November 10, 2025

Today in the orchard

I made what will be the last batch of Charlamoff sauce of the year. I picked the crop on September 1st and made a very decent pie a few days later. The fruit I cooked today was in the cooler for a month or so at about 38F and then in the root cellar for another month at 50F. Amazingly they are still in decent shape. The sauce is still flavorful; the fruit is on the acidic side as all good sauce apples are; cooks quickly. 

Charlamoff is a Duchess-type, of Russian origin, medium-sized, roundish and rather distinctly red-striped. If you saw one, you might think “Duchess”; but if you see them side by side, you know they are distinct cultivars. I first came across Charlamoff in the northern Maine town of Bridgewater about ten years ago. There were two old trees on the farm. Unlike Duchess, the stripes and blush are more lavender than red. I was able to identify the Bridgewater trees and have since also obtained scionwood from the Geneva, NY collection. We now have trees grafted from both locations.  It’s beautiful, productive, cooks well and is delicious. 

November 9, 2025

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.   

November 8, 2025

Today in the orchard

In a brief respite from the gray and the cold, the sun and its heat returned to the farm today. Off came the sweaters and the sweatshirts. Alyssa, Kevin, Skylar and I spent the day in the Finley Lane Orchard. We began the annual task of putting on the “tree guards.” These are the spiral plastic sleeves that protect the trunks of the younger trees from being nibbled by voles and mice during the winter when there’s not a lot to eat and the tender bark is too tempting to pass up. In summer there’s lots of more palatable stuff in the orchard, and the small rodents rarely cause any damage. 

But winter is another thing, especially once it snows and the voles create networks of tunnels beneath the crust. A ten-year-old tree can become toast (literally) in a day. Once the trunk is “girdled” it may be too late to save it. So we put on the tree guards in the fall and take them all off in April. We remove them in the spring because the borers (Saperda candida) love to sneak in behind the sleeves in the summer. On off on off. It's that amazing endless circle. 

November 7, 2025

Today in the orchard

Not much warmer today with more rain by evening. Cammy and I packed up the truck with ladders, picking buckets and boxes and returned to The Apple Farm to pick Ashmead’s Kernel, Roxbury Russet, Kingston Black and Hudson’s Golden Gem. These are trees I grafted there almost twenty years ago. The trees are tucked away in a corner of the orchards where they often go unnoticed. Steve mentioned that they weren’t planning to pick the fruit so it seemed like it would be worth grabbing them before it’s too late. Steve even gave us a hand with the picking. The season there is nearly over.

From Fairfield we traveled south to Gardiner where we attended an apple and cider tasting at a tiny bar/restaurant called “Table Bar.” The place was packed. Zack Kaiser of Absolem Cider, Bill Mullen the NY apple photographer and I shared the stage (corner) where we traded stories about apples and cider. Zack brought three single-varietal ciders—Ashmead’s, Northern Spy, and Harrison—and I provided the fruit. We passed out plates of cut up apples and then followed each round with a pouring of the corresponding cider. In between we told stories and answered lots of questions. If you haven’t been to Table Bar, give it a visit. It was started by a group of friends who wanted a place to share conversation, food and drink with each other and the local community. An evening there feels like hanging out in your neighbors’ living room - familiar, comfortable, lively and you don’t have to clean up when everyone leaves.

November 6, 2025

Today in the orchard

The weather continued to be cold and raw as I drove to The Apple Farm in Fairfield, ME, home of the oldest Gray Pearmain trees in central Maine (or possibly, anywhere). I was in pursuit of a few good specimens of Ashmead’s Kernel and Northern Spy to use in a cider and apple tasting that I’ll be helping to lead at Table Bar in Gardiner, ME tomorrow. We have both of those varieties here, but The Apple Farm has many more trees and I was looking for a good excuse to go visit the owners, Steve and Marilyn Meyerhans. I also wanted to check out some trees I had topworked there years ago to see if they had any fruit left. I was not disappointed - Kingston Black, Roxbury Russet and Hudson’s Golden Gem hadn’t been picked. We’ll bring our ladders and boxes back tomorrow and pick them. The Apple Farm is located on a ridge with amazing views both east and west. They have a large collection of unusual cultivars along with the typical ones. It’s well worth making the trip.

