Making old orchards new again | Hacker News Reader

Making old orchards new again

modernfarmer.com

106 pointsRickJWagner55 comments

My father has a small orchard in Maine and he gifted me several trees including a clone of a "lost" variety called the "Canadian Strawberry".

https://fedcoseeds.com/trees/canadian-strawberry-apple-112

This tree is growing robustly alongside my numerous pawpaw trees and I look forward to getting some fruit in the next year or so. He makes cider every year from the apples he collects from all the feral trees in his area. It is always amazing to appreciate the difference in flavor from the different varieties he harvests.

> He makes cider every year from the apples he collects from all the feral trees in his area.

Are pests problematic when making cider? Do you have to throw away anything that has a bug in it?

You don't want to use the nasty ones for sure, but every plant product you eat probably has some insect protein in it already, so it is a judgement call.

The best thing to do with windfall apples is to turn them into pork.

Pork? Huh? Feed them to pigs?

We should be feeding pigs and chickens insects. They’re omnivores. It’s weird that we are trying to feed them entirely or mostly grain.

It's not weird; grain is cheap. Totally understandable.

They'd die, just like people. Mammals in general can't digest chitin. There aren't any human populations that consume a significant amount of insect protien. It's just a trick to demoralize and humiliate the peasantry.

Bugs literally aren't even fit to be fed to pigs. But I'd enjoy force feeding somebody like you more than you could handle!

Are you a pig farmer? Because this has been studied many times and you’d think they’d notice.

This is one situation where I can say, “how can a billion Chinese people be wrong?” without sarcasm. Roasted grasshopper is sold as a snack. Whole grasshopper. People aren’t dying from it.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adc9165

https://www.wired.com/story/insects-pigs-poultry/ - EU approved insects for pigs and poultry in 2022 and I’m pretty sure there are farmers in Europe.

Ugh, disgusting. No more European cured pork products for me!

Pretty sure pigs eat grubs the find when they root in the dirt.

Nah, they reject insect food. Have you ever been physically forced to eat bugs? We can change that!

You are a very strange person.

Sure. If you keep pigs (and chickens) then there is essentially zero food waste.

This is how efficient farms have worked for centuries. Orchards full of fruit trees, with sheep grazing the grass underneath, bees pollinating the flowers, and pigs in the scrubland next door to feed the windfalls to. Maximising land use to its full potential, unlike the farming monocultures of today.

>Maximising land use to its full potential, unlike the farming monocultures of today.

"Maximising land use to its full potential" (whatever that means) =/= whatever is economically optimal (ie. factoring in inputs like labor)

You can leave the fruits on the ground, But If you would not eat an apple, why would you drink it. Dont use fruit with pests in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jRMK3dA2kI

Codling moths are definitely going to be an issue. When they burrow around in the apple, they allow for rot and the varying amounts and types of mycotoxins.

Definitely not acceptable to drink.

Hard cider from Apple with some CM actually taste better than "clean" sprayed apples. I think the moth proteins might add something to the fermentation.

My parents have finished grafting this year's round of trees. Some 600 new grafts onto root stock. Most of the space on their property is planted out now, so these will be for selling in the next one to five years.

I have to say, I enjoy eating lunch in the orchard. Nothing is quite like sun ripened apples, pears, or plums.

We didn't have space for an orchard, but we did have space for a single combination tree.

A combination tree is rootstock with multiple apple varieties grafted on to it, often designed so that the different varieties can pollinate each other. Our specific tree has Chehalis, Honeycrisp, Beni Shogun Fuji and Jonagold varieties on it.

Other ways to grow apples in a limited space are columnar apples (they grow fruit close to the trunk and are nearly vertical) and dwarf rootstock.

Scarlet Sentinel, Golden Sentinel, and Urban Tasty are popular columnar varieties.

For rootstock their are specialized rootstock nurseries - and rootstock determines the size of the final tree more than the grafted variety does.

M27 (Super Dwarf) is an extremely compact rootstock that can be used to grow apples in containers, as the tree will max out around 2m. Bud 9 and B10 dwarf are also small, but will grow to around 3.5m.

If you want rootstock that will live around a century, you probably need Antonovka Standard, which will grow to about 7m.

I got told multiple times that such a combination tree is a shit idea. Firstly that genes get "diluted" and the resulting fruits aren't good. Then that the earliest variety will consume the most of available resources and any later fruit will not get a chance to grow. How good are your apples?

They are admittedly not super, but for the space we have they provide a good amount of joy.

Your grafts - do they ever come to be as strong as untouched "native" branches ? Or are the graft points always a weak spot ?

Afaik after a few years growing together it's bonded solid.

If you read this and got curious here is an independent grower who has been breeding all kind of wild apples on his homestead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBHqPMK9xM0

6 min in you can see his bright red fleshed (yes, flesh!) apple he is trying to breed out.

Or see this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S4BfgfZ9Kmk

Old apple varieties are fascinating, I plan on grafting multiple old species from my region onto a couple of older trees in my garden. I also experiment with grafting apples onto rowan trees, with is compatible.

I live on an old farm in Australia with several unknown apple varieties. The original trees were planted here in the 1850s to 1860s by French settlers.

One of the most interesting ones is a small purple-ish apple that fizzes when you bite into it. (It is also exceptionally productive, bearing 2-3 times more than any of the others, and makes a very nice cider.)

