One of my favorite things about going to market is answering (or trying to answer) the questions people ask as they walk up to the table. With so many beautiful but uncommon varieties of apples, postures range from hesitant interest, to unbridled curiosity. Common questions include: Which are the sweetest? Which are the most tart? What should I use for baking? What’s with this brown apple? Which is your favorite?
Some questions are easier to answer than others: Usually, the apples are arranged from sweetest to most tart, with a few varieties in the middle, to make things easier for everyone. The best apple for baking depends largely on personal preference. The brown apples are Asian pears…just kidding. Russeted apples like Hudson’s Golden Gem and Razor Russet have great textures that are different from all the others, usually with a less noticeable skin. My favorite apples seem to change each week, with Spitzenburg topping the list currently and Golden Russet following closely behind.
My favorite question at market always starts the same way, “I had this one apple…can you tell me what it is?”, and a wild goose chase of apple identification begins. If North Star had it recently and clues include the flavor, color, or some part of the name, a proper I.D. is fairly easy to come by. If the apple was from last year, or much earlier this season and the details are hazier, it gets a little tough.
Understandably, we have the desire to find out which varieties we enjoy, but talking with people about their recently-discovered-yet-unnamed-favorite apple brings up a deeper topic of what most of us have come to expect with food. Often, we want the same thing again and again throughout the year, and that’s not what you get from locally-grown fruit. There is this tension between seeing the same few varieties of apples in any supermarket no matter what time of year, compared with a wider variety from the orchard that changes weekly. The Summer Blaze apples picked in August won’t be around with the Emperors picked this week – and that’s a good thing.
There is something about stepping away from the regular handful of apples that you can find anywhere at any time, and enjoying new flavors from a freshly picked apple that you’ve never tried before, even if it means waiting a whole year to taste it again. There are so many incredible varieties to try in the meantime, that even if you forget the name, you can grab someone at the farm or market and explain, “I had this one apple…can you tell me what it is?”
I came to work last Monday morning unsure of what to expect in the wake of Hurricane Irene. I didn’t bother asking the obvious questions about the state of the orchard – Is there any fruit left on the trees? How many trees blew over? Can we straighten them back into place?
As the morning unfolded, we tackled one task at a time, feeling the pressure of a full schedule and growing to-do list. Stepping away from the normal work of picking and sorting, we added work we had to allot time for: Clearing downed trees from the driveway and the orchard – 12 hours; hammering stakes and pulling fruit trees back into position – 15 hours; straightening hundreds of blown-over young trees in the nursery – 5 hours; and still so much more to do.
Rows of Asian pears became most noticeable by the fruit covering the ground, rather than hanging from the trees. A stretch of large plum trees looks pretty good, until you begin asking if they were all leaning slightly before the storm. Toppled-over peaches and apples are much more obviously affected; lying down with roots straining in the soil or snapped beyond survival.
Yet, in the midst of visible signs of the weather’s unpredictability and the time spent repairing what was damaged, the regular work moves forward. Crimson Crisp and huge Royalty apples turn glowing reds and deep purples that signal they are ready to be picked. Fantasia nectarines ripen and get picked for their third time. Hosui Asian pears move from green to tan as the flavor goes from good to exceptional, and the trees yield dozens of bushels of ripe fruit.
While a lot of work still remains to clean up after the storm, I’m seeing the practical merit of growing such a wide variety of trees on different training systems in the orchard. When you see how the damage from last weekend affected those varieties closest to being picked, but didn’t devastate the orchard entirely, growing dozens of varieties that ripen at different times not only keeps the orchard exciting, but makes sense in a business so deeply affected by the weather. So as we keep working to straighten trees back into position and get the orchard back into order, there is more than enough fruit to keep busy picking as we continue moving forward through the season.
There’s something about working in the tree nursery that’s really exciting.
Witnessing trees in their earliest stages and growing so quickly provides a perfect complement for the more consistent work of picking.
Earlier this spring, we grafted hundreds of pieces of scion wood from desirable varieties to rootstocks that determine tree size, and since then I’ve been intrigued by the whole process of raising young fruit trees.
Maybe it’s the rows of fluttering nametags for all of the pears, peaches and apples that I’ve never heard of before, but which have stories behind them. (The picture here shows apple trees on the right and peaches on the left in the nursery)
Or, it could be the different types of grafting, like T-Bud grafting, where next year’s flower buds are placed under the bark of peach rootstocks which were previously planted and already looked like small trees.