In the afternoon we planted the garlic back on the farm. We grow two garlics: Phillips and German Extra Hardy. Both are excellent. At one point it began to snow - perfect weather for planting. We covered the bed with hay and made a bee-line for the heat. Another fall task complete.

November 5, 2025

Today in the orchard

More apple sauce for the flying saucers of the omniverse. I’ve been using up the early-season apples lately. It’s interesting to see how they do after a month or two in storage. The Red St. Lawrence are still in remarkably good shape. I made sauce with them today and was pleased with the result. Red St. Lawrence is a sport (mutation) of the classic “St. Lawrence,” which is a seedling of Fameuse (aka Snow for its glowing white flesh). Fameuse is one of the most important of all historic, northern cultivars. It’s one grandparent of McIntosh and is in the ancestry of many other cultivars. It’s a great dessert and cooking apple in its own right. We have a very old Fameuse tree at our place. Both Fameuse and St. Lawrence migrated to Maine from Canada back when the border was not much more than a formality. You can find old trees of both sprinkled around much of the state. We certainly scored when those two apples showed up. 

Red St. Lawrence apparently arose spontaneously from a St. Lawrence tree in Newburgh, a few miles south of Bangor sometime in the early twentieth century. The ground color (“background color”) of the apple is red unlike the original St. Lawrence which has a distinctly green ground color.  Mutations like this happen in all plants and are often coveted by collectors. For a reason I’ve never been able to determine, such a mutation is called a sport. Although sports can be maintained asexually through cuttings or grafting, they are—as far as we can tell—not genetically different from the original plant. I’ll talk again about sports in the orchard report, but for now I’ll just say Red St. Lawrence has a rusty red ground color. It’s a very good, early-mid-fall apple. 

November 4, 2025

Today in the orchard

The cold, raw November winds swept across the farm today, and even rubber boots, two sweaters and a sweatshirt were not enough to keep out the bite. But despite the cold and the wind, we harvested all the potatoes. The yield was good. We had planted them in the bed where we dug out a couple hundred nursery trees this past May. Now that the potatoes are dug, we’ll fertilize the bed and plant garlic by the end of the week. We’ll harvest the garlic on a warm, sunny day next August. That will be three different crops in that one bed. Rotation, rotation, rotation.

In the great apple sauce rotation, today it was Golden Ball, one of my favorites. It’s large, round, golden yellow and, to my eye, beautiful. Whoever named it did a good job. There’s no consensus on where it originated. Some sources say Connecticut while others suggest Maine. Either way, it was grown historically in the southern and central parts of the state. It ripens in early fall and keeps until about now. It was time to use them up. It’s on the acidic side and cooks well into an excellent, thick, creamy sauce. You can read more about Golden Ball in Chapter 5 of Apples and the Art of Detection. I’m pretty sure it was also Sun Ra’s favorite apple - or should have been.

November 3, 2025

Today in the orchard

Todd Little-Siebold and a magazine reporter came to the farm this morning for an apple ID session. We spread out the bags of apples and the books and went at it. One of our focuses was an apple we refer to as Mary Brown #4 from Prospect, ME that we’ve been attempting to identify for the past twelve years. One possible ID is Northern Belle, an apple submitted to the USDA by EH Dunbar from Damariscotta in October 1898 and painted a month later, though never historically described under that name. My guess is that “Northern Belle” is either a local synonym for another apple or possibly just a fabricated family name. Reviewing the literature, the one variety that is a possible match is “Litchfield” aka Litchfield Pippin. There is a pretty decent description of that cultivar in Bradford (Apple Varieties of Maine). Although the description is incomplete, it is a very decent match. 

It was a morning of detective work accompanied by a rolling explanatory monologue.  Becoming an apple detective is a life-long process. If you want to be a good one—or a really good one—prepare to put in many years tromping through orchards and squinting at apples.

November 2, 2025

Today in the orchard

Before starting the long car-ride from western MA back to Palermo, I stopped at an old farm in Gill, just a few miles from Greenfield. This past summer I had been contacted by the owner about an old tree in her yard. Becky Minor had been inspired to get in touch with me after reading an article about the rediscovery of the Drap d’Or de Bretagne. It’s another reason why putting yourself out there can be a really good thing to do. I asked her to send me a photo of the tree; when it comes to old trees, I want to see what the tree looks like first. She sent me a photo, and I knew this was a tree I had to visit.  I pulled into the driveway, parked the car, got out, and there was the tree. I was instantly glad I had come.

Becky had explained in the earlier email, “We have lived in our house for 15 years, and the previous owners told us that the house was moved here ca. 1850. Just outside our back door, literally 10 feet from the house is the apple tree.  It still blossoms every year and produces fruit.  The apples are yellow and generally begin to rot and fall off the tree well before traditional harvest time. I have honestly never tasted one, so I couldn't tell if you they are sweet or tart-but the bees sure love them! It is quite amazing to me that it is still alive as it is completely hollow, and more than half of the base of the tree doesn't even touch the ground anymore.”

I was not disappointed. Although the top of the tree had broken off long ago, the trunk is largely intact, huge, hollow and—as Becky had written to me—mostly not touching the ground. It is an apple tree lifting off to heaven. On one side is a horseshoe grown into the trunk. It looks as though someone had hung it on the tree in about 1880 for good luck. The tree is growing only a few feet from the house. This is odd. Did an apple sprout a few feet from the foundation shortly after the house was moved just prior to the Civil War? Was there a young 20 or 30 year old tree growing at the site when they moved the house? Maybe they planted the tree in anticipation of moving the house. It’s so close. There must be a story there. In any event, the tree is probably 200 years old. 

Becky did give me fruit that had been in her cooler for a couple of months. It is still in decent shape and is an apple I’ve never seen before. I’ll be able to phenotype it and see if it rings any bells. I took leaves and will submit a sample for DNA profiling. And then I was back on the road and heading for Maine. Thank you, Becky.

November 1, 2025

Today in the orchard

Today’s Orchard Report comes to you from Raven’s Used Bookstore at the old, repurposed, historic, river-side mill in the western MA town of Shelburne Falls where a crowd of apple enthusiasts gathered all day and into the evening for an assortment of apple and cider-related programs. It was all part of Franklin County Cider Days. I gave a talk in the afternoon on grafting, growing and trialing seedling apple selections in our orchard. It was a talk I’d never given before. It gave me an opportunity to think about—and question—the value of growing a wide assortment of some pretty weird apples on our farm over the years. Some of my thoughts are listed below. I did do some counting and categorizing beforehand. We currently grow about 125 seedling selections. Here’s a breakdown on the seedling apples we’re currently growing here:

• Other people's discoveries=62 (50%)

• Our discoveries=31 (25%)

• Our breeding/selections=26 (20%)

• Other people's breeding/selections=4 (5%)

Here are some reasons for growing seedlings in a cultivated setting:

• To save the tree: Many seedlings fall victim to road widening, chainsaws, etc

• You might never find it again: I’ve gone back and looked. Where was that wonderful tree?

• It’s far from home: Gas isn’t cheap and by the time I return, the fruit has all dropped.

• You’ve never seen the tree but it sounds good: Trust your friends.

• No longer have access to the tree: “Sorry, we use these apples.”

• Create a more suitable location: This tree could use more room and better soil.

• Your own breeding project: It’s really fun to start apples from seed.

• A friend would like to get your opinion of a breeding project: It’s an honor to grow someone else’s “creation.”

• Something you discover at the Seedling Exhibition: Every year there are new and potentially interesting submissions.

• Something you want to offer in your nursery: If you’re going to offer it for sale, you better know it well. 

• Something you really like and want more fruit: Yes!

