The previous fall I had started a modest orchard—four apple and two peach trees. I had read the literature on organic fruit growing, I was familiar with IPM (integrated pest management), and like any respectable yuppie who came of age in the sixties, I was going to grow organic fruit and organic fruit only.
Commercial fruit, even if grown in town by your local small farmer, is perhaps one of the two most pesticide-and fungicide-laden foods you will ever eat (the other one, by the way, is potatoes—but that’s someone else’s book). Environmentalists blame the farmers for overdosing with pesticides, and the farmers blame the consumers for demanding blemish-free fruit. Whoever is at fault, the result is that fruit trees are drenched weekly in enough poison to kill anything that happens to wander by—bad bugs such as maggots and codling moths, but also good bugs such as bees, lacewings, and ladybugs. With only six trees to tend, I figured I could pick off the bad bugs by hand, encourage the good bugs to stay, and, if needed, afford to use the more expensive “organic” fungicides and pesticides. No, I thought to myself as I listened to the nongrizzled farmer, I will not produce poisoned apples in my backyard.
My cockiness was based on more than simply the arrogance of the too highly educated who think they can learn everything from books; I did have some experience with organic farming. Growing up on suburban Long Island, in the shadows of New York City, I watched my father raise three apple trees that produced bumper crops of beautiful, perfect apples year after year. These were full-size trees, not the dwarf ones most popular today, and by the time I left home for college, these trees were the dominant feature—actually the only feature—of our small backyard.
As I recalled, this was my father’s method of growing apples: On the first fifty-degree day in March, you fill your sprayer with a mixture of a few tablespoons of horticultural oil diluted in a gallon of water. Then you pump the handle, oh, about a hundred times until you feel as though the next pump is going to send you, the sprayer, and the orchard to kingdom come, lock the handle in place, and press the trigger, coating the trees with the solution. Somehow, after about thirty seconds, the two thousand pounds of pressure you built up over ten minutes of pumping is spent and your spray is reduced to a trickle. Pump another hundred or thousand strokes, and repeat until your trees are covered or you feel chest pains. This “dormant oil” (thus named because you use it when the tree is in its dormant stage) smothers any overwintering insects or eggs, allowing you at least to head into spring with a clean slate of pest-free trees.
This was, if memory serves, the only spraying Dad ever did and the only attention he ever paid to the trees until late spring, when the apples were the size of walnuts. Then the whole family would gather in the yard, armed with staplers, scissors, and rolls of clear plastic tubing about three inches wide. Thus equipped, we spread out among the trees, my dad taking a stepladder to reach the upper branches, my little brother in charge of the lowest branches, the rest of us in the middle. At each tiny apple, we cut a four-inch length of tubing, slipped it over the apple, and secured it by stapling it closed at the stem.
Then the trees were ignored again until harvest. As the apples grew, the plastic bags expanded with them, and by October we were ready to pick large, unblemished (not to mention prepackaged) fruit. The bags protected the apples from their most lethal enemy, the apple maggot fly, which lands on apples, lays about a zillion eggs, and flies off. These eggs hatch into the maggots that burrow into the apples and produce the characteristic deformed shapes and black dimples seen on untended trees. The bag is open on the bottom and top, allowing ventilation and growth, but the apple maggot fly apparently approaches the apples on a horizontal plane and deposits its eggs harmlessly on the plastic. It works.
One year, when Dad was unable to get tubing from his usual supplier, he made do with discarded small plastic bags, some of which had a company name printed on them. At harvest that year, in one of those great serendipitous moments in the annals of invention, he discovered that the label, by blocking the light and preventing the apple under it from turning red, had been clearly transferred to the apple. Bingo! A light clicked on in Dad’s brain, and personalized apples were born. The following summer, Dad added a heavy black waterproof marking pen to the bagging arsenal. That fall (and every fall thereafter until his death in 1982), every member of the immediate family, as well as cousins, aunts, uncles, and selected friends, received an apple with his or her name on it. It was a sure sign of solid social standing with Dad if you received a customized apple, the local community’s version of being invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.
