Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Larry Lombard" <ljmelea@msn.com>]

how would i get more info on this apple source?thank you,larry


> From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
> Reply-To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing 
> <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
> To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: [Livingontheland] The Genius of Apples
> Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 09:46:39 -0600
>
> The Genius of Apples
> OCTOBER 4, 2000
>
> There's a hearty band of hunters ransacking the South, says Lee Calhoun,
> hunting for old Southern apples. They are tracking down apple trees in the
> front yards of old country homes that may disappear tomorrow. Time is
> running out for these hunters. Of the 1,400 apple varieties known to have
> originated in the South, only about 200 are still known to exist. "The
> others are totally extinct," says Calhoun, "and when that happens, you lose
> a whole apple. Most of these trees were planted in the early 1900s. I'd say
> we only have about five years left to find them."
>
> Creighton Lee Calhoun is a pomologist. Etymologically, that means he loves
> apples. On his land in the Saralyn community in the heart of old Chatham
> County, he is growing 450 kinds of heirloom apples. Calhoun's Nursery on
> Blacktwig Road has become legendary among those who are trying to rescue a
> history that is slipping away. There he collects cuttings of old varieties,
> grafts them onto root stock and plants and sells the results, all in the
> name of preservation and propagation. Our own Johnny Appleseed.
>
> One hundred years ago, apples were a staple of the Southern diet. Time was,
> says Calhoun, when every farmhouse in the largely rural South had apple
> trees in its yard. Apples provided fresh fruit from June to November, and
> were kept in the root cellar all winter. The varieties were myriad,
> providing fruit through the whole summer -- early, midseason and late.
> Southerners dried the tart varieties, made applesauce and apple butter from
> the soft ones, and fashioned pies from the firmer fruit that held its shape
> during cooking.
>
> When I arrived at Calhoun's house, a beautiful Oriental-style structure he
> shares with his wife, Edith, he had collected a basket of more than two
> dozen varieties of apples for me and had written their names on the bottoms
> in ink, "so you can have an apple-tasting," he said. They were red and
> yellow and green and striped. But none of them were massive and waxy and
> spotless like the varieties shipped to Food Lion from Washington state.
> Calhoun sprays very little for the insect damage and fungal infections that
> come with growing apples in the South. "An apple that's blemished is as
> good as one that's not," says Calhoun. He patrols his orchard daily,
> ridding the trees of caterpillars, aphids and Japanese beetles. He likes to
> quote an old Chinese proverb that says, "the best fertilizer is the
> farmer's footsteps."
>
> Calhoun found his two dozen acres in Saralyn in 1977 and began clearing
> land for a garden. Thinking about fruit trees, he asked an old friend in
> Pittsboro for advice. "Why don't you plant some old-timey ones," said the
> friend, "like the ones we used to have--Blacktwig, Red June, Nickajack,
> Fallawater, Horse Apple." Calhoun liked the idea and wrote off for some
> catalogs, but nobody carried the old-timey varieties. Most sellers were
> limited to the apples we know from the supermarkets, like Red Delicious and
> Jonathan and Macintosh from Washington, New York, New Zealand.
>
> Calhoun wasn't discouraged. From a magazine article, he taught himself
> tree-grafting, then started driving around the county looking for old apple
> trees. When he spotted one in a farmhouse yard, he would go up to the house
> and ask if the owners knew the apple's name. "Often," he told me, "they'd
> say Granny knew, but she died in '84. But when they could name it, I would
> take a cutting, graft it onto some root stock, and plant it in my orchard.
> I thought there'd be only a few dozen, but I just kept finding them."
> Calhoun traveled further and further away from Chatham County, finding old
> Southern apples in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. He outgrew
> his little orchard, and the saga of Calhoun's Nursery began.
>
> Now Lee Calhoun gets 1,000 phone calls and letters a year asking him for
> advice and sharing new information about apples. "I've met some great
> people," he said. "I'm so interested in these old folks, I'm tickled that
> somebody's trying to keep the apples growing. They're mostly elderly, and
> to hear them talk, you'd think it was the 1800s. Most of them grew up in
> the '20s and '30s on primitive farms, working with mules. They'll tell you
> their apple memories--how they kept them in an unheated room under the bed,
> how the apples would perfume the whole room." There are as many old stories
> as there are old apples--stories of having apples for breakfast fried in
> meat drippings, drying apple slices on a tin roof, eating a freshly picked
> fruit right off the tree, after it had baked in the hot Southern summer
> sun.
>
> Calhoun's eyes light up with the memories: "They'll tell you all about
> their apples and then send you on down the road to the neighbors. I met a
> woman in Stokes County whose father fought in the Civil War. Imagine that.
> The Civil War. This is the end of the line, you know. We're in double
> jeopardy. The old apple trees are dying out, and so are the old people who
> can identify them."
>
> Calhoun hauled out a thick, coffee-table-size hardbound book called Old
> Southern Apples--by Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr. (Blacksburg, Va.: McDonald &
> Woodward, 1995, 326 pp.). It catalogs 1,600 extant and extinct old apples:
> the Baltimore Monstrous Pippin, recorded in 1817 at a foot in diameter and
> four inches high; the Blacktwig, over which a furious battle was fought in
> the magazines and newspapers of 1896 (Is it or is it not the same apple as
> the Paragon?); the Buff, traced in 1853 to a North Carolina seedling tree
> raised by the Cherokees; the Cathead; the Chenango Strawberry; the
> Cullasaga; the Duchess of Oldenburg.