Even weeding seems so rewarding when you expose the contrast between rows of young vigorous trees stretching toward the sky and the dark and crumbly soil in which they are anchored.
As we dealt with weeks of hot and dry weather earlier this summer, a lot of the newly grafted trees did not make the sensitive union to begin growing together, and several withered.
However, some of the grafts which looked snapped or bent way beyond hope have taken hold and are growing to heights over my head, even with a 90-degree bend where they were grafted! The 5-foot tall bamboo stakes that support the trees seemed like overkill at first, when the trees were a knee-high, but are now steadily being outgrown.
While it takes a lot of time to work with so many tiny trees, grafting is often the only means for accessing a lot of different varieties.
Many of the varieties of scion wood selected come from smaller orchards and nurseries during the spring, so when they don’t graft successfully, it can be a frustrating wait until new wood can be ordered for another try the following year. Still, for every tree that didn’t make it, a bunch did, which means we are well on our way in an exciting several-year journey to taste even more untried (for us) fruit varieties and flavors.
Really…just look at them. With nifty patterns of variegated brown symmetrically arranged on its back, it could be the model for a new variation on hunters’ camouflage gear or other apparel dye patterns. It’s really pretty neat….beautiful in fact, if you don’t think too much about what the patterns and colors are attached to.
And the smell of the stinkbugs? Well, scratch and sniff. For some folks, the smell is downright revolting. For others (like me) it smells kind of like paper. Some people smell cilantro. So it’s weird, but not always completely offensive (unless you think about it).
The brown marmorated stinkbug (BMSB), as you may have heard, is wreaking havoc all over the midAtlantic states, and is spreading further. Florida is very worried about its arrival.
BMSBs are an invasive pest which are native to the Japan and China. They were first discovered in Pennsylvania in the late 90s, and have multiplied in such numbers that they’re invading homes and destroying crops. Their native predators, alas, did not travel with them, so they are pretty much on their own here and having a grand feasting party.
BMSBs love all kinds of fruits and veggies. Fruits like peaches, nectarines, apples, and Asian pears are very tasty to them (and hey, why not?). Their favorite vegetable around here seems to be edamame soybeans and sweet corn, but they’ll dabble in other veggies as well. They literally suck on the fruit in question, and leave a dimpled area. Sometimes (like if their dinner was interrupted), that’s all you’ll see is a dimple. Other times (when they can feast uninterrupted) the interior flesh may be discolored a bit or even a little ‘corky’. It’s not harmful to eat it or eat around it, thankfully.
For large commercial farms which sell to wholesale markets, any amount of BMSB damage on the crop makes it completely unsaleable. Some reports show that $37 million in crop sales were lost last year due to BMSB nibbling. Ouch. And it’s only going to be worse this year. Since the wholesale (ie. grocery store) market demands perfect, farms which rely on wholesaling are getting hammered.
Meanwhile, lots of studies are being conducted looking for ways to control the problem. Importing the BMSB’s natural predator is being considered, new chemical sprays are being studied and developed, and other less invasive means are being considered. Here at the farm, we are currently talking with a company which is trying to develop a solar-powered BMSB trapping system for commercial application. We’ll keep you posted on developments!
In the meantime….what is the beauty of stinkbugs?
1. They do look kind of neat (if you don’t mind antennae and creepy-crawly legs)
2. We’re all in the same boat here: you’ve got them in your houses and I have them on my farm. So, we can commiserate together (the ties that bind and all).
3. A little dimpling is just that….a little dimpling. Adds character perhaps?? We’ll keep the fruits the BMSBs really feasted on (like those pictured here) at home, but we trust that the occasional dimple in your fruit will be tolerated.
We’re all in the same boat on this one, and until a (hopefully non-toxic) solution is found, the BMSB will just bring us closer together. Complaints about them can continue now!
When introduced to a guest at a party recently, I shared that I work in an orchard. He seemed surprised and responded, “You mean, like, picking fruit?” We chatted briefly and since that conversation I’ve been thinking about everything that leads up to the iconic, but brief, moment of picking fruit within the context of the entire growing season.
Looking back nearly 6 months to frozen ground and blankets of snow, it’s strange to think of the trees as leafless holdouts waiting for their time to shine. With comfy boots and layers of warm clothing, I embraced winter as the time for pruning and learning about all of the different growth habits and training systems for the trees. It was hard to imagine these naked branches being weighed down with clusters of fruit and trying to prune accordingly – they didn’t even have leaves yet!
