Mostly a massive failure...
Two major reasons...
One, herbicide/pesticide over-spray by a local wheat farmer killed a lot of trees outright... damaged most of them, and, damage was not limited to just the orchard. They killed a number of 100+ year old giants on our property, and throughout the neighborhood bordering their wheat fields for a couple of miles. That in result of spraying an herbicide intended to prevent emergence of weeds... a pre-emergent... but, they didn't spray it until after the trees had budded out, well outside legitimate boundaries. The worst impacted of them dropped flowers, leaves, entire shoots... the best of them "quit growing" and didn't grow again the rest of the season. As fruit trees are highly dependent on the first three or four years of growth... losing a key year... means, even if they survive, a decade or more of delay being imposed. So, also invalidating the results of any "study".
And, not just plants. A local wildlife rescue operation lost recuperating birds they kept in outdoor aviaries... the spectacular growth of the quail and pheasant population, which we'd helped enable... all suddenly gone. Our elderly neighbors became ill... and moved away.
Two, not unrelated... an intense eruption of fireblight... which was uncontrolled in the neighboring orchards whose owners had abandoned them.
But, prior to the disasters occurring... I learned a whole lot in a short time. Got to evaluate qualities of fruits from a large number of cider varieties... and a couple of dessert apples...
And, did complete a good number of other projects, which helped out others... improving the local direct to consumer farms... tomato trials, strawberries... and got them adopting quite a bit of permaculture in how they're growing them... Selected seed sources for local oaks... and helped them plant a lot of oak trees... which will mean acorns for the pigs...
My own experience with the cider varieties seems it is being duplicated by others... not only at the application level... but at the nursery level... While there are some spectacular cider varieties out there... they tend to be "very high risk" for growers, only in part because of disease susceptibility... and, far more... too often ignored... older varieties tend to be far more susceptible to the chemical assaults imposed by neighbors that are now a routine part of agriculture. Modern varieties, intentionally or not... are selected to survive in the chemical dominated landscape that defines our modern reality.
So, the nursery operations have been throttled back... making it harder to get heirloom varieties as easily as was true, for a time... But, that's at a time that "interest" has soared... pandemic driven, largely... so that obtaining trees to plant is harder, now... and costs two to three times what it did a short while ago.
The key takeaways... there are a solid handful of "antiques" that are fairly robust... along with a handful plus of modern varieties that not only incorporate quite good disease resistance as the objective.. but, also, have better chemical tolerance as an inadvertent selection factor...
If I were starting over to make a small planting to use in cider production... I'd go organic... meaning... plant only that handful of highly disease and chemical resistant apple varieties... knowing the product wouldn't be nearly as good as it might be... but having a product being a better plan than having a dead orchard.
Have also relocated... still have access to the (surviving) plant materials I've left there... but now working on enabling new efforts in places that are far more isolated from other agriculture...
Should note... the difficulties almost exclusively impacted apples... All the others I planted... a range of plums, and a range of tart cherries... shrugged it all off, and kept going. The plums in particular, encountered difficulty only in result of growing too fast... and not being properly pruned after I left them...
But, French heirloom prune plums... and "Thomas Jefferson's favorite" plum... spectacular. Cherries I planted were English Morello, Northstar, Sure-fire... and a variety I don't see listed any more, anywhere... that was a seedling found growing wild in Manitoba... super cold hardy... All proved valuable... and, from a growers perspective, they compensated well for each other in terms of the annual crop variations imposed depending on seasonality. But, if you've never had a cherry pie made from freshly picked English Morello... you've never really had a cherry pie... Unbeatable flavor, but, perhaps... not a quality that is optimal for being preserved... which others seem to do better.
The level of care I provided to the cherry and plum plantings... was zero. They had no problems...
My biggest regret from that couple of years... had nothing to do with the other disasters... was entirely self imposed. I spent years searching and sorting citrus plants for sale... finally found one, that had been growing in the ground in a back yard in New Jersey for ten years... said to be tolerant to -10F below... a Chinese import from before they cracked down on that... Got a couple, and grew them outdoors in pots for three years... during which time they blithely survived temperatures as low as -25F... which decimated the trifoliate oranges I grew as controls... Very excited by that... purposed to plant them out... so, moved them for that purpose... then, forgot about them... and, without water during a heat wave, killed them.
And, now... can't locate them any more... as it seems "someone" has made that impossible... and has disincentivized the grower from making them available... So, the future of the citrus industry of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, western Montana, and coastal/southern British Columbia... died in my back yard. |
