Or you let it grow, taste it, and if you don’t like it, cut down that tree, or use that one only for cider, or just ignore it. You don’t have to graft anything.
And at some point, someone has to let some apple trees grow to fruiting age on their own-- That’s how you get the tasty varieties you’re grafting on, in the first place.
I don’t know what ‘bad’ apples taste like. I don’t really like a lot of apples like Granny Smiths that bite me back. They get used in pies, but usually with sugar added.
So how does the cider come out? Does it taste as bad as the apple? Can it be improved by adding sugar? Do they have enough sugar to ferment into alcohol?
It seems well established that 19th century American apples were mostly used to produce cider, and a lot of that cider distilled to concentrate the alcohol in some manner. This was done with many crops as a method of preservation, the liquor doesn’t go bad, and may be more valuable than the ingredients in their raw form. Still, I would think the crops grown to eventually produce alcohol would be selected for their multiple uses and there would be a desire to grow good tasting apples, and apples that make good tasting cider. Are apple trees so much better at producing fermentable fruit than the alternatives that bad tasting results could be ignored just to make alcohol?
It’s not so much that bad tasting apples are good for cider. It’s more that apples that are bad for fresh eating may (or may not) be good for cider; just like some of the best wine grapes aren’t very good for eating fresh.
An orchard of seedlings is going to produce some decent eating apples, some good cider apples, if you’re lucky an excellent one or two of one or the other or both, and some that won’t be good for either use.
There are grafted varieties grown specifically for making cider with; really good cider, sweet or hard, is often a selected mix of more than one of those.
I went down a little rabbit hole thinking that Americans were eating apples during Revolutionary times. I thought “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” was a Ben Franklin quote but it isn’t found in print until 1887.
An earlier quote, from 1866, is “Eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread”. This makes bread as slang for money make sense.
How about using those bad tasting apples for animal feed? I assume that apples would keep well as the weather got colder and fresh feed died off so remaining useful as feed and the good tasting ones for people to eat also.
Some apples keep well; some apples don’t. Some apples that taste bad to humans probably taste fine to one or more livestock species; some probably don’t. They could only be a portion of the diet, and would have to be a fairly small portion for some species; the digestive systems aren’t made to work on a diet of nothing but apples.
Depends what you mean by “good to eat”. There’s a variety that used to be commonly grown from grafts that’s reported to taste like cork, but it kept really well in a root cellar, and it shipped really well. It didn’t taste good, but it produced wholesome food that would keep you alive.
An apple like “uncle David’s” that tastes great the day it’s picked, but doesn’t keep, is no good as a significant part of your food supply, at least if you only eat it fresh. But if you convert it to cider, it can be a valuable part of your diet for months. For that matter, i didn’t care for Uncle David’s green apple (sweet and bland) out of hand, but it was certainly edible. It, too, made a nice addition to cider.
Yes. You can cut down a tree and convert it to a new variety via grafting. That gives you a bearing tree much faster than starting from scratch. You can also test new varieties by grafting a twig onto a mature tree. That gets you fruit in a year or two, whereas just growing out the tree could take a decade before it fruits. (One virtue of selected rootstocks is that they often promote faster bearing, by the way )
Huh. I knew about it, but it wasn’t something I learned in school. It was in one of those “things you didn’t know about Johnny Appleseed” type posts (or even articles). Hence I assumed that it’s something most people don’t know.
Still, Cecil covered a lot I didn’t know even from that info.
I don’t know where these notions come from. I’ve read about Johnny Appleseed from time to time but am unable at the moment to quote any actual sources.
I think you have to put yourself in the pioneers’ frame of mind. My Dad’s family came West in the early 1800s by fits and starts from the Carolinas through Kentucky to Ohio and eventually to Indiana. There is a so-called family history of the migration, but it’s a gloss. It doesn’t go into detail about what time of year they traveled or whether they had to forego a crop year on the journey and how they handled the finances of acquiring new land and liquidating previous holdings. All that stuff is left to my imagination.
I doubt that they traveled much when planting was underway and when harvest was due. This left a narrow, highly anticipated introspective window in high summer when non-farming activity could be contemplated. This was when John Chapman was out and about. He was notorious in his day. There weren’t all that many White men “on the frontier,” and most would have known a story about Johnny Appleseed. There were a handful who’d met him, and many would have known of someone who knew someone who had ostensibly. And that’s all it takes really to make a legend. That the man was evidently a spellbinder helped his reputation. Folks stuck in summer doldrums would have welcomed the opportunity to invite the neighbors to hear him speak whether or not he was selling something and regardless of what he was preaching.
I doubt that the pioneers traveled in the Spring when rain on frozen ground would send snowmelt to fill every gully and creek between this farm and that. In the days before improved roads and drainage systems, it would take weeks for the runoff to subside.
I imagine that they traveled mostly in the depths of winter — despite the risk and uncomfortable weather — because rolling a loaded wagon over frozen ground can be somewhat easier than through mud. They brought with them the carefully wrapped dormant scions of fruit trees from the old homesteads.
