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Apple Season

Living on the Earth, October 10, 1997:  Apple Season

It's apple season‹the time of year when it¹s easy for almost everyone 
to see and taste the benefits of food produced nearby.  This weekend, 
look for local apples at farmers' markets, roadside stands, cider 
mills, pick-your-own orchards, and some neighborhood markets.  Fresh 
picked in nearby orchards, Macintoshes, Macouns, Cortlands, Baldwins, 
Northern Spies, Staymans, Winesaps and Ida Reds are all delicious.  
They have the wonderful firm texture and flavorful juiciness which 
distinguishes fruit grown close to home. Their patina, a faint milky 
bloom, says they are fresh.

Oh, I know.  You can go down to the supermarket any day in any season 
and find some red, yellow and green apples.  They come from such 
places as Chile, South Africa, New Zealand and even as close as 
California and Washington State.  They're very shiny because most of 
them are coated with waxes and maybe fungicides, too. These apples 
always look better than they taste.  This time of year, you may even 
find some local apples in the supermarket, but they soon pick up the 
flavor of their surroundings. There's no way around it, the closer you 
get to the tree, the better the apple tastes.  

Apples get tired, sort of beaten up, if they travel too far, are 
roughly handled, or spend too much time in a plastic bag. Imagine if 
you were popped into a box with dozens of your kind, shipped 6,000 
miles and then dumped out onto a supermarket shelf. You might be a 
little tired and beaten up too.

Compare one of those apples with a just-picked Connecticut one.  
You'll soon recognize the effect that long-distance shipping has on 
taste.

Apples are alive, respiring and carrying on other biological 
processes.  (If you want proof of this, take the seeds out of an apple 
and plant them.  After winter's cold, many of them will germinate.)  
Using an understanding of apples' breathing,  local growers are able 
to keep them for more than three months with ³controlled atmosphere² 
storage. This system seals apples in a cool, air-tight room, and then 
replaces most of the oxygen with inert nitrogen.  Without much oxygen, 
apples' respiration slows down, and with it, their biological 
imperative to rot so their seeds can get to the soil.

If we want to enjoy the pleasures of these fresh apples, we need to 
support local orchards, or grow our own.  However, it's not so easy to 
grow a good crop of apples.  Fungus diseases like scab, and insects 
such as plum curculio, oriental fruit moth, and apple maggot also find 
this fruit delicious. 

Fortunately, a lot of progress is being made in reducing the chemicals 
needed to bring in a good crop.  The University of Connecticut IPM 
(Integrated Pest Management) program helps orchardists to reduce the 
use of toxic sprays by monitoring insects and diseases carefully. The 
Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven is testing hardy, 
pest-resistant varieties which will produce a good crop without using 
pesticides.  Some of these varieties are ideal for the home gardener. 
At High Hill Orchard in Meriden, Wayne Young uses compost and rock 
powders in a long-term, soil-building program, and is experimenting 
with compost sprays to control apple-scab fungus. 

Notice our double interest in reducing the use of toxic materials in 
agriculture.  We would like our farmer neighbors to use fewer or no 
poisonous chemicals, and we'd like to eat fruit with fewer chemicals 
on it.   

The Macoun is our favorite apple- a wonderful mix of tart and sweet 
flavors, firm and crunchy.  It is usually available for a limited 
time, so eat them while you can.  Wayne Young says his favorite 
variety is whichever one is ³just ripe.²

The Connecticut Department of Agriculture publishes a list of state 
apple orchards, and a listing of farmers' markets. To get these lists, 
send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to the attention of the 
Marketing Division, Department of Agriculture, State Office Building, 
Hartford, CT 06106.

There are two lessons to be learned with every bite of a local apple.  
First, local food tastes better.  And second, in order to have local 
food, we need to have an ecological agriculture that we can live with.

This is Bill Duesing, Living on the Earth

© 1997, Bill Duesing, Solar Farm Education, Box 135,  Stevenson,  CT 
06491

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