But before long, the trees burst into bloom and the orchard transformed from bare-boned rows of trees into stunning blocks of pink and white flowers. With spring under way, we focused on tying and training the trees to desired shapes and growing habits: “V’s” for peaches and nectarines; central leaders and open centers for apples, pears, Asian pears, and plums.
With the time for tying and training passed, thinning continues to be the main task, especially among the Asian pears. At first, it seems terrible to snip off so many tiny fruits, but after seeing (and tasting!) the size and quality that the remaining fruit achieves, the hours devoted to thinning are definitely worthwhile.
In the middle of everything, we found time to graft dozens of different apple, pear and peach varieties, notching together rootstocks that control the size of a tree, with scion-wood of the desired tree varieties. The grafts and hundreds of apple trees grown from seed were planted in two new on-farm nurseries.
Watching them bolt into waist-high trees has been exciting sign that there are still so many new and antique varieties of fruit to grow and try – it just takes a few years. I’ve already been so impressed by the Purple Heart and Early Golden plums, Pristine and Redfree apples, Eastern Glo nectarines, and GaLa peaches that were new to me this season!
So in response to my fellow party guest’s earlier question about working in an orchard, in addition to pruning, tying, grafting, planting, weeding, thinning, tasting, and all of the surrounding tasks, my condensed answer is “Yes! – Picking fruit!”
Itzstedter Apfel, Kandil Sinap, and Bloody Ploughman. Cinnamon Spice, Holstein, and King Solomon. Ok – what do all of these names have in common? Other than appearing in this blog post, what these names have in common is they are all apple varieties, and they are some of the 141 new varieties added to our orchard this year.
Names are always so intriguing. Some other varieties we’ve planted this year have yummy-sounding names such as Nutmeg, Early Strawberry, and Red Butterscotch. We can imagine perhaps, what may be in store when we bite into them. But Husk Spice? What flavor might that be?
Some of the newbies will keep us wondering. What in the world might Incarnation, Black Gilliflower, Stump, Suntan, Black Twig, or Fiesta taste like? And what was in the breeder’s head when they named those varieties so? I’m not sure I want to think about the flavor of Herferdshire or the aforementioned Holstein. Cow names? Really??
Some of these new-to-us varieties were obviously named in honor of people. There’s Reverend Morgan, Father Abraham, Ingrid Marie, Crown Prince Rudolph, and, simply, Oliver.
But then there’s some whose names will cause no end to pronunciation difficulties (not to mention spelling difficulties). Red Berlepsch, Zabergau Reinette, and Junaluska, among others which I refuse to spell out more than I absolutely need to. Ooh, copy and paste; problem solved. Gotta love the initial one mentioned today – Itzstedter Apfel, Itzstedter Apfel, Itzstedter Apfel. Say that one fast three times. Oi.
We grafted these and 116 more varieties this year. Bummer is, it’ll be some time before we get a taste of them. (GRAFT FILM)
Ike selected and ordered budwood from a variety of apple collectors, and then we grafted them onto the rootstocks we like to use in this orchard. Rootstocks control the size and other characteristics of the adult apple tree. We’ve got only two itty-bitty baby trees of each variety, and we’re hoping that at least one of each will grow to maturity, although it’s likely we’ll lose a few along the way.
So why add so many more to our current stash of 76 apple varieties?
The answer was revealed very clearly last week when Ike was being interviewed for an educational documentary which was being filmed at our farm. The interviewer asked Farmer Ike what he liked best about farming. Having been married to the guy for 24 years, I figured I’d know the answer. Something along the lines of, “because I like growing things” or “I enjoy having different work to do season by season” or even “I enjoy dealing with the challenges Mother Nature gives us”. But no, his answer was “I just love the experience of trying new apple varieties; nurturing a baby tree for several years and then taking that first bite.” Not the answer I really expected, but not a surprising one either.
Ike continually studies lists of apple varieties put out by other breeders and collectors. His ‘wish list’ for this year’s planting was well over 300 varieties. Thankfully, that was cut in half, or else we’d have to buy a new farm to plant all those trees on!
The other thing coming down the pike in addition to those 141 is a breeding project Ike started last year. He crossed Gold Rush with Florina apples. We’ve got a whole bunch of interesting-looking seedlings from that cross, but it’ll be several years before we get a taste of those. And each one will be different. Hmmm….Gold Rush and Florina as parents? I can’t wait!
