Heritage Apples: A New Sensation
Susan Lundy
Language: English
Pages: 228
ISBN: 1927129915
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Heritage Apples travels far beyond the grocery store of today to savor the apples of the past. These are the apple varieties -- the Gravensteins, the Kings, the red-fleshed Pink Pearl -- that link us to history, but through food movements and taste preferences are remerging as the fruit of the future. Heritage apples evoke memories and passion for some; for others they offer delicious, unexplored flavors and a connection to local farmers.
Discover the histories behind the apples, and learn some startling apple facts. Identify the taste, appearance, and uses of 40 different heritage varieties and gain useful growing and harvesting information. Meet apple growers, cider-makers, and people fighting to preserve heritage apples, and join a lifestyle that embraces local and slow food movements. Then try the recipes! Create delicious apple-based dishes, such as Chickpea-Apple Curry, French Apple Clafouti, Tarte Tatin, Apple Brownies, Apple Pie, and more. Expand your knowledge of one of our most popular fruits and celebrate its history with Heritage Apples.
draws over twelve hundred people, making it one of the biggest annual events on little Salt Spring Island. Harry was hovering by the ticket booth, recognizable by the big red apple painted on his face. Since I’d dropped by the hall the previous night to watch the set-up, I wasn’t entirely surprised by the sight inside, which was highlighted by two massive lines of tables—absolutely chockablock with apples—right down the full length of the hall. About 50 volunteers, some of whom had been doing
apple excitement. Growing and experimenting with twenty-four varieties, Harry almost certainly has the largest collection of red-fleshed apples in Canada. On that day, I tromped behind him alongside a fellow called Charlie Van Streubenzee, who was picking up five heritage apple seedlings that he had ordered from Harry the previous year. The young trees—really just three-foot-tall stems with four outward-pushing branches—were a year old and would not produce apples for another four years. Charlie
orchards go with “safe” apples because sales have to be high to make land prices (between seventy-five thousand and one hundred thousand dollars for a bare acre in Cawston in 2010) worthwhile. Irrigation, labour, and equipment are added costs, and for Ron, whose family has farmed the land in Cawston for several generations, farming may be in his blood, but he’s not getting rich from it. (“Why do you call it Heart Achers?” I asked. Said Ron, “If you’ve been farming long enough, you find out.”)
park is on a culturally sensitive Kwantlen First Nation archeological site. Apples and other organic fruit—some from Heart Achers—are on sale at a funky roadside stand in Cawston, BC. “The cost and details of having an archeologist on site for the digging and planting of the trees proved prohibitive,” Bill said, so he went “back to the drawing board” and resurrected a tree-planting method (called the low profile pot system), which he’d used previously in New Westminster and requires no digging
disease-free branches. However, most of the original germplasm in the old orchard was lost.” Gabor also belongs to the Devonian Botanic Garden (DBG) Fruit Growers’ Group, which organizes local scion exchanges and fruit shows. The fall fruit shows are particularly interesting, he said, as many people are unaware of the range of fruits that can be grown in Edmonton, and some return the following spring to take part in the scion exchange. This brought me back to Edmonton’s designation as a