Today in the orchard
This afternoon Laura, Skylar and I led an apple tasting for a small but enthusiastic group in a cozy, old, tool-lined carpentry shop in Harpswell. (You never know where the next talk may be.) The event was a tribute to Robert McIntyre who spent many years fruit-exploring down the peninsulas and islands off Brunswick. He was never afraid to knock on a door, and I think he knew every ancient tree in every dooryard on every old road south of Bowdoin College. He made numerous excellent discoveries including a spectacular Golden Ball and the bizarre Danziger Kantenapfel which he dubbed, “Lumpy Red”. We grow two of the seedlings he introduced me to: Norton Greening and Orr’s Island Cemetery (aka “Roberto”). He also found three beautiful ancient Baldwin specimens from which I took scions for our own Baldwin trees. He is someone we miss everyday, especially in the fall when the fruit begins to drop and the trees are begging to be visited once again.
Skylar began the tasting by introducing the basic apple flavors: tart (sub-acid: Ashmead’s Kernel). sweet (low-acid: Tolman Sweet), bittersweet (low-acid and bitter: Damelot) and bittersharp (acidic and bitter: Kingston Black). From there we went directly to “pear-flavored” in the form of Hudson’s Golden Gem. Then, for the next two hours we tasted an assortment of Harpswell apples collected by Dorothy Rosenberg and Charles Strickland. Laura, Skylar and I tag-teamed the answers to numerous questions all along the way. By 4:30 it was getting dark and time to go home.