It’s October - the month of the apple. The height of apple season. The pinnacle. Grab your picking bucket. The ladder. It’s here. The time is right to go out on the limb.
And so we plunge into October, and it’s a beauty. The colors are just about perfect in central Maine right now. The sky is blue, really blue. The red maples (Acer rubrum) are electric orange and red. The leaves are dropping, but there are still plenty on the trees to enjoy. Looking up through the trees, the combination of red and blue does look… purple.
Cortland, Macoun and McIntosh. Can you tell them apart? Which is which?
Today the College of the Atlantic apple class returned to the farm. We played a game in which each of the eleven students created a written description of one of four apple cultivars, and then they tried to group themselves by cultivar according to which apple each was given. They could only use their written description to group themselves, not the apple itself. It wasn’t easy. Using the written word to describe an apple is challenging at best, especially when you have several roundish red apples. The apples they were describing were Cortland, Macoun, McIntosh and Red Gravenstein. To the inexperienced observer the four may seem indistinguishable even though they have obvious differences to the well-seasoned orchardist.
I always ask myself, “what make this apple distinctive?“ I look for the characteristic that sets this apple aside from any others I’ve ever seen. “When I see this cultivar again, how will I recognize it?” Each cultivar does have something that distinguishes it from all the others. The key is to observe each apple so deeply that the subtleties become obvious. The students did remarkably well. They’ll get better.
Is there a reason this matters? For those of us who are identifying apples, time is precious. We need to know the “Macs” and Cortlands and Macouns and Red Gravensteins as easily as we know red from green when we pull up to an intersection. That gives us more time to spend on the obscure, historic apple mysteries that have eluded identification for decades or even centuries.
Before the students headed home for the day, we put vole-deterring, spiral, plastic tree guards on some of the trees up at Finley Lane. We’ll be doing a lot more of that in the next three weeks. After they left, we graded apples for sale and picked more Grimes Golden and Pomme Grise. It’s October. It’s blue. It’s orange. It’s here.