Today in the orchard
Our big activity today was collecting leaves from fifteen apple trees for DNA samples. We pinch off two or three small leaves of each specimen and stuff them in special tubes half-filled with desiccant. Each tube is carefully labeled with a name and a number. We send them off to the Washington State University where they are “profiled” and compared with a huge international data reference set. Our goal is to learn names of cultivars and the names of their ancestors. It's one of the most valuable tools we have as we work with others around the world to assemble an apple family tree. We’ll tell you what we learn from this batch in about six months.
At noon we tasted two Frostbite red-fleshed seedlings that fruited for the first time: “Radar Love” and “Mo.” We’ve been waiting for this day for twelve years. Cammy, Skylar and I all agree that both have real potential as dessert fruit.
More apples are beginning to drop, and we picked the Kenrick Sweet and the Kilham Hill. Both are rare and will be DNA profiled and phenotyped. We checked out the wild trees down Finley Lane for potential cider fruit (we found two good candidates) and harvested the Strike Anywhere peppers (the small, prolific hot pepper we’ve been developing over the past 30 years). Tonight frost is anticipated. Time to get the tender stuff under cover. It was dark by the time we hung the last pepper plants from the rafters and called it a day.