Apple Season is Here

Photo Provided by Becky Nelson
Social media is loaded with photos of families off on adventures apple picking. The governor declared “apple season” about a week ago, visiting a pick your own operation and picking the “first” apple. We have been picking apples here at the farm since the last week of August, so I guess he was right. Apple season is here.

I can’t pick the first apples without thinking about the process of planting our orchard. The farm has “wild” apples all over the place, where birds or vermin carried off a seed and dropped it in some uncultivated area after stealing a bite from the original trees planted on the farm. Not a formal orchard in days past, these trees were conveniently planted near the homestead and were a valuable part of the economy and food security of the farm. We have several antique varieties growing at the edges of the woods. Some we think are old “Pound Sweets,” a yellowish apple that can grow very large. My favorite is one that grows directly across from the farmhouse by the roadside, a “Blue Pearmain”. The family always pronounced it “Blooper Main” and I never realized the true name until we planted an orchard of our own. We used to pick the wild apples every fall and munch, make pies, feed them to the cattle and sometimes make cider…even hard cider. We didn’t care if there was a blemish or a worm. We just ate around the “bad spot” and enjoyed the sweet taste of fall.

The present day orchard is about an acre and a half in size with about 120 trees of ten or so varieties. It is planted in the most rocky of pastures, and where we think the original cabin was built at the farm in the 1780s. We found a large burned area when we prepared the soil for planting, and oral family legend tells that the first cabin burned and the farmhouse was then built in 1803. It is really poignant to me that we are still growing on the very soil my ancestors cleared and claimed as farmland that long ago.

We originally planted the orchard in the 1990s, just sticks with a few little branches it seemed. We were hoping to raise enough apples to support our cider production at the start, and picked apples and stored them just for that task. When the store got busier, we marketed much of the crop as retail apples. When the cider industry changed and we were no longer able to wholesale our production as we do not pasteurize our cider, we picked most of the apples for retail sale and the sort-outs were used for cider.

Now that markets and demands have again changed, we have adapted and opened the orchard for pick your own customers. We even grafted some of the original Blue Pearmain apples onto root stock in the orchard so customers can try and enjoy those original tastes from the farm. We also have recently planted “new” customer favorites to add to the mix.

It means a lot to me to preserve some of the old while pivoting and adapting to the new, something that all of us need to do as life changes around us. Like the old song we sang as Girl Scouts states, “make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, and the other gold.” It is important to remember where you came from, wear the scars with pride, think of past mistakes and not make them again and look forward to making this a better world for ourselves and others. Both history and the future are invaluable in our living and planning, with my future shining silver and my history and roots true gold. My heritage and the love for the land is as rooted in these soils as are the apple tree roots, but I am as excited about the future of the farm as I am the past. The bloodline…and the blooper main…live on in golden glory.

Becky Nelson is owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, eighth generation in a multi-generational farm that was established in 1780. She can be reached at [email protected].