Good Fruit Grower

August 2012

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ANTIQUES T Eastman's im and Cindy Ward agree: Their favorite apple is the Holstein. (And you probably thought that was just some kind of milk cow.) The Holstein is a sweet apple that looks much like Gala, is orange-yellow in base color and red striped, was introduced commercially in Germany in 1918, and is probably an offspring of Cox's Orange Pippin, Great Britain's most famous apple. The Holstein is just one of more than 1,400 apple varieties the Wards have in their Orchard includes 1,400 apple 12-acre Michigan orchard of antique and heritage apples. From late July to November, customers flock to the Wards' retail space at the Midland Farmers Market, where they can buy any or all of 50 or so varieties, with new ones offered weekly as they ripen. Each week, the Wards list on their Web site, www.eastmansantique varieties managed for direct market. by Richard Lehnert apples.com, all the varieties they'll be bringing, and it's a first-come, first- served free-for-all, because there may be just a few apples of any given variety. Market days are Wednesdays and Saturdays in Midland, a city best known as the home of Dow Chemical Company. The orchard is a sight to see. There is a certain uniformity, because all the trees are on Mark rootstock and nicely spaced at about 10 feet inter- vals in rows 20 feet apart. But there's a curious individuality to the trees. The varieties vary in vigor, uprightness, weepiness, bearing habit, leaf color, and, this year, fruit set. Most of the apple crop in eastern Michigan was wiped out by spring freezes this year, but some of these antique apple trees are loaded with fruit, while oth- ers have nothing. Grafting is a skill that is useful in maintaining an antique apple orchard, and Tim has mastered that. The Wards prune their orchards in winter, and some think it would be great to save this wood for propagation. But Tim doesn't want to sell trees or budwood. Few customers get to see the orchard, and the Wards aren't set up to sell directly from the farm. The orchard sits on flat ground in a rural farm area better known for production of corn, soybeans, dry edible beans, and sugar beets. Midland market But at the Midland market, customers buy fruit. "People can mix and match whatever they want," Cindy said. "We sell by the basket." In the world of antique apples, bad color, russeting, knobbiness, and odd shapes won't get you thrown into the cull bin. "Russeting? We like it," Cindy said. "Some of our apples are so homely we have to give them away to get people to try them," Tim added. "After a taste, they become regular customers." Prices are quite modest. Customers pay $8 for a peck, $5 for a half-peck, $3 for a quarter peck. That's less than a dollar a pound for these rare apples, and less than a supermarket charges for ordinary apples. "On a good Saturday, we'll sell over a thousand dollars worth of apples," Cindy said. "The Midland market is very good. Sometimes we're so busy we can't keep up." Last year, they struck a deal with The Produce Station in Ann Arbor, a specialty food market catering to an educated university clientele in affluent urban southeast Michigan a hundred miles south of them. While some of the apples at Eastman's Antique Apples are wildly exotic in shape, color, or size, some of them are not so unusual and are familiar names. Why they became rare is not apparent. Among those might be Northern Spy, Duchess of Oldenburg, Gravenstein, Grimes Golden, Esopus Spitzenburg, Arkansas Black, Winesap, Newtown Pippin, Kidd's Orange Red, and Blue Pearmain. 50 AUGUST 2012 GOOD FRUIT GROWER As the Wards tell the story, the orchard was the result of the driven spirit of her brother, Jon Eastman. About 20 years ago, he began seeking out unusual apples and planting them on their dad's farm. "My brother just had this love of apples. He thought he was a modern-day Johnny Appleseed. It was uncanny. He just kept grafting and planting apples. He seemed driven to plant trees," Cindy said. He apparently found them by browsing nursery cata- logs. He obtained varieties from around the world—many from Europe, some from Japan and Turkey. The job of maintaining all these apples became too big and costly for Jon. He had not put in any trellis, and many of the trees are less than upright. While some are central leader style, a lot look like open vase peaches. About five years ago, Cindy and Tim, along with their sons Rafe and Casey (and their wives Nicole and Heather) created a three-way partnership to buy the family farm from Jon and to manage and market the apples. Cindy and Tim weren't orchardists. But Tim, who had just retired after 30 years working for Dow Chemical, and Cindy plunged in to learn their lessons from Michigan State University horticulturists (especially eastern Michigan Extension educator Bob Tritten). "We had no idea what to do when we took it on," Tim said. Now, they are speakers on the topic of antique apples at winter horticulture shows. Good records While most fruit growers work with blocks of apples, the Wards need to approach their apples tree by tree, and that takes good records. And they have modernized the records Jon left them, which was a notebook filled with handwritten notes of tree varieties and locations. Every tree has a tag with its name on. A large spread- sheet contains the name of every tree by variety and its location (row 5, tree 10, for example). The records show when each tree's apples ripened in the past. "We keep records every year," Cindy said. "It is very important to pick them at just the right time. Some have a very short window, a week or so." Codes are used to indicate how sure they are that the variety is rightly named. Apples from each tree have been photographed and tasted and compared with descriptions from historical records. Cindy is creating a book, in which she has names, pho- tos, and descriptions, and she makes laminated cards containing this information for people who visit their market booth in Midland. Last year, the Wards made 400 bottles of hard cider using various blends. They have 50 varieties grown exclusively for cider use, and lots of crabapples that also www.goodfruit.com

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