• Curiosity: Can this seedling do well in an orchard setting.

• Something to expand the cider apple pomona for future growers: Seedlings are the future.

A highlight of the day was receiving a gift from fellow apple-explorer Sean Turley of a gigantic two-volume set of the annotated Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is one of my favorite literary mentors. 

October 31, 2025

Today in the orchard

Today I attended the annual seedling exhibition in Williamsburg, MA. It’s a day-long event held in one big room in a beautiful, old Grange Hall with high ceilings, squeaky wooden floors and a stage that should be used for singing apple songs. Spread out across the entire room are long tables covered with paper plates of seedling apples submitted from all across the country. Each submission has a name tag with the apple’s name (some are hilarious) and where it came from. The person who submitted the apple is not listed. (To protect the guilty?) Some of the names are familiar because they’ve been shown other years, but none of them are apples you’d find in nursery catalogs or U-pick orchards or grocery stores. These are wild apples found growing by the side of the road or along a hedge-row or out in an abandoned field. Think Thoreau. They come in every size, shape, color and—most of all—taste. Each plate has 3 or 4 apples on it and at least one is sliced up to taste. (Toothpicks are provided.) There is room on the ID sheets for taste comments. 

When I arrived, the room was packed with apple enthusiasts tasting, chatting, writing, taking photos and voting for their favorites in several categories: best quality eating, best quality cider, best crabapple, best in show. These newly discovered fruits are the apples of the future. Yes, some will fade into oblivion ,but others may even become household names, like “Lil’ Limey,” “Jarman’s Held Leaf,” “Thankful Sage,” “My Heart,” and “Guatay Pippin.” I may even graft some of them into Finley Lane. It was a great way to celebrate Halloween.

October 30, 2025

Today in the orchard

I think it’s fair to say that the picking season is now officially over. Today we picked the Dandeneau trees, Steve Gougeon’s productive bittersharp seedling discovery in western Mass that we love to press and ferment. We’ll do all that in a couple of weeks. We also picked the Baldwins, Yellow Bellflowers and Roxbury Russets. We’re leaving the Wicksons to freeze on the trees. We’ll pick them frozen and press them for cider. We did that several years ago, and we liked the result. I imagine we’ll collect a few other odds and ends, but essentially it’s all done. It’s been a good season. A lot of apples over the course of nearly three months.

It’s fitting that the last apples picked for the season were the Roxbury Russets. Roxbury is probably the first North American apple to be selected and named. It remains one of the last to ripen and one of the best in storage. It is also a great sauce apple. We’ll be eating these with our oatmeal long into spring. What a truly great apple.  

October 29, 2025

Today in the orchard

We continued picking the last of the late apples. Northern Spy, Lincolnville Russet and Stark are dropping fast and could have been picked a few days ago. The Benton Red (aka Salome?) are right at the perfect moment: a few drops but coming off with ease. The Reinette Simarenko are holding on tight and could stay on another week or more, but it’s time to go.

The apple I call Green Monster was just beginning to drop but we “caught” nearly all of them. It’s large, green, firm and crisp. It’s had me scratching my head for decades. It’s in a row in a fairly old orchard and should be a grafted tree, but I don’t think it is. (The abandoned orchard is in Waldo, not far from Belfast.) The tree is majorly twisted and very cool. When it was DNA profiled, it came back as a seedling of Tolman Sweet. It’s not a true sweet, however, and we have not been able to determine its second parent. I’ve read that Tolman Sweet seedlings were sometimes used as rootstock, so maybe it’s an old un-grafted rootstock: Green Monster.

In the late afternoon we went to South China to harvest a recent seedling discovery I’m calling South China Sweet. This one is a true low-acid, sweet apple. The fruit size is large. We collected 4 bushels of good quality drops and another bushel off the tree as the sun was going down.   

