DRAGONGOOSE FARM ORCHARD
Joan
Shaw
New Varieties Just
Coming
into Production
Fortune
Apples
Impressive this past fall were the
Fortunes
(Northern Spy x Empire). These trees,
planted as branched 2-year-olds, gave us a few apples last
year, 2006, but this past 2007 fall, they were laden with lovely
big
apples, some of them very big indeed. To the right below is Melanie
holding a couple of them from the same tree.
We planted these apples on a cold, blustery March day in 1999, so
that's seven and eight years after planting that they started 
bearing.
Fortune apples were developed at Cornell's Agricultural Experiment
Station in Geneva, NY and offered for sale in 1995. They are large
eating apples, sweet and snappy. The apple has cream-colored flesh and
we're told that
it stores well. We don't know this from our own experience. The
Fortunes we put aside for sale
were sold immediately, the rest went into cider. We were encouraged
to buy 30 of these trees by the people at Cummins Nursery when we were
looking for trees to extend our orchard, and we're glad we did.
Personally, I was attracted to Fortune because of the Northern Spy in
its parentage.
Northern Spy
Northern Spy is an antique variety dating
from 1800. They're said to have come from seedlings brought to New York
state
from Connecticut. They soon became the quintessential dessert and
pie apple in the east for over one hundred years and one of
the first in
commercial production. The fruit is large, and the skin is thin
and delicate, which is what attracted me to the variety and why I added
five of them to the 1999 fruit tree order. But the delicate skin
is what gradually eased it out of the commercial apple business.
Because it bruised easily, it was a poor candidate for shipping. The trees are also
notoriously slow to begin bearing, and that fact is probably why we
couldn't figure out what the five naked apple trees on the end of the
Jonafree row were. Perhaps, though, well get at least a few in the fall
of 2008 and we can compare them to their offspring, the Fortune.
The other variety from which Fortune is bred, Empire, was also bred at
Cornell's Ag Experiment station, some forty years ago. It's a
sweet-tart, crisp and juicy all purpose apple that we haven't tried
growing yet.
Imperial Gala
Our new Imperial Galas, also planted as
branched 2-year-olds in 1999, have performed nicely for us this past
year. This variety is a sport of the Gala apple, very popular here, but
bright red with a quite noticeable orange underlay and creamy flesh. It
was finely
t
extured, juicy and crisp with a tangy
sweet taste (picture to the
left). Both the Imperial Galas and the Fortunes went as fast as we
could wash, grade, polish, and box them.
The Imperial Galas were slightly bigger than regular Galas, though the
taste was the same. The biggest problem in talking about these apples
were trying to remember where in the world we got them. I could find no
packing slip, no order confirmation, and no indication in any of our
apple catalogs that we ordered them from our usual suppliers.
Alan Shaw remembered finally that the people at Cummins offered them as
overstock from one of its growers. The grower had propagated hundreds
for an orchardist who in the end couldn't come up with the
financing. It was a lucky choice. Alan said they were indeed very
discounted and a bargain. And it turned out well. The trees were laden.
with lovely apples (below, right, Dawn picking them).
Big Red Gala
These apples, planted here in 1999 with the others described
above, mature about two to three weeks earlier than the parent
Galas. They were offered by Rocky Meadows Orchard (no longer in
business) as the offspring of a sporting limb of his stock of Galas. It
was discovered by the daughter of Ed Fackler, then the owner of Rocky
Meadows. The limb eventually became the source of a good stock of
the bigger, and redder, Galas until they could offer whips in the late
1990s. 
Melanie was just talking about the fact that the first crop of these
Galas were indeed bigger and redder than the parent Galas in 2006, the
first year they began to bear at DragonGoose Farm. But the crop in 2007
continued green with only a touch of red, and this was well into the
falling-off the tree stage. So she and Spencer, our landscape manager,
picked them all last fall, green or not. I didn't taste them, but
Melanie says they tasted crisp and juicy but very tart, not the usual
Gala taste. At any rate, Melanie didn't try selling too much of them,
using them almost entirely for cider.
Jonafree
This
disease resistant Jonathan is the strangest shaped tree -- something
like a dwarfish Lombardy poplar, despite being marketed as a semidwarf.
They were the biggest, heaviest trees in that 1999 planting and we've
suspected for some time that they're actually standard. Alan spends a
terrific amount of time jamming spreaders between the limbs to open
them up which the trees resist with all their physiological might. The
fact that they've proved very slow to bear also adds to our suspicion
that they might be standards. A few of them offered us some apples this
past fall -- brilliant red, sweet and tart, just like the old fashioned
Jonathan in the south orchard. Melanie and Spencer picked these
together and of course sampled them. Delightful!
