Great project underway here in my state, preserving local heirloom apple varieties whilst demonstrating land restoration. Nice documentary on YouTube on link.
http://www.mofga.org/Home/MaineHeritageOrchard/tabid/540/Default.aspx
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Nice vid. John Bunker is great.
Nice video, thanks for sharing this, Jesse. Wished someone was doing this for pears.
Patty S.
I think that pears are planned for the Heritage Orchard as well, eventually.
When I visited the site, the terraced landscape was really starting to knit together.
Amazing when you consider the lifeless moonscape they started with…Wish I could sèe what it’ll look like in 50 yrs!
Awesome project, thanks for sharing Jesse.
I had the good fortune to visit last week and run into the orchard manager, CJ Walke. He had a few apples out to taste for some visiting chefs. They are celebrating their 10th year. There are about 150 trees, many on Antonovka rootstock. Most are 8-15’ tall and pruned to central leader.
The areas between rows are full of native plants. They don’t irrigate, so this was a hard year for some of the trees.
Apples tasted: Rhode Island Greening, Drap d’Or, Spencer, Lavalle, Northern Spy and Naraganset Crab.
Here are a few photos from the visit.
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Thanks for updating! I hav an visited overthe years and it’s been a real joy to see the trees progress, come into bearing, more plantings installed. I got to try Drap d’Or a couple years ago, a nice full flavored russet heirloom
That so neat- do you have any pictures of the rows with the natives?
CJ said it was one of his favorites, and I could see why!
They mow the rows with trees a few times a summer, then have strips that aren’t mowed. This picture shows some unmowed area near a tree. There were grasses, shrubs, some flowers in the strips (and some “weeds” like mullein). I got the impression that they did not actively manage these strips- what grew there, grew there. There had been a few frosts, so most plants were on the way out. They do not use any kind of guild approach- just grasses under the trees.
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