First, I want to thank you for responding, and responding so quickly. As my husband said, "Wow, both your heroes (Joliceur and Phillips) responded on your very first post!" I am very honored to hear from you and Mr. Phillips. You are both so generous with your advice and your time. If there is a resurgence of holistic apple growing and fine cider brewing in the English-speaking world, you two are largely responsible.
That said, let me address the points you made.
When we came to our property, we originally had in mind the idea of subsistence farming. And we asked the land, "What do you *want* to grow?" We noticed that despite off-the-charts deer pressure — the previous owners treated the deer as pets and fed them apples and produce from the orchard, in the middle of the orchard, so that the trees were nibbled to stubs — when you got to a height beyond the deer's reach, especially in the wild orchard, the trees were in great shape. Despite the fact that most of our dozen or so wild apple trees are so shaded by pines and firs that they don't blossom, the one or two that have light are loaded with little apples. I was reading your book early this spring, and was gladdened to learn about the possibilities of wild seedlings. These trees — not so young, maybe 30 years old — were planted by the deer, so I consider them to be gifts from the deer, which is as cool as it gets. We don't know yet if these apples are good for cider. But we think the odds are high, which is why I named the orchard "savage cider", because I think there is a good chance that some of the apples that go into our cider will be feral, apples who have survived the law of tooth and fang. Ferocious apples.
I have no intention of trying to sell our apples at market. I am growing the kinds of apples I can't buy at market, because the point of growing these apples is to have the ingredients to make interesting cider. When I decided to make cider, I was thinking of how alcohol is a recession-proof industry, how really fine cider is rare and hard to find, and how I love a good, complex, bitter cider more than beer, more than wine. We will always be a small operation, but I want the quality to always be our foremost consideration. That is why I am trying to make our apples as healthy and disease-free as possible. I know scab is OK for cider, but I want to at least shoot for apples as close to perfect as I can. That said, there is the time constraint. I work as a software engineer in Boston, four hours away. I come up every weekend. So I cannot be there to do the intensive monitoring and spraying it would take to have a perfect crop. Someday when the economy goes south and I become unemployable because I am in a field that favors the very young, I will then be in Maine full-time and will be able to spend more time with my trees. But right now, I can only expect what can be achieved with weekly care.
You asked what kind of apples we're growing. Well, the trees we inherited were a Cortland and a Honeycrisp. We planted one each of Ashmead's Kernel, Bramtot, Canadian Strawberry, Cox Orange Pippin, Dabinette, Ellis Bitter, Grimes Golden, Harrison, Kingston Black, Whitney Crab, and Yarlington Mill — mostly English bittersweets. Of these, the Bramtot and Grimes Golden are doing the best, while the Canadian Strawberry and Kingston Black are in trouble. So, scab-resistant? Some of them.
That said, our healthiest apples are two Gravensteins. I don't know if they will make good hard cider. I've read the warnings about early apples and tart apples. We'll see. But there's a story about the Gravensteins. Before my husband and I married a few years ago — he's a Bergener from Norway — he drove me down by the Hardanger Fjord, which you may know is a fabulous apple-growing region. It's a place of mountain crofts, light so clear it hurts your eyes, 21 hours of sunlight in the summer, almost daily rain, grass so green it's almost fluorescent. Mile upon mile of happy sheep lounging in pastures. Houses with sod roofs and trees growing out of them. And fields of Gravensteins. You try the apple juice there and it's a revelation. We get Gravenstein apple juice here from California, and it's very good, but because of the terroir in Hardanger, the apples are so flavorful and sprightly that the juice there is well, like you've never had apple juice before. In Maine, we have colder winters, less rain, and far fewer light hours to the day. We can't reproduce their growing conditions. Still, we'll see what quality of apple we can achieve. Now, you may be interested in how they grow these marvelous apples in Norway. They're dwarves, coppiced, in tight rows. An apple orchard in Hardanger doesn't look too different from a wine vineyard in Sonoma, except everything is impossibly green.
So we'll see how we do with our terroir here. We're growing mostly standards because of the deer pressure, and a lot of our time is taken up with the effort to put up a metal eight-foot deer fence. It will take us the rest of the summer. I suspect that the English apples may not do too well. We have a bunch of young rootstocks growing, and some Mainer friends eager to show us local wild trees from which we can take scion wood. I'll have to learn how to graft. I am interested in John Bunker's heritage apple project and if we find any wonderful new varieties from our local wild trees, we will certainly share them.
We would both like to thank you for essentially setting our minds at ease about the scab. I don't want to be spraying copper or sulfur and if I don't have to, I don't want to. I want my apples to be organic or as close to organic as I can get. I don't expect any kind of yield for several years, but in the interim I will be buying apples from other growers and learning how to brew cider. I have been giving your book a close reading and I cannot wait to get to the Cider Days in Franklin to see and taste what other people have achieved.
Surely, right now at least, this is great fun.
Shelah Horvitz
Savage Cider Orchards
Zone 4b, Weld, ME