In the meantime, these little grafted trees will give us a taste first. There’s one out there called “Westfield Seek-No-Further”. I wonder if it’s true? Seek no further…..nah…..there will ALWAYS be new varieties out there just waiting for Ike to get his hands (and teeth) on.
Anyone have some extra land available? Somehow I think we’re going to need it…..
Change in our pockets is reassuring (unless it’s too heavy or there’s a hole in your pocket)
Living in Changes is rather routine (for the people who live there)
A lane Change can be tricky (depending who’s driving)
“Changes” is good (if you’re a David Bowie fan)
Change can trigger stress or excitement (depending if you’re suddenly be chased by a tiger or have just won the lottery)
Change in the orchard can be stressful, exciting, good, tricky, rather routine, and reassuring. Sometimes all at the same time.
Today, Ike, Brint, and Brady pulled out a number of young peach trees. Cut down in the prime of life (they were 2008 babies), they had to go in order to make room for new babies.
In any orchard, replanting is a common and necessary thing. If you don’t change out old for new, pretty soon the orchard will be old, tired, and non-productive. But why do away with young trees which only first fruited last year? Several reasons. One variety was very susceptible to bacterial spot (which both sounds and looks nasty; we’d rather avoid it if possible), one variety we just had planted too many of to begin with, and one variety just tastes…..bad. Bad. Bad.
As orchardists growing specialty varieties, we have to deal with this kind of thing all the time. It’s kind of like “As Seen on TV” products; sometimes what we get works as promoted, and sometimes it’s, well, a real let-down. You just can’t believe everything you read about (or see on TV), so you have to be prepared to take chances and make changes.
What are we replacing the trees with? Some new-to-us peach varieties which come with stellar descriptions. You’ll just have to stay tuned to this dial to see if they are all they’re cracked up to be.
While we wait, I’ll crank up the Bowie.
I probably wouldn’t be working at North Star Orchard if it weren’t for the Asian pears. It’s true – they’re what drew my attention to this farm years ago at Philadelphia farmers’ markets. I’m not the only one; they truly have a cult following. I’ll often open my mouth to answer a question about them at a market, only to have another customer standing nearby answer enthusiastically for me. I’ve heard about Asian pears shipped away to kids at college who are yearning for a taste of home, and about some that are shipped each year to relatives in Europe. I know my parents won’t let me in the door at Christmas-time if I don’t bring pears along.
So many people love them, but they’re still a bit of a mystery to most. What are these things? These “apple pears,” “Korean pears,” “sand pears,” “salad pears,” nashi? Well, “apple pear” is misleading; they really have nothing to do with apples, except that they share a plant family (Rosaceae). What they actually are is another species of pear, Pyrus pyrifolia, that has been traditionally grown in Japan, China, and Korea. You’ve been eating them for weeks (if not years) now, so I don’t have to tell you what they taste like, or about their characteristic crunch. Unlike “European” pears, Asian pears are picked ripe and ready to eat – none of that guesswork about when it’s reached its moments-long window of peak ripeness before turning to unpleasant mush in the center. Keep them in your fridge loosely in a plastic bag and they’ll keep for weeks. (Especially good to know this time of year when the CSA’s ending!)
Perhaps the Asian pear fervor is only unusual in this country where fruit generally serves as a sort of placeholder. We’re not accustomed to great flavor, but rather a healthy something to tide us over or fill a lunch bag. Most of us grew up on inoffensive-at-best apples and identical-looking bananas, definitely nothing to get excited about. In Asia, however, where these pears come from, they’re served as a special treat or gift or shared around the table after a meal. Here, as well, I sense that Asian pears are treated as something special. If nothing else, the price inspires a bit more awe than we’re used to affording a piece of fruit, and reflects the hours spent hand-thinning the crop as well as their fragile nature.
All season long I’ve been looking forward to learning more about these pears and their traditional uses, and I have to confess, I haven’t been too successful. There still isn’t that much information out there, readily available on the information superhighway (in English anyway). I was, however, able to find a bit on their usage in traditional Chinese medicine. From Kitchen Medicine Cooking Medicine, a blog about Food, Herbs, and Philosophy from Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine:
“The most common Kitchen Medicine in the East for the lungs are Pears. Pears are cooling and moistening which in moderation is how the lungs like to be. Not only do pear’s cool energy counteract the heat building in your lungs with infection, but their viscous moist quality is a natural lubricant for the mucous membranes of the lungs, with expectorant qualities, too.
