From left (back) to right (front): Akane, Tydeman's Red, and McIntosh Apples

One of the obvious questions for us as apple growers is, "Well, what varieties should we grow?" With thousands of apple varieties grown across hundreds of years, the question isn't a simple one. My approach to tackling it is two-fold; the first is to glean what knowledge I can from the expert resources available: Dr. Bob Norton, for instance, or the many online apple enthusiasts.

Some Favorite Apple Resources

Adam's Apples: Adam is "an amateur" pomologist, but he has a thrilling love of the fruit. He seeks common and unusual varieties and reviews them in the manner of a wine taster.

Apples & Oranges — Kuffel Creek: Kevin Hauser of Kuffel Creek has taken on the ambitious task of finding apples that will thrive in Southern California's persistent heat. He also ships apple trees to Africa, another non-traditional apple locale.

Orange Pippin is an excellent directory of apple varieties and orchards around the world. Some of the entries for specific varieties are a bit scant, but this just leaves room enthusiasts to fill in the blanks.

With a good imagination, someone else's vivid description can almost summon the flavor in your mouth. But at some point, you just want to bite into the apple yourself.

Apple Tasting

We were in Seattle this past Saturday, and had the good fortune to visit the University Farmer's Market. My Dad had mentioned tasting heritage apples at the market last year, so I was on the prowl for anything I hadn't tried recently. Grouse Mountain Farm had a small assortment of apples, and I had to bring each of them home for a taste-test with Erik and Sola.

Sliced in half: Akane, Tydeman's Red, and McIntosh (left to right). Note the snowy white flesh of the Akane.

Pink Pearl (eaten before apple portraits were taken)
I'm previously familiar with this apple, as it's a favorite of a longtime family friend. It has attractive, pink-streaked flesh with intriguing pale gold skin. The skin is thin, with crisp, fine-grained flesh. Its flavor has a good balance favoring tartness slightly over sweetness; a bit dry, rather than juicy. This is a truly beautiful apple which I'd happily eat again.

Tydeman's Red Apple
Very soft flesh, with medium grain. Very mild, sub-acid flavor, with skin that separated from the flesh when we bit in. Ultimately a disappointment — we see few reasons to recommend this apple. From reading others' tasting notes, we wonder whether the flavor deteriorated during storage.

McIntosh
A familiar variety to any apple lover. McIntosh has thin, tough skin and crisp, moderately juicy flesh. It has a very familiar flavor profile — a dominant, pleasing sweetness tempered by a tangy touch of acid. A good all 'rounder, similar to our Baldwin apples but without a certain piquant quality that we love.

Akane
Another very attractive apple. Akane has thin, bright red-streaked skin and crisp, fine-grained porcelain flesh. The flavor hinted at spiciness; Erik compared it to a raw radish. That quality was never fully apparent, though, and only appeared at the back of the throat. The taste was primarily sweet, with only light acidity. Too dry for Erik's taste, but I found it juicy enough to enjoy. Addendum: A day or two ago I looked at the apples in our local supermarket and saw a display of Akanes, which bore no resemblance to the apple we'd purchased at the Farmer's Market. Very curious!

The Gravenstein Puzzle

All three of the exhibits above were dead ripe in Mid-September. New to pomology as we are, we thought that perhaps they were all Gravensteins — the quintessential pie apple. I perused the USDA's watercolors (pictured above) and determined all three specimens to be good matches for a Gravenstein's striped appearance. Excited that we might have good sources for lots of Gravensteins, we set the serious business of tasting them.

Exhibit A
This apple came to us from a neighbor, who'd clandestinely filled a bucket with apples and left it near our horse pasture. Most of the apples in the bucket were in poor condition from codling moths and other unpleasant apple pests, but I salvaged a few of the best-looking apples for us to sample. When Erik and I knocked on his door to thank him for the secret gift, he professed no knowledge of the apple variety. Among the four of us who tasted this apple, I can't say that any of us gave it a favorable review. The flavor was weak and sub-acid, with mealy flesh to round out the deal. We baked some of these apples into a pie with results that might best be described as profoundly mediocre. Aside from the apples, the pie was quite good!

Exhibit B
Erik and Maia found this apple growing alongside Aurora near Fremont Way in Seattle. It was in full fruit in Mid-September, perhaps even past its prime ripeness. This apple had soft flesh, with a pleasant tartness. The overall flavor, however, was a bit lackluster in comparison to the blockbuster flavor we associate with Gravensteins.

Exhibit C
This apple fell fifteen feet (or thereabouts) from the boughs of our family's "Red Gravenstein" tree. Upon tasting it, we knew immediately that neither of the other two apples were Gravensteins. The flesh had a crisp, even grain; the skin was thin and made a nice "crunch" when bitten. The flavor was big: a perfect balance of tart and sweet that bloomed rapturously into the mouth. When we made apple crisp with more of these apples, they performed perfectly.

Although it's disappointing not to have access to more than one Gravenstein tree, I must remember that I am still more fortunate than most. To quote Fred Lape's From Apples and Men:

"During the period when the restaurants were able to use Gravenstein apples for cooking, their daily average sales of apple pie were double that of the average sales for the rest of the year."

We have a few young Gravenstein trees that Maia grafted. We'll need to graft more.

Northern Pacific Tree Frog (Pseudacris regilla)

I rescued this cute frog from our newly-christened garden hunter. You can see that he's a bit worse for wear; he has a golden hair wrapped around his body from being dragged on the floor and a gash on his leg from kitty aggression. I have hopes that he won't be permanently disabled from the encounter. I unspooled the tightly-wound hair from around his abdomen and set him free near the hedge where he was caught. I'm pleased that she's found a way to employ herself, but I wish she'd focus more exclusively on pests!