Having a Jonathan without all the Jonathan's problems with diseases
would be nice indeed. We have a customer who would love to have
Jonathans, called us for some years every fall about them. She actually
makes applesauce from them, but we have been lucky to harvest a few
pecks of them in years past. Among other problems like lack of
vigor, too much shade, and depredation from the ever-present voles,
we've been plagued with fire blight. This is in the south orchard, the
older orchard, which is where our few old Jonathans (still) grow. A
couple have died outright and of the remaining, several have had many
afflicted limbs.
As a result they were drastically pruned in the last couple of years,
but Melanie mentioned that as a result of this pruning, the Jonathans
they harvested from those deeply pruned trees were as big as the
Jonafrees and had the same Jonathan taste. It led her and her Dad to
believe that hard pruning might lead to a heavier, larger fruit from
the older trees.
Melanie at the Sorting Table
Calville Blanc d'Hiver and
Arkansas Black
Let
me tell you of our experience with these two wonderful trees. The
Calville Blanc is a tree bred in France or Germany around the year
1598, and greatly prized by gourmet cooks for it superb culinary use.
It's a fine textured apple, with tender, yellowish-white flesh, sweet
but also acid. It is said to be higher in vitamin C than an orange.
Melanie, who ate most of our slim crop this past fall was casting
around just now trying to describe the taste. She came up with
"something like a crisp lemon." She'd given me a slice of one to
taste after she'd first picked them and I'd have to say it did have a
sprightly taste.
We planted the two Calvilles with two Arkansas Black along the east
side of the south orchard in 1990. The Arkansas Black is an American
bred apple dating back to before 1886. It has a deep maroon skin,
darker than even McIntosh, and a greenish white flesh. It has a nicely
sharp flavor when first picked, sweetens nicely in storage. Best of
all, it keeps all winter and is wonderful in salads.
All four of these two trees took forever, it seemed, to bear. Although
the Calville was a true semi-dwarf, I could swear the Arkansas Black
was a standard – that is, a full-sized tree. Alan needs the better part
of a day to do the late winter pruning on the thing. Then, finally, a
nice crop from both of them in the late 90s. For two years. Then we had
an influx of voles and gophers. This was before our vast population of
cats moved in and took over the small rodent patrol. In the
spring of 1998 someone, Alan or one of the the girls, came in to say
our Arkansas Black trees were girdled by voles almost completely
around, and the Calville Blanc trees were uprooted.
I went out to see the damage. Not only had the rodents girdled the
Calvilles but had gone completely down into the roots and both these
trees were loose in the soil.
Well, that was the end of the Calvilles. On the other hand, the fact
that the Arkansas Black trees, standards masguerading as semi-dwarf
proved their worth. Their thicker bark saved them from the worst of the
depredation and the continued to bear. We replaced the Calvilles we
replaced the next year, 1999, with five new branched whips, and at the
same time added five more Arkansas Blacks. It looks like both varieties
are going to take their time in bearing, but Melanie, as described
above, did get a few Calvilles this year, and we've always had a few
Arkansas Blacks from the two old trees.
One of the problems with these trees, as with all the trees along the
east border of the south orchard was deep shade. We'd planted trees on
that very steep hill that had grown like Topsy and shaded the orchard
enough to cut into production. We've since had our tree-trimming
company take down a good seventy-five percent of them and hope for a
better year in 2009.
Honeycrisp
Planted in 1999, the shade also cut into the vigor
of our Honeycrisp along the very end of the south orchard. Honeycrisp
(Macoun x Honeygold) was developed at the University of Minnesota and
introduced in 1991. It was suggested to us by our daughter, Ethy
who, with her husband Steven, was working at the university at the time
and had tasted one on a tour through the testing grounds. Though the
tree is precocious, bearing has been spotty at best, mainly due not
only to the trees along the east side, but the ............ Cottonwoods
along the south. (They were oh, so delicate and small when we planted them in the
1990s!)
We're hoping for an improvement on the Honeycrisp as well, since the
line of trees along the south have been thinned to two. What apples the
trees have given us so far, however, have been crisp and juicy, the
taste nicely balanced between sweet and acid. They're large, too, and a
great favorite of our customers.
Weather
All the Imperial Galas in the north
orchard (a row of which is shown to the right) suffered from splitting
at the stem end, as did many of the Fortunes,
necessitating the dumping of many bushels of picked apples on to the
compost heap (also known as the Neighborhood Deer Buffet). Alan thinks
he may have given the trees too much irrigation water to ameliorate the
terrific heat we experienced during the summer of 2007. Live and learn.
We'll try being less lavish this year and see if it helps. The Galas in
the south orchard didn't seem to be as affected as those in north,
though Galas in general are subject to splitting.
Spring in Two Months,
Joan Katherine Shaw
January 2008
Photos
- Ethy and Steven Cannon and Alan Shaw
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