Bite into a ripe pear. Compare with a ripe Apple. Pears have a viscous quality. This is a moistening characteristic that targets the lungs and nasal passages, and makes them excellent food this time of year, raw or cooked.”
Appropriately enough, I was fighting off a cough as I did my research, and it took longer than it should have for me to realize that I should get up off the couch and go steam some Asian pears. I highly recommend this recipe (adapted from Nina Simonds’ A Spoonful of Ginger), even if you’re feeling 100% healthy. Once cooked, the texture of Asian pear is remarkably similar to cooked European pears.
For anyone who’d like to dabble in the world of pickle making, Asian pears can also be used in kimchi. I’d recommend using Olympic, a Korean variety with a little more crunch and tart flavor. Another Korean cooking technique I learned: use Asian pear to marinate and tenderize beef in recipes such as bulgogi and galbi.
Also, one of the nicknames for Asian pears, “salad pears” makes a great suggestion – they go fabulously in salads, providing a sweet and crunchy counterpoint especially to bitter or spicy greens. Finally, online success – a search easily turns up a number of Asian pear salad recipes…
All of these suggestions, however, are contingent on any Asian pears lingering beyond the moment you take them out of their bag. The traditional way to eat a North Star Asian pear is, after all, to simply eat it, as soon as possible, caution to the wind with juice flying, a bit of the mystery still intact.
The phrase “dessert apple” may have become a bit obsolete. Nowadays, the combination of words conjures up images of pies, crisps, apple dumplings – sweet things that involve apples and follow a meal. An apple on its own is about the healthiest thing you could eat, right? Not dessert at all! But really the phrase really just means an apple that you would want to eat raw and fresh without first cooking, baking, or pressing it. So, really, pretty much everything that we grow at North Star is a “dessert apple.” Some are good for cooking as well, as the line between cooking and eating apples is not well defined in the U.S.
So, what’s with the name? I’m guessing that it hearkens back to an era when apples were synonymous with cider, and if you weren’t drinking your apples, you were likely drying or cooking them (or drying them and then cooking them). These apples were distinct from the ones popular today, with an unpalatable flavor or texture when raw. So, historically, for the masses, an apple that you would want to eat out of hand would be something of note. All those apple trees Johnny Appleseed planted? They were for pressing cider (which was, of course, the hard stuff), and the apples would have been too astringent and bitter to eat whole or unfermented. This is due to the prolific nature of apple genetics; plant an apple seed and you’ll get something dramatically different from its parent. So since Mr. John “Appleseed” Chapman was planting seeds, except for the one in a million, he was necessarily planting cider apples. In An Apple Harvest, Frank Browning and Sharon Silva explain: “If apples are nearly everywhere in the New World and the Old, they are not all uniformly delicious. Of the six thousand or so identified varieties, only a few hundred are good enough to be swallowed. Most are little green knots, their scant sugars drowned in bitter acid.” Furthermore, while American nurseries of a hundred years ago offered hundreds of varieties of apples for sale, today you’d be lucky to find upwards of thirty easily available. (These stable varieties are propagated by grafted cuttings rather than seed.) Some of those varieties gone by the wayside are the ones traditionally used for drying, which would have had an unpleasantly dry texture.
However, apple drying is not limited to those varieties; you can dry any number of dessert apples as well, and it’s a great way to spread out the harvest without taking up precious refrigerator space. Then you can snack on them as is all winter, or soak them in water or cider and use them in place of fresh apples for baking. There are several methods for drying (or “dehydrating”) apples. Fruits of all kinds have been dried in the sun since prehistory. Another of the oldest methods is to simply peel and core them and string them up whole in a warm drying room. Slicing them into rings speeds up the process. With the advent of modern ovens and specially-built food dehydrators, apple (or pear) rings can dry as quickly as overnight. Basically, the idea is to expose your food to warmth and air movement to lower its water content. If you live in a warm, breezy arid climate, you’re all set. But say it’s summer or fall in Pennsylvania, then you have a little less control over your drying conditions, and you’ll probably want to move your drying operation inside, and crank up your oven or dehydrator.
