Apple Investigation

On the farm there is a very well stocked apple orchard full of antique and wild apples that were planted, grafted, and cared for 3 generations of Millers ago. I think that's right... LeAnne's great grandfather was the one that planted and cared for these trees and now here I am wandering through the gnarled old branches completely loaded with unknown apples and I'm taking on the task of trying to figure out what's what.
A lot of them are wild. Some of them are the most delicious apples I've ever eaten. Some I spit out and washed my mouth out. I guess my goal is putting at least a couple of names to the faces of the hundreds of trees.

Step one was marking them, which the friendly neighbor who's adept at carpentry did. Step two was picture taking and test testing... which is what this blog is all about. Well, I think I only got through half of them before I remembered that taste testers usually don't swallow what they're testing and with a belly completely full of apples I had to walk away before I ruined my love of apples. Step three will be testing their pH and sugars and whatever else you need to know about the apples that are going into the cider... which brings me to step four, making the cider and trying new blends. Oh experimentation. It brings out that scientific side of me that was extinguished with the rigors of documenting, test taking, and studying things that had no relevance to everyday life and I had no interest in learning in school. This is real and fun and delicious. It combines being outside with food, the art of pruning, the history of growing things, the physical nature of gathering, crushing, squeezing the juice, and the delicate mixture of flavors to make the perfect tasting apple cider.

...yes. I'm excited. Can't you tell?

Anyway, meet the trees. By posting on here I am hoping to find some antique apple enthusiasts who can give me some insight or point me in the right direction as to what the heck I have here. Oh, and also if anyone wants to swap cuttings of any of these, by all means let me know. I have another bunch of trees to take pictures so more to come....



Kinda sweet, not tart at all, kinda bland but an ok apple flavor






Very overripe, mealy. Possibly a transparent that went far past it's prime but is still holding on to the tree. Pretty gross right now though.


Underripe? Excellent apple flavor. Blushes with the sun?



Lots of drop. Decent flavor apple. Nothing out of the ordinary as far as taste, slightly bitter.



My what cute little apples. My how tart these cute little apples are. Possibly super underripe. Very small apples but they really have a lot of apple flavor.



Excellent yield. Mild sweetness with an excellent tart bite, very good apple flavor.



Excellent yield. Very similar to #6 as far as taste and coloration goes.



A lot had dropped. Interesting flavor. Red ones hit the ground. Some green small tart ones on the tree. Not sweet, more tart and apple flavor, but a little bitter.



#10 Decent production. *** Very sweet!!! *** Not tart at all. Excellent apple flavor. Big beautiful tree.



Possibly same as #10, sweet and very productive.




Lots of drop. Poor shaped tree and crowded from all sides. Very tart! Nice apple flavor but somewhat bitter aftertaste. Maybe underripe?



Two trees in one! Both very established, but the red is so bitter it hurts. Possibly very underripe. Very bitter, decent size and excellent production. The yellow one is similar to #12, very tart as well. Definitely a graft where both types are very productive on one tree.




Odd shape. Shaded. Low production, lots of drop, pretty tart.



Pretzel shaped tree. All apples dropped and covered in wasps. Looks like they dropped awhile ago.



Blushes in the sun. So tart!!!! Maybe underripe? Apples are still pretty small and hold on the tree very well.




Heavy producer. Tastes like an apple, but bland. Nothing really remarkable.



*18* Heavy producer. Beautiful apples. Amazing flavor. Not terribly sweet but great tart apple taste with little to no bitterness. Very juicy! Good enough for the table!


No apples.



Lots of drop. Very tart but very concentrated apple flavor.



Two types of apples on one tree. Yellow apples are small and very tart, butter and hard. The red apples are not too sweet or tart but has a lot of apple taste. Maybe overripe?




*** Delicious. Perfect blend of sweet and tart. Ready now. Amazing flavor. Lots of juice. Maybe the same as 25 - 28?



Small wild apples. Lots have dropped. The ones still on the tree are sour and bitter.



***Huge apples! Excellent for eating! Large and well balanced with nice juicy flavor, just the right amount of tart and sweet. Would put these on my table with pride. Really want to propagate this tree and find out what it is exactly.





There are a group of trees which I think are all the same. They don't look like much but the flavor of this apple is exquisite. Marty says they might be Rhode Island Greening. All trees are producing heavily, even the one that is almost parallel to the ground that when I first saw, I wondered why they heck they wouldn't cut it down. Now that it's producing these amazing apples, there's no way I would think of cutting it down either! Very sweet with just a little tartness and excellent apple flavor. We have plenty of them so I think this should be the staple behind our cider and I want to graft more of these and take some for my orchard at home. These trees are huge and still producing like crazy! Even the trees with bad form are still producing heavily.




After the Rhode Island Greenings, I didn't think that I could taste another apple, but this one isn't bad. Extremely sweet, but kinda bland. Probably the closest to a dessert apple yet though.




Dropped it's entire crop.




Overripe, mealy and unpalatable.



Decent production. Pretty sweet and nice apple flavor.



* Huge apples, shaded but still producing. Excellent for eating, but getting mealy. Very sweet.




Tart tart tart! but not bitter. Small apples






Dropped. Very low production for being in such a prime spot.