But why stop there? Dad moved on to apples with messages such as “Merry Christmas” while we kids winced and asked him, in vain, to put away the marker. Frankly I’m surprised that some commercial grower hasn’t thought of this and produced apples with a trademark burned onto the fruit, or sold the space to Coca-Cola or NBC. Perhaps the cost of bagging would be prohibitive.
But of course, with a mere four trees, nothing is prohibitive. I wasn’t sure about bagging (the aesthetics leave something to be desired), but I was sure I could produce organic apples in my backyard. I had planted bare-root trees—little more than twigs, in reality—from a mail-order supplier. I could have purchased larger, balled-root trees from a local nursery, but I would have been restricted to three or four of the most popular varieties—McIntosh, Red Delicious, maybe a Golden Delicious if I was lucky. In other words, the same boring apples I can buy in the supermarket for less than they cost to grow at home. That didn’t hold much appeal for me. I was interested in raising so-called antique apples, the apples of our forefathers that are no longer widely commercially available.
Commercial growers (and others in the retail chain—distributors, shippers, and so forth) use a number of criteria in determining what kind of apples are grown and sold throughout the United States, but the number one consideration is handling. No matter what other positive attributes an apple (or a pear or peach) may have, if it doesn’t store and ship well, you can’t get it to market. If it bruises easily, if it gets mushy shortly after picking, it can’t be shipped from Washington State to Florida.
A close second to handling is appearance. The apple industry is convinced that Americans don’t want an apple that is uneven in color, russeted, or otherwise “unapplelike.” The industry is banking on the fact that Americans buy fruit based on appearance, not on experience with taste or texture. As insulting as this sounds, the popularity of the Red Delicious apple supports the theory. By far the most popular apple in the United States, the Red Delicious looks absolutely gorgeous. And has virtually no taste, a mealy interior, and a tough skin. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone buys or eats this apple. In contrast, the wonderful Granny Smith, a green apple popular in France, has only in recent years begun to make an appearance on American grocery shelves because distributors were sure Americans would never buy a green apple. The American public does seem to be slowly catching on, though. Red Delicious sales are down, Grannys are now widely available, and apple farmers are scrambling to replace their Red Delicious trees with other, more palatable varieties. So there is hope.
For myself, freed from the need to ship and sell my apples, I could grow apples that have fallen from corporate favor and the American consciousness. That meant buying trees by mail order. When my fruit-tree catalogs arrived in the dead of winter, I pored over them with a fervor most men reserve for Victoria’s Secret. What tantalizing descriptions! What history! “The remarkable flavor has the barest hint of anise and is always deliciously spicy.” “Goes back to Caesarean Rome.” What variety! “The fruit is long and conical, yellow with red stripes.” Surely the Yellow Newtown Pippen, “bred by the early colonists to satisfy British quality standards,” and the oldest commercially grown native variety in the country, deserved to survive. Here’s one I had to have: it is thought to have been planted by none other than Johnny Appleseed!
Johnny Appleseed? Isn’t he an American mythi
cal hero along the lines of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill? He is often thought of that way, but Johnny—born John Chapman in 1774—was an actual man, a serious man, a man with a vision. Chapman’s vision, or perhaps his delusion, was an American frontier abloom with apple trees. The traditional view holds that Chapman, a devout Christian, envisioned sturdy log cabins built in orchards whose sweet blossoms inspired, and whose lush apples fed, the settlers as they conquered the wilderness. The less romantic historical perspective is that precious few of those apples found their way directly into settlers’ stomachs. They were too valuable as the main ingredient for hard cider—applejack. And it was apple jack, not apple pie, that fueled the homesteaders on the frontier. In any event, Johnny A. made enough money buying land and selling apple seeds—that’s right, selling, not giving away, seeds—to become a moderately wealthy man (not that this eccentric ever spent any of it).