Aine with an apple in Piper's Orchard.

Festival Poster

This past Saturday we made it across the water to the Piper's Orchard Festival of Fruit. Nestled in the forested reaches of Carkeek Park, it attracted a modest crowd of young and old apple enthusiasts, including some friends of mine — members of the Seattle Tree Fruit Society — who I hadn't known shared my passion for apples. Pies were submitted for judging upon arrival; an old cider press clunked and groaned as small hands strained to spin the wheels and crush apples into cider.

Early on the schedule were a few presentations. The first of these was given by Kathy Mendelson, who gave histories for a few "famous" heirloom apples. Of particular interest to me was the story of the Northern Spy, a celebrated apple (often lauded in my family) with a name suggesting real intrigue. She told us about an anonymous letter submitted to a gardening magazine in 1853. The letter (see below), suggested that it had been named for a notorious abolitionist novel about a Union spy who set slaves on the path to the Underground Railroad. All this might well be fiction, she said, because she'd turned up no evidence of the book's existence.

My interest was piqued. After the festival I did some Googling of my own to investigate the tale of the Northern Spy, and found a "Threepenny Novel" (cover pictured below) from the mid-1800s called The Northern Spy or: The Fatal Papers. I haven't yet had an opportunity to read through it to find what all the fuss was about, but the time period seems like a close match. For those interested, the full text is available online here.

After the first presentation ended was an interesting keynote from Tim Smith, who'd travelled from Wenatchee to share recommendations for the use of modern horticultural methods in backyard orchards. He had quite a bit to say about the benefits of Eastern Washington's climate, but he also shared generously his expertise in spraying, pruning, and fruits that we could expect to grow well (or poorly) in our own rainy climes.

Identifying Apples

After the speakers finished came something that we'd been particularly looking forward to. Dr. Bob Norton (founder of the Vashon Island Fruit Club, retired WSU professor of horticulture, and expert pomologist) was on site and identifying apple varieties brought in by backyard orchard-keepers. We'd brought along three varieties from our own orchard.

The first of these three we'd been calling the Roxbury Russet — a large, mostly green apple with a red blush where the sun hit and prominent russeting, occasionally covering most of the fruit. It is a late-ripening, heavy-bearing apple, and excellent in pies. Without hearing our opinion of what sort of apple it was, Bob Norton scrutinized our underripe specimens. His first thought was that it might be a Rhode Island Greening, famed as a pie and cooking apple. His second guess was a Roxbury Russet, matching my Dad's assessment. Both guesses are well-regarded late season apples that are excellent for pie or cider. We'll have to sample the apples this year once they've ripened; if they're enjoyable to eat fresh, the scales will weigh more heavily in favor of it being a Russet.

Dr. Bob Norton samples a "Northern Spy" and puzzles over the mystery of its true identity.

The second apple we offered was from a tree that we've become quite fond of. Though we had been calling it a Northern Spy, there was no consensus within our family on the apple's pedigree. According to my Dad, it was my great-grandfather's favorite of the apples here on the farm. My grandmother referred to it as a British Columbia, much to the confusion of any pomologist we've ever spoken to (there is no known variety by that name). Bob Norton was unable to make a diagnosis on the spot, but called us back late that night with further thoughts.

There were two likely possibilities, he said. The first of these was the Ben Davis, an apple of some notoriety among historic apple snobs. Sometimes referred to as the "cotton apple" due to the texture of its flesh and lack of flavor, the Ben Davis was once widely grown in the southern and eastern United States for its qualities as a storage apple. I have seen it described as tasting like cardboard, which certainly doesn't describe our apple. We shook our heads at this possibility, hoping for something more tasteful.

The second possibility, he said, was that it was a Baldwin — another late-ripening, storage-friendly New England apple. The Baldwin enjoys better regard than the Ben Davis; like our own apple tree, Baldwin apples are noted for their aromatic qualities and sub-acid, unpretentious flavor. This sounds like a good match for our apple tree, and we've taken to calling it the Baldwin until we learn otherwise.

Top: Apples from our tree. Bottom: Watercolors by the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection; 1915, 1918, and 1911.

The last of our apples never even passed Dr. Norton's lips. Upon seeing the small green apples, he declared them to be Grimes Golden. I wish that we'd pushed him to sample the fruit, as I have my doubts about this assessment. Our fruit are a bit tough and aren't very flavorful (though perhaps they're underripe), which stands in sharp contrast to the exceptional flavor usually attributed to the Grimes Golden. Of the trees on our property are likely to be a Grimes Golden, I'd consider the gnarled tree presiding over our woodshed the likeliest candidate. Perhaps by this time next year, we'll have a better guess about the identity of the small green apples.

Apple Pie and Torpor

Climbing an apple tree.

The rest of the afternoon proceeded with increasing lethargy. We tasted the championship apple pie (made with Gravenstein apples), as well as some equally excellent pie without any sort of fancy credentials. We meandered through the forest to the tour of Piper's Orchard, which was planted in the 1890s. Rather than follow from tree to tree with the rest of the group, we loitered in the shade and watched Aine do her best to eat an apple without the aid of teeth.

I overheard Erik making enthusiastic conversation with a veteran of hard cider-craft. My parents lolled in the shade with us. Threads of pomological conversation drifted past on the gentle breeze — permaculture, pests, apple hygiene and orchard art installations. We compared the Roxbury Russet growing in Piper's Orchard to our own tree (ours had less of a golden cast).

Finally, we convened the Vashon and Shoreline contingents of our apple-loving family and parted ways with the festival. Though the festival's over, I've developed a voracious appetite for apple lore. I'm determined to deduce the truth of our apple varieties, but find myself with less and less confidence the more I learn.