Apple Tree Club. This is where people can connect to buy trees and tools, plan tree care and harvesting, share knowledge and recipes, and maybe even start to make products for market. So many trees are untended, the fruit just wasted, because people don't know what to do or can't find help. This is the place to reach out and connect. As you join, simply by putting your name below, and perhaps contact information, you can get help or help others. Your Club could be related to creating work for kids, tackling food security, a Fruit Tree Fundraiser, or Inner City Orchards, a Green Teams program creating a permanent pool of work for youth.
See below for the Fruit Tree Planting and Care Guide
To join this club, click the Edit button and add your name here. Details about this club are on the Trenton News website http://web.ncf.ca/en369. For now, the main contact person is David Teertstra, but this is about family and friends working together. You can be your own group leader. A general description of how that could work is in Clubs Intro 1 with more detail in Clubs Intro 2.
APPLE TREE GUIDE Planting Bare-Root Apple Trees
So much writing to describe 30 minutes work! But here’s the basics. The best time to plant is spring or fall, around April when the temperature ranges from 0° C to 5°C. At the nursery, the trees have been freshly dug or stored in a controlled environment for a short time until delivered to you. Plan to plant them immediately in a pre-dug hole, because the roots are exposed and very sensitive to sun! The roots must be kept dark, cool and wet, and planted as soon as possible. This is quite literally a transplant requiring intensive care.
Wind or sun can dry out the fine roots within 2 minutes if left exposed. It’s best to plant on a rain day, but this is not always possible. If it’s sunny, warm and windy, constantly spray them with water or keep the roots covered with a wet cloth and wrapped in plastic. Sometimes they are shipped in wet sawdust, but if you get them yourself keep the roots wet! If you can’t plant the trees right away, store them out of the sun in a cool place (not freezing, less than 10°C) like a garage or basement.
Water fruit trees deeply every week their first summer, especially when there’s less than one inch of rainfall per week. Water is the most important nutrient for newly planted trees. A slow overnight drip works best, but you can also build a compost + soild donut in a ring around tree to fill with water and let soak in.
Bees pollinate trees. But apple trees also pollinate each other. To maximize fruit, get two types of apple tree, like Macintosh and Ida Red, that flower at the same time. Wind does the work of cross-pollination, but it’s smart to make a home for honey bees. If that’s too much of a venture, just plant flowers around your house to attract bees. Most of the pollination is done by wild bees that live in forest floors, so if you have a yard, leave a corner untended. Don’t make it all grass. Leave a corner for a few hardwood trees and bushes that you can just let be, unraked, to let the nutrients recycle.
In advance of getting a tree, choose a sunny spot and dig a hole about 2’ deep. Leave the soil in a pile beside the hole so you can backfill. Are you into metric? Holes should be at least 30 cm wide and 30 cm deep, the bigger the better, because it will make it easier for the roots to grow, especially if your soil is heavy and compact. That means it has more clay than sand. Sandy soil feels gritty. Clay-rich soil is sticky. If you wet a little soil in your hand, if it has a lot of clay in it, you can roll it into shapes that hold their form just like pottery clay. Why are we talking about clay?
Fruit trees need sun and decent drainage. If your soil looks like mud for days after a rain, it’s not well drained. But you can test this. Dig a hole and fill it with water. See how long it takes for the water to pass through the soil. If it empties in an hour or two, that’s perfect. If it stays filled, you tree can drown. Roots like air and water. Fruit trees can tolerate excess water in the spring as the snow thaws, but after that, they need decent drainage. All that means is don’t plant in a swamp! If it’s not a swamp, you’re good.
[Side note 1, which probably won’t apply to you. Don’t plant near evergreens like spruce, cedar or pine. Their needles make the soil too acidic. If you want to plant there, you’ll have to correct your soil pH with bone meal or lime. Use a pH (acidity) test strip from a swimming pool supply store.]
Fruit trees are not like flowers – they don’t need and don’t want fertilizer! In fact, any fertilizer (including manure and compost) near the tree can burn the roots. That’s the beauty of trees – they grow and produce a ton of apples with barely any tending at all! The only thing you might want to do after planting is mulch the soil at the surface once a year as this helps conserve moisture and slowly release nutrients into the soil. Generally you do this in the fall. If there’s a hard frost forecast, mulch the ground heavily with dead leaves to protect it from freezing.
[Side Note 2, which probably won’t apply to you: Some people are simply not convinced that fruit trees don’t need anything. No fertilizer, no potting mix, no manure, nothing. In fact, quite the opposite. If you have a clay-rich soil, and you back-fill a garden-mix soil in around the roots, the water will drain into the hole and stay there, drowning the tree! The porous soil will act as a sponge to absorb water, and the clay walls will create a pool to collect water. Make life easier for yourself – don’t buy anything, don’t do anything – just use the soil you’ve got.]