As Johnny made his way through the eastern United States planting orchards, he was also, perhaps unwittingly, performing a second important function: increasing the diversity of the species in America. Apples do not grow true from seed, meaning that if you plant a seed from a McIntosh apple, it will not grow into a “McIntosh tree,” that is, a tree that yields McIntosh apples identical to those of the parent. If you want another McIntosh tree, you have to take a scion, or a cutting, from the fruiting portion of the tree and graft it onto a rootstock. Apples grown from seed will have characteristics different from the mother apple, sometimes wildly different. Most of the apples will be inferior, but once in a blue moon the offspring may be superior in taste or appearance, or have disease resistance, or keep longer, or have a faint banana smell or a striped skin. Note that Johnny wasn’t grafting trees for forty-nine years. He was planting from sacks of seeds he lugged around the country. So he was single-handedly responsible for creating and spreading thousands of new apple varieties, ancestors of apples we still eat today.
One of the varieties rumored to have sprung from one of Johnny’s seeds is the Grimes Golden, a native of West Virginia and a slightly spicy, juicy, golden apple thought to be an ancestor of the Golden Delicious. I decided this would be a good choice for our orchard. The other antique variety I selected, the Esopus Spitzenburg, was an easy choice. Not only was it first discovered in the Hudson Valley, just miles from our home, but it is also documented as having been the favorite apple of my boyhood hero, statesman-inventor-farmer Thomas Jefferson. Finally, to cover my bets (and on Anne’s suggestion) I planted two trees of an outstanding modern variety, Empire. Developed in New York State, Empire is a derivative of the classic McIntosh, which it may well replace some day as a standard supermarket apple. Certainly it won the blind taste testing my family conducted during several trips to a local orchard. Zach, perhaps practicing for a future career as an oenophile, pronounced it “crispy, but not hard. Sweet, but not sugary. Hint of cider.”
During these apple-picking and -tasting trips, we were able to sample over a half-dozen different varieties, including the newest disease-resistant ones. Logically, one would think the first step in planting an organic orchard should be to select disease-resistant varieties. But not surprisingly, we were disappointed in all of these apples because they are bred for resistance to blight, mildew, and scab—not for flavor. To us, they tasted bland and uninteresting, or, as Katie described one, “pukey.”
Just buying apple trees required a bit of research and a number of careful choices. This is not like growing tomatoes or even peach trees, which are less challenging. The first thing to consider when choosing apple trees is that apple blossoms need to be cross-pollinated by a different apple variety in order to set fruit. This has several implications. The most obvious is that I needed to plant at least two types of trees. (Although one can buy trees that have two varieties of apples grafted onto a single trunk, this seems a touch Frankensteinian to me.) Less obvious is that the different varieties need to be in bloom at the same time; otherwise, no cross-pollination. Since some apples bloom later than others, one needs to know when the different varieties bloom. Fortunately this information is available in books and in some catalogs. Generally, if the apple ripens early, it blooms early as well. Some commercial orchards intersperse crab-apple trees among the others, as crabs tend to bloom early and hold their blossoms for a long time and thus make excellent pollinators. All four of my trees were listed as early- or mid-season bloomers, so I felt confident in having that base covered.
Another decision was how large I wanted the trees to grow. Years ago, there were only “standard” trees, full-size apple trees that grow to twenty or thirty feet in a great, spreading, twisting, gnarly growth. The Hudson Valley still has many existing eighty- or one-hundred-year-old specimens, twisted into fantastic, tortured shapes, providing the perfect backdrop for the headless horseman and frosty winter nights. But while stately and impressive, standard trees require a tall ladder for pruning, spraying, and picking, not to mention a good deal of space, and thus are less than practical for an amateur, even one with three acres of land. I felt that a better choice was a dwarf or semidwarf tree, actually a “regular” tree grafted onto a dwarfing rootstock. As true dwarf trees generally have weak root systems and require staking, I went with semidwarf trees, which will grow to a quite manageable twelve to fifteen feet in height and can be kept ever shorter with pruning. Should you ever plant your own, be careful to look for the knobby graft at the base of the tree and make sure it remains above the soil when you plant. If you bury it, the trunk of the tree will send out roots above the graft, and you will—surprise, surprise—end up with a standard-size tree.