I currently have a top of the line ‘Excalibur’ dehydrator on long-term loan, and the Excalibur and I have been spending a lot of quality time together lately. I’ve got a routine down – about a half an hour to forty-five minutes in the evening peeling and slicing, run the dehydrator all night while I’m asleep, awake to a warm, apple-y smell rising from my kitchen, turn off the machine for the day, check on the fruit when I get home from work, and then run it a few more hours if anything needs more time. Home-scale dehydrators run the gamut – from the “Snackmaster” at around $40 to the “Excalibur Deluxe” topping out over $200. If you’re in the market, you’ll want to look for one with a thermostat and a fan.
Or, if you’re using your oven, put the fruit first onto wire cooling racks, cotton fabric, or cheesecloth, then onto your oven racks. If you use baking sheets, you’ll need to turn the fruit, since the air flow can’t travel through. Keep the oven as low as possible – no higher than 145°, or if your oven doesn’t go that low, turn it to “warm.” You might need to prop the door open a bit to encourage air circulation.
Either way, the process is pretty simple. Whether or not you peel the apples is up to you. The thickness of your apple slices also depends somewhat on you – how chewy or crispy you want your apple rings to be, and how long you want to spend drying them. In some scenarios, with some fruits, it might take up to even a few days. You do need to remove a certain amount of the water content to prevent the fruit from spoiling. Various sources say as dry as a raisin or until the fruit feels dry and leathery on the outside but slightly moist inside. If you’d like more of an “apple chip” just let them dry longer. If you’d like you can “pretreat” your apple slices – not with sulfur like commercially dried fruit – but with lemon juice and/or honey. This helps to keep your fruit from browning, but I’ve never really found this to be a problem. Dunk your fruit in lemon juice, a honey-lemon dip (1 cup honey: 1 cup water: the juice of one lemon), or a honey syrup of ¼ cup honey in 2 cups of hot water.
As you’re drying you’ll want to check in on your fruit from time to time, to turn it, or to remove any fruit that’s dry (it won’t all be done at exactly the same time). The amount of time needed varies widely with temperature, thickness, variety, etc., but I’ve found that overnight at about 135° is generally sufficient for most of the fruit I’ve dried. For more detailed instructions, check out http://www.pickyourown.org/apples_dried.htm which includes instructions on how to use your car as a dehydrator!
There’s a word farmers use to describe the more unusual, rarefied varieties we get a kick out of growing: esoteric. The assumption is that such varieties are appreciated only by other plant geeks and hard core foodies (a word which has an unfortunately negative connotation in my mind – what’s wrong with caring about your food?). The cultivation of such esoteric varieties implies an impractical search for flavor, for the forbidden fruit, the holy grail of the garden.
I’ve always liked the word ‘esoteric,’ and could easily picture what it meant, in farming terms, but I wasn’t quite clear on its precise definition. So I looked it up:
Esoteric adj. a) intended for or understood by only a chosen few, as an inner group of disciples or initiates (said of ideas, literature, etc.) b) beyond the understanding or knowledge of most people; abstruse
(abstruse?!?… “abstruse adj. hard to understand; deep; recondite”… recondite?!?… “recondite adj. Beyond the grasp of the ordinary mind or understanding; profound; abstruse”)
This definition isn’t quite what I was expecting, but it leaves me with the dissatisfaction I was predicting it would. I say it’s not fair that the pursuit of really good flavor is limited to the chosen few. Shouldn’t we all enjoy our food? There is the conundrum that something cool inevitably loses its cachet once it’s gone mainstream, but I think that’s where the local food movement can step in. If small farms were well-supported enough so that the farmers had a bit more breathing room (with their time and finances) and could play a little, they could discover and cultivate all the unusual things that were well-suited to their microclimate. And differences in climate and ecosystem as well as appropriate scale would set natural limits to the spread of certain varieties and foods. So each farmers’ market, CSA, or local food store would have its own unique varieties (say, didn’t that used to be the case, once upon a time, but not so long ago?) We can all be in the inner circle – in our own foodshed.
This sounds like a great scenario to me. It’s a goal of many farmers I know (a few of us at North Star included) to grow things they truly enjoy growing (and eating!). There is, however, often a sort of tug of war between productivity and livelihood on the one hand and passion and creativity on the other. We can all relate to this, right? The need to make a living often leads us to do things that we don’t love to do, even if we’re not compromising our morals by doing them. Planting anything is a gamble, and the first rule of intelligent farming is to have a ready market for what you’re planting. Whether or not those new oddball crops will sell is anybody’s guess. The fruit CSA ameliorates this situation a bit, by providing an infrastructure in which we (the farmers) can grow unusual varieties and have a ready market for them, and you (the consumers) can try new and amazing things without going on a wild goose chase to find them. Just by signing up, suddenly, you’re in that inner circle, and the esoteric is becoming a bit more recognizable.