Did you see the link in the post to get DNA and lineage of trees tested?

The word "cider" has become frustrating conflated. It can mean apple juice, unpasteurized apple juice, unfiltered (but still pasteurized) apple juice, and some combination thereof.

But "cider" only means fermented apple juice. Lets keep it straight and separate from apple juice.

Yes I think this is an American thing. In the UK cider is always an alcoholic drink.

Adam Ragusea has a good video on youtube explaining exactly that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R41YFcX8e4

No, it has regional meanings, and you cannot assume that 'cider' always means what you say it does. I mean I too would have liked to have kept the original meaning of 'hacker' but alas, such is the nature of language.

It's like the reginal words for soft drink. Soda, pop or coke: https://www.businessinsider.com/soda-pop-coke-map-2018-10

The mention of grafting in the article made me wonder.. Are Apple trees genetically immortal? Eg, they don't have the problems that humans and other mammals have with ever shortening telomeres, leading to eventual death?

Short answer is no, not really. Here is a paper on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6356271/

Under laboratory conditions you can regrow a whole plant from an extremely small sample, even down to an individual cell. This is very handy with potatoes for example. Potatoes are notorious for acquiring many different viruses that eventually make a clone line uneconomical or just kill the whole variety altogether. With lab work it is possible to cleanse a potato cell of the virus then propagate many new, clean plants.

Plants still have the same issues with shortening telomeres, but their mechanisms for repairing and maintaining genome stability are much stronger than in mammals.

So if you were to take new growth and graft the same variety of apple tree for the next million years, at some point it would no longer be viable. But how many years that would take isn't really known. On a human scale, yes, they can be considered immortal.

My understanding is that a scion from new growth effectively resets the clock.

As long as you keep grafting healthy scions, the apple trees live forever.

I only have experience with citrus, but as far as I know you can graft forever. Some variants don't have seeds, this is the only way to propagate them.

The seeds are typically not true to type, so while that doesn't really answer the question I think it makes it irrelevant?

Its orthogonal. Grafting would not work if apple trees had the same issue with shortening telomeres that humans have.

Well that's answering the question, I admitted I was dodging that - my point was that they're not true anyway so we don't even need to theorise what might happen over generations of reproduction. But perhaps I misunderstood/mis-scoped what was meant by 'immortal'.

I greatly enjoy the exquisite drawing and watercolours that people make of our nature. This nicely little service publishes once each day pictures from the USDA of apples and related fruits. (They are on X/Twitter but stopped the daily tweets last year). https://botsin.space/@pomological

Maybe it’s just my small sample size, but I’m surprised at how many of the artists are women given the dates. I wonder if there is something about botanical illustrations that was particularly inviting to women of the time.

Botanical illustration.

I’ve grafted a really amazing wild seedling onto an old apple tree on my property. In a good season apples are everywhere and few people harvest them where I live.

I started out excited about hard cider but it turns out drinking it fresh at the time of pressing beats waiting many months for something alcoholic every time.

Change yeast. Run a kveik strain and ferment at 35c. Should be done in 18 hours. Different kveik strains will bring out different flavors.

Cider makers could maybe provide me with a clue...

I understand apple pectin (or fruit pectins in general) have methoxy groups, and these can lead to production of methanol. Is this a concern in cider making, and are there steps cider makers take to minimize this production?

I have not made enough cider and mead to be called a 'cider maker' in any sense but the most literal, and neither am I a chemist, so what I know about this is mostly from reading books and following others' advice. The way I understand it, all fermented drinks have methanol, including all your store-bought wines. They just have very little and it's distributed uniformly so the point at which it becomes it a health risk is way beyond the point where other things would be problems before the methanol (that's a roundabout way of saying - if you drink something like 20 liters of wine, the methanol in those 20 liters will probably not be your most pressing concern). Methanol only becomes a problem when it's concentrated, i.e. in distilled drinks. When you distill, you separate the methanol by throwing away the first part of your distilled result (probably has a proper name, I've never distilled anything myself), because the methanol evaporates before the other alcohols, the ones you actually want to capture.

> probably has a proper name

"Head" or "head product", vs. "heart" for the desired fraction.

https://www.barisonindustry.com/en/news/methanol-what-it-is-...

Correct, pretty much anything fermented will have methanol if it has any pectin. Luckily the cure to methanol toxicity is ethanol so as long as the concentration is organic and not poisoned by industrial methanol, it’s perfectly safe.

The only drink you could theoretically get poisoned from is fermented orange juice but it’s pretty much unheard off outside of prohibition-era denaturing.

Pomace is often treated with a pectic enzyme, not out of concern for methanol levels, but usually to enhance pressing yield of juice. Otherwise, it’s also sometimes used as a fining agent.

We have an applesauce variety farm nearby. Can these make cider or do they specifically have to be made into applesauce due to the texture?

I'm sure anything works, but does it work well I mean?

Ethanol is popular in part because you can make it with just about anything that contains enough sugar for the yeast. As to "taste well": there are people who get pretty audiophile about grape-based ethanol mixes.

(around here, for people who have only a dozen or so trees there are people who come around with a still on a trailer, to reduce the harvest down to something easier to transport and store)

> Vypil C2H5OH, sel na «Nivu» ("Rostsel'mash") —IVR

I visited Cluj in Romania. There was an orchard outside the city. It has been abandoned for decades but in the fall families come there and pick apples.

HN Hug Of Death?

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