Ok, that's it for one day. If you or anyone you know has any information about these apples, please contact me. Oh, or if you just want to stop by to sample some apples, by all means, please do. I'm going to take a couple days off before I go back for seconds. Still plenty of apple trees left to try.

netting

What a weird season so far. It's been exceptionally cold and rainy, not that I mind too much as being out in the sun every day at upper 90s would be terrible, but summer is just blowing by like nothing is happening.

But nevertheless, everything is growing just well. Here's the back vineyard on yet another overcast day with the Traminettes starting to hit the top wire while the indian corn sits like an audience watching.

The netting went over all the bearing grapes quite well and it looks like a veil over the vineyard. The birds are rather frustrated and only stuck around for a day after we netted the grapes before they accepted that their free meal was no longer.

The Marquettes are by far my favorite, without hardly any afterbite, they are sweet and delicious. As the numbers come in, they are setting sugars quite well. They turned two weeks before the other varieties and they are holding very well... aside from the birds getting the top half of the bunches before the netting went on as you can see in this picture. But from what I've read about them and after fighting with vines that push out new growth faster than any other variety and in every direction, I am actually excited to see how the wine turns out. They have an amazing flavor fresh so I'm sure they'll be delicious. Not saying that I'm particularly fond of the idea of planting any more acres of these time-consuming beasts, but I guess if the final product is worth the effort, it will be a labor of love.

mid august

Marquettes are now almost fully turned, and pretty small as far as the bunches go.

Frontenac Gris look delicious. They are turning this beautiful champagne color, small grapes on a large bunch.

And Frontenacs, which are huge and it seems like it takes forever to get the entire bunch to turn.

Corot Noir, still nothing.


And finally the Noriets, who are by far the most inconsistant plants in the vineyard. Some are dead. Some are vigorous. Some bunches are tiny, some look great. And still some pushed up new growth with blooms and leaves only to die back all the sudden. Weird. Looks like a very light crop if any at all will make it.

Otherwise, everything looks good. I keep watching the tractors do their rounds cutting, tethering, and baling the hay. It seems like it's never ending and I always look out in the field just a few weeks after it has been cut to find that my dog almost disappears in the tall blades of grass and bushes of clover.

Every day for a week I've seen the same turkey vulture sitting on top of a giant round bale, just giving me a long hard stare. Sometimes they circle overhead and I wonder what I look like to them... although I wonder that when the planes and helicopters circle overhead. The blimp came by once. I just imagined rich people drinking champagne on their -alternative to a cruise ship- day outing. It looked like they were not sure which way to go when leisurly hanging in the sky until they saw me and made a quick jaunt over to see what the little plot of land with such strange angular rows of green could be. By the time I could hear the whurr overhead, they had found something else that caught their eye and changed course so I went back to counting train whistles. Some conductors really go for the gusto and blow their horn for 5 seconds with only a half second rest. Some are very conservative and only blow two short horn blows before going through the crossing. And there must have been a new guy who was a real jerk who decided it would be funny to blow it at me when I was less than 50 feet away playing in the garden by the tracks. It took me a half hour to get the ringing out of my ears.





Anyway, it feels like the neverending task of beating wild vines into some managable shape is never ending, but I'm starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. While it used to take me a long time to go down a row, straightening trunks, training new trunks, combing fruiting wood, thinning clusters... now it's starting to be a bit easier. I come up to a vine and look at it like I've seen it before and I kinda get what I was thinking when I tied it up the last time and all I have to do is a little light pruning and move the tie up higher.

Help is always good to have as well. After awhile the grapevines start blurring in together and every once and awhile it's good to have a word of empathy at the ease or difficulty of a particular variety (oh man the marquettes...) or to judge pace at how fast a row can be done. Otherwise, I was going to the dollar store just to have a conversation with the outside world. I keep asking my friends about fashion because I feel like I live in a grape vine bubble where jean shorts and a tshirt is perfectly accented by waterproof rubber boots and a baseball hat.

...oh how I hope farmers tans are in style this fall.

Let's go for a walk

Let's take an August walk around the vineyard.....


In the front, the Frontenac Gris from last year's planting is going crazy. It's at the top wire, making cordons and trying to flower again. You just can't stop them.



A Cabernet Franc in basic training. My advice to Jason when tying up these VSP vines; "make it look like a menora." I think it worked.






Rootstock 3309, a Cab Franc trained below the graft junction last year. My initial response in the spring was - why is this one over here growing like crazy? A little glance at the graft cleared that up... but we still didn't have the heart to just chop it down after it tried so hard. Maybe next year.







A Vidal Blanc, trying to be a little more white with the odd leaf in the middle. I find these white leaves mixed in a lot, springing up in random spots on vines. Looks like someone bleached the new shoots and they either grow out of it into dappled green and white or die.







The Traminettes holding their own.


Nice fruit... but we'll wait until next year to harvest








Oh my, Marquettes!




Shoot positioning and leaf pulling is a pain for these hardy vines. They push out branches and leaves everywhere at a rate like you wouldn't believe.







The Fronenacs are blushing


and the canopy looks nice too







The Frontenac Gris showing that white grapes turn too







The Noirets, limping along as usual.



Nice clusters forming though. Not too many of them, but they are nice.







Corot Noir..... not too bad. Pretty lush, but the grapes seem not as developed.