forest grown in around them. It is hard to determin the age of many of the trees. It is obvious that some were planted specifically and are very old–the farm was settled prior to the 1840 date of the current house…. Other trees appear to be seedlings. At least two rows of trees in small orchards were planted at some point between 1939 and 1966 when very detailed aerial photos of the farm were taken. Two larger orchards also appear to be missing in the 1939 photo, but the trees seem to tell a different story. I need to ask a fella who worked here in the early 40′s about this when he drops in next time.
Both of these larger orchards I didn’t even bother delving into. I am pretty sure they will bring the total number of trees well over 150. I also haven’t recorded any of the other fruit trees on the farm, the peach, the plums, the wild cherries and the domesticated ones. Nor am I sure all of the trees I logged today are apples….while many did have sparse fruit on them, many did not. These could be–I hope so–pears which the frost killed the blossoms of in the spring.
Additionally, after sampling a great any of the apples, I haven’t found many which are edible when ripe. As of this week, many of them are falling from the trees as well. Part of this is due to their unpruned status. It has been a great many years since any of these trees thought about as the valuable commodity they are. Also, because almost all of the trees are full-sized, it means they’re difficult to prune and that their fruit can often be 20ft high. I’m not going to let this discourage me. I want to save and rehabilitate as many of these trees as I can. I am sure they were planted here for a reason. Was it for eating, storage, cider or as someone recently suggested to me, vinegar. Apparently before chain supermarkets or grocery stores of any kind farmers often made apple vinegar in bulk in this area to sell or trade with and for farm use. These all sound like great options to me.¬† It will surely take some time to get these apples out into the open and prunes into some sort of healthy bearing state. I am hoping to find the quantity, qualty & flavor of the apples greatly improved. At very least I will have plenty of applewood for smoking meats and apples to finish the pigs on.
This article suggests it might be better to just plant new trees instead of rehabilitating old ones and waiting the three years it will take to bring them into some sort of order. But I’d rather not loose the history or the varieties planted here on the farm. As of yet I have no idea which kinds of apples are here. I will wait they yeild better fruit before trying to identify.
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