October 27-28, 2025

Today in the orchard

Some much-needed rain these two days. Time to organize the piles of apples I need to examine in the coming weeks. They come in many categories - apples collected from newly-discovered ancient trees, apples sent from folks seeking an identification, recent breeding projects needing trial, and even apples from our own rare cultivars fruiting for the first time. Bags and boxes by the gazillion. How can we get to them all? Fortunately most are in the cooler which is pretty good at extending the life of the fruit.  

In between the raindrops I was able to clear out around the last trees to make them easier to pick in the next few days. By week’s end they should all be harvested. Baseball season will soon be over too. Out in LA the Dodgers and the Blue Jays are duking it out for the World Series. There’s a lot of similarities between those whose lives are spent in the ballpark and those in the orchard. The consummate orchardist has to be able to climb and pick and spray and prune and graft and dig and a whole lot more.  The best baseball players have to be able to do almost as many things as well (though not quite), like hit and throw and catch and run and slide.  We’re all multitasking! 

October 26, 2025

Today in the orchard

We bottled last year’s cider and pressed about 25 bushels of this year’s best. It was a busy day. The bottle-cleaning crew cleaned while the bottling crew bottled, while the grinding crew ground and the pressing crew pressed. By mid-afternoon we had emptied the old oak barrel and filled it up again. All the while the picking crew continued to pick the last of this year’s crop. It was a well-oiled (well-cidered?) machine.

In the past we’ve bottled last year’s cider a few weeks before pressing, but this was a busy fall, and we didn’t get to it. So we compressed the ritual into one long day. And it worked. We gave up washing our oak barrels years ago so we were able to bottle last year’s cider and then refill the barrel with new juice, right on top of the lees. Any concern about exposing the inside of the barrel to oxygen is probably not an issue since the exposure is less than a few hours. And all that sludge at the bottom of the barrel (the lees) is instantly inoculating the fresh juice with everything it needs to start the fermentation.

What apples did we use? Well, Shavel Sharp of course. And Fuel Service, the bittersweet roadside seedling Cammy spotted on a trip to Castine several years ago. And a few bushels of Grimes Golden just because we had them. And 447 (Frostbite), Tolman Sweet and smaller amounts of about two dozen others, including all our French bittersweets, a few bittersharps and an assortment of seedlings. This may be the universe’s ultimate blend (or not). In any event, stay-tuned. We’ll bottle this batch in October ’26 and begin drinking it a year later. If we can wait that long!    

October 25, 2025

Today in the orchard

Today we finally picked the Black Oxfords. We harvested close to thirty bushels from our three Black Oxford trees. We also picked the rest of other late varieties including Scout, one of our favorite seedlings "born" here on the farm. It’s time to get those late-season apples off the trees before the really cold nights freeze and destroy them. To get all the apples off the trees before dark we had to call in reinforcements - our neighbors Marc and Ava and our good friend Brett Mirliani who made his long, annual trek up from MA for this late season, pomological ritual. Thank you Brett!  

October 24, 2025

Today in the orchard

I traveled to southern Maine to harvest one of my favorite apples directly from the original “source” tree. The apple was introduced to me a dozen years ago by orthopedic surgeon Steve Barr. (Steve is actually a farmer who does knees and hips as a sideline. His advice to me—and presumably to you too—is “keep moving.”) 

Steve and his family produced organic cider for several years but were told to cease and desist when the authorities discovered that the cider was entirely unprocessed and un-irradiated. Subsequently, as a school science project his daughter did a comparison of their cider with the store-bought, irradiated brand. The result? Their cider was still looking good after weeks in the petri-dish. Meanwhile, the store-bought, irradiated cider had developed mold.  Which would you want to drink?

Year ago Steve told me about the most bitter apple he had ever tasted. Of course I was curious. (More accurately, excited.) Less than an hour later I ate my first apple and dubbed it “Shavel Sharp.” It’s either a seedling or rogue rootstock. The flavor is nasty and bitter. Just my kind of apple. We’ve grafted multiple trees in our orchard, and they are all now fruiting. But when the original tree bears fruit, I still love to make the pilgrimage to Cumberland County to collect the fruit. Shavel Sharp!