>
> He wrote this book by hand, compiling, he says, at least 30,000 facts
> gleaned from trips to the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Md.
> There, with his wife, he trudged up and down the library's 14 floors and
> sorted through thousands of boxes of old seed and nursery catalogs. The
> curator of rare books took the seekers to a steamy room in the sub-basement
> to inspect files compiled by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture's pomology
> section between 1886 and 1920. There they found thousands of handwritten
> cards tracing the origins of old apple varieties.
>
> They also found what Calhoun says is a "priceless national treasure"--7,000
> hand-painted pictures of American fruit, executed by USDA artists from 1885
> to 1930, all unpublished. Calhoun enlisted Chatham County photographer
> Jerry Markatos to spend two days "in a darkened niche" at the library,
> making 48 color plates from the original drawings to grace the book. Each
> one includes the handwritten identification of the apple and the signature
> of the artist.
>
> Calhoun's book contains a treasure trove of apple lore. When the first
> English settlers arrived on this continent, says Calhoun, they found plenty
> of fruit, but, to their surprise, no apples. The English had always had
> apples and had come to regard them as native to their own land. But in
> fact, they originated in Kazakh-stan, in central Asia, and seeds were
> carried to Europe around 1,500 B.C. The Greeks, Romans and Etruscans grew
> apples, and Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, described 29
> varieties. The Romans carried apples with them to northern Europe, where
> they thrived in the British Isles.
>
> The first settlers to Maryland were instructed by Lord Baltimore to take
> with them "kernalls of pears and apples, especially of Pippins, Permains
> and Deesons, for making thereafter of Cider and Perry." Most Southern farms
> of the Colonial period had orchards. George Washington had 200 apple and
> peach trees planted on his farm in Berkeley County, Va., but even ordinary
> farmers usually had 50-200 trees, mostly for making cider. A rough rule of
> thumb for Southern farm families, says Calhoun, was six apple trees per
> person.
>
> The earliest documented nurseries in North Carolina were operated by
> Quakers, offering apple trees from cuttings brought from England in 1806 by
> Ann Jessup, a Quaker minister in Guilford County. Descendants of her trees
> spread throughout the Carolinas, and were sold to North Carolinians
> migrating into the Northwest Territories from 1820 to 1826. The coming of
> the railroads in the 1880s, especially into the Appalachians and Arkansas,
> brought on an "apple boom" in the South. But overproduction, poorly sited
> orchards, falling prices after World War I and competition from the West
> Coast doomed the Southern apple boom. In North Carolina, ten million
> bushels of apples were sold in the early 1910s, compared to about 3 million
> in 1950.
>
> Most Southern trees were grown from seeds. "This means that the South was
> literally a vast agricultural experiment station," says Calhoun. Because
> each apple seed is genetically different from all other apple seeds, it
> will, if planted, produce a tree and fruit different from all other apple
> trees and fruit. Calhoun explains that to reproduce a distinct variety of
> apple, we cannot rely on the seeds. Apple biology requires that its genes
> be passed on through a root sprout or, more reliably, through a twig cut
> from the tree and inserted into the pencil-diameter, severed trunk of a
> young apple tree. The twig and trunk fuse into a tree which grows up to be
> identical to the tree from which the twig was taken. Each new tree will
> bear fruit identical to the original tree.
>
> And out of the millions upon millions of apple trees grown from seeds in
> the South from 1607 to 1900, only a few were of exceptional quality, "the
> geniuses of apples," as Calhoun calls them. Those are the ones that were
> cherished and saved and shared and traded and sold. It is those varieties
> Calhoun has collected, grafted and sold in his nursery. And because apple
> trees only live about 100 years, the rest of those genius apples from 1900
> will be gone in five years if they are not found and saved by the apple
> hunters.
>
> Walking in the orchard with Calhoun, I was surprised to find the trees
> espaliered, that is, with the branches trained along wires stretched in
> parallel aisles. Calhoun assures me that this method produces the most
> bountiful harvest, and he is presently writing a book on "espaliering for
> beginners," which he says is "really fun," and a good idea for people with
> an urban lot or a small amount of room for the orchard. There are a variety
> of shapes that work well, he says, and, when in fruit, they will "stop
> traffic."
>
> As we passed through the rows of trees, Calhoun spotted some favorites. He
> showed me the July-August Go No Further, from West Virginia (as in: "that's
> the best, you might as well stop looking"); Aunt Cora's Yard Apple (grown
> by an African-American midwife in Virginia); the Ben Davis (from 1870 to
> 1920 the most popular commercial apple in the U.S., the Red Delicious of
> its day); the Spitzenburg (Thomas Jefferson's favorite, grown at
> Monticello); and the Rattling Core (its seeds are loose inside, and
> rattle).
>
> As I drove down Blacktwig Road through the wilds of Saralyn, I couldn't
> help remembering that song from Disney's Johnny Appleseed: "Oh, the Lord is
> good to me/and so I thank the Lord/for giving me the things I need/the sun,
> the rain and the apple seed/Oh, the Lord is good to me."
>
> At home in my kitchen, a Dixie Red Delight, a Nickajack, a Ben Davis and a
> Rockingham Red have already been served up in a delicious pie, and the rest
> of my famous, cherished, rescued old Southern apples are waiting in a cool
> spot in my storage shed. If there are any left in December after his orders
> are all filled, Lee Calhoun will sell me a couple of little apple trees,
> and I will plant them on the meadow in Saxapahaw where I got married. Thank
> you, Lord.
>
> http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A14958
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Livingontheland mailing list
> Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland