Hello all. I’m a fruit enthusiast from Syracuse, NY. I’ve had the Upstate New York staples of Concord and Niagara grapes, Northern Spy and Macintosh apples for years and branched out into plums and apricots in 2018.
This year I jumped on the cider bandwagon and will expand my hobby to cidermaking at the carboy scale. Planted around 70 trees and grafted another 50 on G.214 on a tall spindle trellis system with about 40 varieties altogether. I don’t have a ton of space (1 acre), so the plan is to follow commercial trellising guidelines from Cornell and keep everything 2 dimensional on the trellis.
Setting myself up this year to enjoy the fruits of labor down the road with blending and experimenting. I mostly grafted scions from heirloom American varieties (Harrison, Baldwin, Gilpin, Newtown Pipin, Black Oxford, Russets, etc) but the purchased trees are newer varieties (Gnarled Chapman, Kronebusch, Franklin) with a handful of European due to an end-of-season tree sale.