October 23, 2025

Today in the orchard

You know that apple picking season is winding down when you’re out there picking the Black Oxfords. I did a test run picking two bushels of Black Oxfords up in the Finley Lane Orchard. They are beginning to drop. The stems are detaching easily. It’s time to pick them all. We’ll do that this weekend. 

We sell or trade most of the Black Oxfords, but we always keep a few bushels for ourselves. We store them in the cooler as the root cellar cools down. In a few weeks we’ll shut off the cooler and move all the remaining apples into the root cellar where they’ll reside for the winter. After a couple of months in storage— about mid-January when they’re reaching their prime — we’ll begin to pull out the Black Oxfords and use them primarily in cooking. 

Yes, apple picking season is winding down, and Black Oxford season is winding up. 

October 22, 2025

Today in the orchard

Today was an all-day, apple exploring adventure that focused on Maine’s Franklin County. Along the way we made stops at Colby College (the ancient tree by the Rugby Field), Oakland (the two amazing huge Fallawater trees) and Belgrade (the Spice Sweet tree that got hit by a tractor-trailer truck a decade ago and is now on its last “legs.”) Then we detoured into Somerset County to collect a bag of fruit off the Norridgewock Sweet, my provisional name for a true sweet (low-acid) apple that begs to be identified. (It might be one of the Northern Sweets.)

It was late morning when we finally headed west on Route 2 into Franklin County. The first stop was the incredible Tolman Sweet tree in New Sharon. (You can see a photo of the tree in the Art of Detection, p. 353.) Hellmut Bitterauf met us at the tree; then we checked out two more of Hellmut and Karen’s oldest trees, both of which have fruit this year. I will attempt to ID them in the next few weeks.

We continued on Rte 2 through Farmington and headed due north up Rte 4 into the heart of Franklin County where we met David King in the parking lot of the Sandy River Shop ’n Save in Phillips. David guided us to three local sites. The first two were interesting, but the third was a winner: the ancient remnants of what was once a huge tree, now nearly dead but still with one small vibrant living branch. There was no fruit; however, there were enough leaves for a DNA profile. Score.  

Then it was up Tory Hill to visit the four, thought-to-be-Deane trees. Michael Rothschild, Wendy and Chee gave us a long tour of their farm. We took leaves from one of their Deane trees to be submitted for DNA analysis. An earlier test with leaves from the Maine Heritage Orchard “Deane” tree matched the Wisconsin apple “Milwaukee.” I’ve been wanting to get leaves directly from the Phillips trees, and this was my opportunity.

The day ended at the Farmington Grange where I handed out Franklin County Wanted Posters, sold books and apples and gave a presentation on the apples of Franklin County. During the Q and A I learned that there’s a very good chance that the long-lost Sarah apple has been found. This may have been the most exciting news of the day. I’ll obtain scionwood this winter and graft it in the spring. I’ll also get leaves for a DNA test. Long after dark we were back on the road for the  foggy drive back to Palermo. What a day.    

October 20-21, 2025

Today in the orchard

Scott Skogerboe came to visit us for two days. Scott has worked in the nursery trade for several decades out in Fort Collins, Colorado. He’s an apple geek as well as a plant explorer and plant historian. One of his special interests (among dozens) is Niels Hansen, the plant explorer who found and introduced Dolgo Crab and the red-fleshed apple, Niedzwetzkyana. Hansen also bred and introduced many of the hybrid plums we grow in our orchards as well as dozens of other plants. Fittingly, Scott brought us a small grafted tree of a Dolgo seedling he’s selected for us to trial up at Finley Lane.   

For years a mutual friend kept trying to get us together. Then we finally met in Boulder at an apple conference a couple of years ago. He was in New England for a wedding this past week and detoured up to see us. Although we did tour pretty much every tree and garden on the farm, we spent many hours at the kitchen table just talking plants as a much-needed gentle rain blessed the landscape. It was a wonderful visit. When he left, we loaded him down with a major stash of apples to take back to Fort Collins.