Today in the orchard
The Drap d’Or de Bretagne tree and Todd Little-Siebold on Verona Island, February 2024.
More tree planting today. This time in our neighbor’s orchard that dates from about 1900. Most of the original trees planted by his grandparents are gone, but over the years I’ve supplied him with young trees to fill in the gaps. There are now a number of important local historic cultivars in amongst the Baldwins and Ben Davis. All the cultivars we’ve planted date from before 1900. The most noteworthy tree in this year’s planting would be the Drap d’Or de Bretagne. It’s been gaining a lot of attention lately and rightfully so. It was a great discovery that has helped fill in another piece of the puzzle of how the apple found its way to North America. Kudos to everyone involved.
During the middle of the day I attended an apple meeting via zoom, and Skylar continued her work on creating “passports” for all the trees in the Maine Heritage Orchard (MHO). The most important task at MHO is maintaining the trees, since they are an irreplaceable living history library. But documentation of the collection comes in a close second for importance. Keeping accurate records of each tree’s origin, DNA profile results, fruit description and observations requires a lot of time. Having the information in our heads (as we do) is not very communicable. Writing it down is time consuming but critical. We call this the tree’s “Passport.” Each tree in the MHO will have one. Fortunately we have Skylar to help us this spring.
