Apple Basics – Poverty Lane Orchards & Farnum Hill Ciders

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Apple Basics

	At first glance,orchard trees might resemble large appliances. In a good year, orchards look so well-behaved in the Fall. Standing in rows, offering tons of big handsome apples, our trees look interested in giving humans what we want. No way. Fruiting plants are in the reproduction business.Fruit is their tool. Fruit persuades animals and birds to swallow the all-important seeds. As fruit nourishes the carrier, digestion takes its course, and the indigestible seeds drop to the ground. Result? More fruiting plants. Like most living things, apple trees work full-time to make new versions of themselves. Apple growers are in the fruit business. Birds and beasts will eat much smaller, greener, less tasty apples than humans will. So growers interfere considerably with our trees’ natural tendencies. Long before a new orchard produces fruit, each tree starts being trained and pruned so that later it can grow the big sweet apples we need. During the life of a working orchard, training and pruning never end. On their own, our trees would accomplish their mission by growing tall, vertical, thick and bushy, while bearing more, smaller, sourer, greener apples than we want. Either way, the trees hold all the power. We just guide their mighty feats in tiny ways. Here’s a quick illustrated run-through of the fruiting cycle. These pictures of a McIntosh branch were taken in a long-ago drought year, so the apples ended up small. It all starts with the buds. Some contain blossoms, some leaves. From blossoms come fruits.
	All winter and into April, the buds look like little wooden stick-outs from the twigs.Then they swell, then crack open, and then let out what’s growing inside.(In 2010 it all happened way too early, but that’s another story.
	By early May, the buds reach what growers call “full pink.”
	During mid-May up here, it takes about ten daysfor all our varieties to flower and fade. Each variety has its own schedule.During bloom, it’s ALL ABOUT BEES, BUGS, BIRDS: THE POLLINATORS! All day they collect sugary nectar from blossoms.As they move, pollen from one blossom sticks to them, then drops it off inside other blossoms. Immediately, each pollinated flower starts growing into a fruit.Active bees (and other bugs, and birds, and bats in some places), make fruit grow by pollinating blossoms.Flying creatures tend to stay grounded in cold or rainy weather. Too much bad weather: no crop.Growers of all kinds try to sweeten the odds by RENTING EXTRA BEES. That way, a good crop can form during just one or two fair days.Beekeepers work hard for their rents, moving hives from farm to farm.
	In late May comes “petal fall.”At once, the pollinated flower parts thicken.The others stay slim. They turn yellow and fall away.
	A week or so on, the difference is plain.Late in June, each tree naturally sorts through its new crop. Small, weakly-pollinated fruit falls to the ground.In our climate, it’s called “June Drop.”Meanwhile, growers decide whether to thin out the crop even more than the trees themselves will do.
	For us in the fruit business, this branch is still crowded.If these little apples all grow on, they’ll end up small, jammed together, and strictly for the birds.For centuries, orchard workers thinned acre after acre by hand, knocking off thousands of tiny apples so the rest could grow large.We still do some hand-thinning. But these days, it’s possible to spray fruit trees with specific hormones, to imitate the natural ones that cause weak fruit to drop. In years of heavy pollination, most growers try to boost the early-summer ‘drop’ in this way.
	Weeks later, see how thinning gave these apples space to grow. Each apple receives more nutrients from the tree, and more sweetening-power from sunlight. Toward harvest time, fewer swelling apples will shove their swelling neighbors to the ground. Growers make these little differences that matter to people, not so much to Ms. Nature.
	Here’s our cluster late in the McIntosh harvest, after sunny days and cold nights have turned all the starches in the apple to fruit sugars, and made the skin as red as it can get. The apples were small that year, but the quality was excellent.