I did wonder how much fruit I was sacrificing by planting a smaller tree, but the answer was, remarkably little. Because semidwarfs set fruit more densely than standard trees and can be planted closer together (as close as ten feet), they actually provide a higher yield per square foot, which compensates for the reduced height. In fact, most commercial orchards are now planting exclusively semi-dwarf stock, which is not only more suitable to the popular pick-your-own type of operation that many orchards run, but also begins to produce fruit a couple of years sooner than standard trees.
That’s right. I planted my trees in the fall, and it wasn’t until two springs later that I had my first blossoms. That’s also when I had my first problems.
Seemingly overnight, while I was sleeping, tent caterpillars netted out my apple trees and started munching on everything in sight. Everything, that is, except the remaining peach tree (the other had not made it through the first winter). Before I had noticed, the trees were nearly stripped bare. These critters put Agent Orange to shame. Panic-stricken, I consulted my organic-orchardist guide. Pick the caterpillars off by hand, then pinch them in half, it advised. Eww! But dutifully, after coming home from work, I changed from my dress shirt and tie into my grungiest slaughterhouse clothes and picked ‘n’ pinched until nary a critter was in sight. I was thoroughly nauseated, but they were gone.
For about twelve hours. The next morning, replacement troops had arrived and were happily munching away. Time to escalate. I stopped at a nursery on the way to the office and picked up a bottle of a spray labeled “organic,” environmentally friendly pyrethrin soap. Pyrethrins are made from a particular species of African chrysanthemum that has developed a natural defense against pests. All right, better than a manufactured toxin that gets into the food chain and ends up wiping out bald eagles, I guess. But really, I wondered, how effective can a chrysanthemum be?
Very. This is amazing stuff. A spritz of pyrethrins on a caterpillar causes it to immediately curl up and fall to the ground.
Having narrowly escaped devastation by caterpillar, the apple trees grew new leaves and branches and all looked well until late July, when I noticed many of the leaves, especially on the antique trees, were turning brown and curling at the edges, giving the trees a wilted, sickly look. In fact, they appeared to be dying. I snipped off a twig and took it to my nurseryman, who took a quick glance at it and proclaimed, “Ceda
r-apple rust.” Rust? My apple trees were rusting? It seems that cedar-apple rust is a fungus with a life cycle that depends on both cedar and apple trees. I went to the home-orchardist book for advice. Two solutions were offered: (1) remove any cedar trees within two miles (“Oh, Larry, sorry, my good man, but I had to chop down and burn all of your cedars today. Hope you don’t mind”); or (2) use a friendly, natural organic spray of sulfur (listed as being “poorly effective”) or a nasty chemical fungicide like Ferbam (listed as being “effective”). I looked at my sickly trees and figured a “poorly effective” treatment wasn’t going to cut it.
Ferbam saved my trees that summer, but I felt guilty nonetheless, like I had taken the first step down a slippery (from toxins) slope. The following spring I was rewarded with a few blossoms and one Empire apple. I had raised an apple! I felt like Gregor Mendel. Encouraged by success, I hit the Ferbam early and often, watched the trees thicken and grow, and nurtured the single apple as if I were raising it for Eve. When it reached the size of a walnut, I dutifully cut a plastic sandwich bag down to size, slipped it over the apple, and watched and waited.
Through the summer, my little apple swelled and showed hints of red inside its protective sheath as my family waited in anticipation for the crisp fall day when, dressed in our L.L. Bean red-checked flannels, we would descend into the orchard and with great ceremony pluck the literal (and only) fruit of our labors.
But before that day could arrive, on a sweltering mid-August afternoon, I bumped the tree slightly with the lawn mower, and the young apple, bag and all, plopped unceremoniously to the ground with a muffled thud. From Gregor Mendel to Homer Simpson. I sheepishly brought it inside to face the silent stares of my inquisitors. “Must be ripe. Popped right off,” I said cheerfully. We sliced it into quarters and ate it on the spot. It was the best apple I have ever tasted, if a bit tart. And hard.
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