When they arrived, they set to work clearing the ground enough to squeeze in a crop and start the orchard. Fruit was one among many crops, and apples were food for people. They were eaten out of hand, baked, dried, sauced, cooked as a vegetable with other victuals, and juiced. The fermented juice was mostly stable in the colder weather that followed harvest. The applejack from freeze distillation of hard cider would keep indefinitely. And there was vinegar for preservation of other food stuff. Each variety of apple had a local — albeit transplanted — fan base for this, that, or the other purpose as food. Providing the orchard infrastructure was not the only business, but it was considerable.
Where did they get their rootstocks? Conveniently Chapman had been there years before, had planted and tended a grove of seedling apples, and moved on, leaving the franchise in the care of the owners of neighboring parcels. Pioneers knew where these groves were located and went there during the spring thaw. They bought as many seedlings as they could and took them home as rootstocks for their heirloom scions. On his next circuit, Chapman would collect his share to finance his peregrinations.
What was the point? There is or there isn’t one, I suppose. One point is that pioneers shaved a year or two off starting their own orchards, which got them up and running a little quicker. Another point is that — in spite of his otherworldly views — Chapman’s relatives inherited quite a tidy little fortune in small plots scattered hither and yon in handy locations throughout the early frontier.
Huh. I certainly have heard of the Swedenborgian Church before, and my mind just made the connection. Have any of you heard about the Wayfarer’s Chapel on Palos Verdes Peninsula in California? It was designed by Lloyd Wright (son of the more famous father), and the chapel and the view of the coast are quite beautiful. I’ve visited there several times, but never learned much about the religious practices there, other than that they were not what you might call mainstream Christian. Yeah, Swedenborgian. TIL.
This is sidestepping the main point – what proportion of the apples were fit only for cider-making, and not effectively desirable or usable as simple eating or baking apples. The impression you get from Pollan and articles based on his work is “practically all of them”:
Actually, that bit about drinking cider rathrer than water because of bacteria in the water has been challenged by several recently
My point was that cider keeps. A lot of those apples might have been fit for eating the day they were picked, but if they don’t store well, you are wasting most of the food the tree produced. That’s why an apple that tasted like cork (people joked about not being about to tell if they were eating the apple or the packing material) was propagated, whereas apples like my uncle’s tree weren’t.
My best guess is that about half were pleasant enough to eat fresh. That’s mostly based on my husband’s uncle’s experience. But far fewer than half keep decently, or ship at all, in days before refrigeration. And you need an apple that both tastes good and keeps in a root cellar to use it primarily for eating or baking. Did people eat the cider apples fresh when they were in season? I imagine they did. But they probably still thought of the crop as “for cider”.
Why do you say that?
That’s really a question I’ve been asking for a while. To listen to the “apples were only for cider” crowd it wasn’t because cider kept better, or because it was more cost-effective, but because the apples weren’t really good for anything else.
I have no idea what proportion of grown-from-seed - no - grafting apples were things you wanted to eat, and I’m very curious if it was 10% or 50% or what. No one seems to have supplied the answer. But guessing won’t do.
Here’s one take on it:
And here’s another, very different report:
It looks like it’s from personal experience with a number of grown-from-seed apples.
Yes, but from too few trees to be a good number.
Still, my experience is in line with the 20% good, 20% spitter, 60% edible-but-not-great cite above. Out of four seedlings, my uncle-in-law got two spitters, one tasty apple, and one edible apple.
Someone else above cited personal experience of 3 trees that were all edible.
This guy’s experience is very different from Pollan’s
He grew only one. Hitting a 1-in-5 chance isn’t surprising.
Anyway, my main point is that most edible apples are best used as cider if you are trying to make a living off them. And i don’t mean “sell for a profit”, i mean “survive the year on the fruits of your labor”.
By the way, i used to spend a lot of time on a mailing list for “fruit explorers”, and it’s not true of all fruit that it doesn’t come true from seed. Many people on the list harvested peaches from trees that had grown from pits that sprouted in their compost pile, and reported that they tended to be much like the parent peach. And there’s a strain of Russian apple often grown both to eat and as rootstock (antonovka) that is reported to grow mostly true to seed, that is, it commonly produces seedlings with apples similar to the parent.
But none of these people routinely grew seedling apples. Sometimes they’d let one fruit before grafting it to a desirable variety. Because based on the experience of all those people, it’s pretty uncommon for a seedling apple to taste as good as its parents.
Also, the wickson (seed parent of the BITEME! tree) is an Amazingly good apple. If it weren’t tiny I’m sure it would be all over the market. I have one in my back yard, but it doesn’t get enough sun, and i have squirrels.
Is this true of most “heirloom” apples? I make Heirloom runs up to New Hampshire sometimes to get the weird and wonderful varieties I can’t get in my local supermarket. There are so damned many of them that I have a hard time imagining that they owe their propagation to traveling graftmen.