First-timers walking up to our market stand or checking out the list of varieties that North Star grows won’t see many familiar faces. No Red Delicious, no McIntosh, no Granny Smith…. I think there’s one Fuji tree out there somewhere, and a number of HoneyCrisps for the enthusiasts. But Hudson’s Golden Gem? Esopus Spitzenburg? Adams Pearmain? A season or two, and these are old friends. And you CSA members get first crack, because the small amounts of the unusual varieties go right into the fruit shares.
“But what’s with the wacky names?” you might ask. Many are heirloom varieties, others are new varieties bred for disease resistance, some are North Star originals, some just needed naming – they might be a “numbered variety” (still being tested and not yet or not ever named and released for commercial distribution) or they might be a “mystery variety” that was shipped incorrectly by the nursery. Some of these varieties received the death sentence of “commercially unviable.” But viability looks a little different when you’re growing on only 15 acres, handling fruit by hand, and sending apples to market days after harvest. It also helps to have informed customers who appreciate a variety of flavors throughout the season. It might be humanly impossible to grow all of the hundreds of varieties possible in our southeastern Pennsylvania region, but with the inner circle on board, we can certainly try!
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Rows of Asian pears became most noticeable by the fruit covering the ground, rather than hanging from the trees. A stretch of large plum trees looks pretty good, until you begin asking if they were all leaning slightly before the storm. Toppled-over peaches and apples are much more obviously affected; lying down with roots straining in the soil or snapped beyond survival.
(like those pictured here) at home, but we trust that the occasional dimple in your fruit will be tolerated. 
When introduced to a guest at a party recently, I shared that I work in an orchard. He seemed surprised and responded, “You mean, like, picking fruit?” We chatted briefly and since that conversation I’ve been thinking about everything that leads up to the iconic, but brief, moment of picking fruit within the context of the entire growing season.
But before long, the trees burst into bloom and the orchard transformed from bare-boned rows of trees into stunning blocks of pink and white flowers. With spring under way, we focused on tying and training the trees to desired shapes and growing habits: “V’s” for peaches and nectarines; central leaders and open centers for apples, pears, Asian pears, and plums. 
The answer was revealed very clearly last week when Ike was being interviewed for an educational documentary which was being filmed at our farm. The interviewer asked Farmer Ike what he liked best about farming. Having been married to the guy for 24 years, I figured I’d know the answer. Something along the lines of, “because I like growing things” or “I enjoy having different work to do season by season” or even “I enjoy dealing with the challenges Mother Nature gives us”. But no, his answer was “I just love the experience of trying new apple varieties; nurturing a baby tree for several years and then taking that first bite.” Not the answer I really expected, but not a surprising one either.
The other thing coming down the pike in addition to those 141 is a breeding project Ike started last year. He crossed Gold Rush with Florina apples. We’ve got a whole bunch of interesting-looking seedlings from that cross, but it’ll be several years before we get a taste of those. And each one will be different. Hmmm….Gold Rush and Florina as parents? I can’t wait!
However, apple drying is not limited to those varieties; you can dry any number of dessert apples as well, and it’s a great way to spread out the harvest without taking up precious refrigerator space. Then you can snack on them as is all winter, or soak them in water or cider and use them
I’ve always liked the word ‘esoteric,’ and could easily picture what it meant, in farming terms, but I wasn’t quite clear on its precise definition. So I looked it up: 
“But what’s with the wacky names?” you might ask. Many are heirloom varieties, others are new varieties bred for disease resistance, some are North Star originals, some just needed naming – they might be a “numbered variety” (still being tested and not yet or not ever named and released for commercial distribution) or they might be a “mystery variety” that was shipped incorrectly by the nursery. Some of these varieties received the death sentence of “commercially unviable.” But viability looks a little different when you’re growing on only 15 acres, handling fruit by hand, and sending apples to market days after harvest. It also helps to have informed customers who appreciate a variety of flavors throughout the season. It might be humanly impossible to grow all of the hundreds of varieties possible in our southeastern Pennsylvania region, but with the inner circle on board, we can certainly try!