To plant, place the tree in the hole and spread its roots. If your tree came packed in wet sawdust, do not use the sawdust in the hole. Just shovel the natural soil in and work it in around the roots with your hands. How deep should the tree go? Leaving roots a exposed will stress the plant. For easy watering, you can make a donut-shaped ring of mulch & soil around the tree. Just not piled up against the tree above the graft scar. Mulch against the tree can make the trunk rot. Also, if you bury the grafted portion, the tree can sprout a root that bypasses the dwarfing effect of the rootstock. Then you’ll need an extra-long pole-picker for harvesting!
Spiral tree guards are recommended to protect against mouse and rabbit damage. Wrap spiral guards around the tree trunk and push them down into the soil so that voles can’t lift it and moles can’t go under. Once the tree gets large, it’s less tender and of no interest to those pesky nibbling critters.
Some people put in stakes to keep trees straight. Trees don’t need that, because they get stronger by enduring wind. But stakes can help to protect against breakage by snow or ice. And they help to see where they are - to avoid running them over with the mower.
Imagine, a beautiful flowering tree that feeds you! The natural wild apple tree forests of Kazakhstan originated in the Tian Shan mountains of central Asia. Apple trees are unique like you. Apple trees have a life of their own. Some take to a spot, grow fast and produce a lot. Others do not. They stay small and struggle. If there’s not enough sun, or a bit of wind to keep the leaves dry, they can get sick – mildew is the issue. Have you ever grown vegetables from seed? It’s like that. Some plants grow large, while others do not. Same seed, same conditions. If grown from seed, any sort of apple can be produced. All sorts of flavours and colours. Sweet dessert apples are rare, but tart apples have the best flavour for cider.
For healthy apples, raking the grounders out in the fall helps stop the worm/moth life cycle. Raking out leaves also stops apple scab. Apple scab is spread through fungus growing in old apple leaves on the ground that spreads during warm spring weather to infect the new spring leaves. The fruit develops brown spots with velvety or cork-like textures - and this is also seen on the leaves. For saucing or cider, apple scab is no big deal. Cooking destroys it. Or just peel it off.
Picking & Processing, Storing & Saucing
If you want to store apples for eating, pick them in the palm of your hand and twist to take them off the tree. Twist, because pulling can damage the small branches where apples will grow next year. Use the palm of your hand because apples bruise easily. Now you have an apple in your hand. It seems silly saying this, but what next? What next, if you’re standing on a ladder?
A picking apron will keep your hands free. You can to sew one. It’s basically a cloth grocery bag. If the handle is not quite long enough to fit over your head and hang around the back of your neck, chop it with scissors and sew or staple a piece of cloth on to make it longer and more comfortable.
You can look up dates for when apples are ripe. Some are early apples, ready before others. Or you can just pick one and take a bite. You can also tell they are ready when they start falling. If you pick one and twist, and it does not come off easily, that’s another sign they’re not ready.
You may notice your apples are smaller than commercial ones. Want to know the trick? Mid-summer, when you see some apples are larger than others, pick off the small ones because that puts more juice (sap) to the large ones. The ones you pick will be too tart to eat. That means they’re starchy. The starch has not yet converted to sugar, so they’re sour. No need to toss them, because those small starchy apples are perfect for making pectin.
To make pectin for jams and jellies, cut the small sour apples in half to look for bugs, then toss them into a stew pot, skin, seeds and all, add water and boil until soft. If you want clear pectin to make jam, strain the liquid through a sieve or cloth. If you’re fine with a thicker cloudy pectin, just mash the boiled apples through a sieve or feed them into a juicing or saucing machine.
If you have small apples that are ripe, know that there’s no need to peel and core to make applesauce. Put the whole batch into a pail or sink full of water and wash. Chop off bad spots and cut in half to look for bugs. Toss them into a stew pot, skin, seeds and all, add water and boil until soft. The skin has lots of nutrient and red skins add a lot of colour to your sauce. Mash the boiled apples through a sieve or feed them into a juicing or saucing machine. Saucing machines let you do a lot fast and they separate everything nicely. You can bag and freeze, or can into jars.
If you have large apples, it’s fastest to use a hand-held apple dicer that also takes the core out. You can cook with peel on, but if you don’t like peel, you can take that off in advance. If you have a lot of apples to process, it’s smart to use an apple slinky. These sit on the counter. You push the apple onto the coring stem, and rotating the handle takes the peel off and removes the core. Super-fast for pies.
Some apples are better for saucing, other types are better for pies. Or you might want to try drying apple slices. If you build or buy a fruit dehydrator, you can also make raisins when grapes are on special. If you don’t like the sauce you made, remember that it gives a rich background to soups and gravies, is great in fruit smoothies, and that some savoury recipes call for simmering meat slowly in apple or pear sauce.
If you want fresh juice daily, with the maximum live nutritional content, use a juicer. You can make fresh cider from apple juice by using yeast and fermenting for 3 to 5 days. It’s a lot like making beer, but easier. If a batch doesn’t taste right to you, distill it into a stronger alcohol.
If you want, you can pasteurize apple juice to make it last longer. Or you can freeze it. Or you can put in on low heat all day, leaving the lid off to let the steam out, and condense it to a dark rich thick syrup that the Dutch call Applestroop. That’s the juice. You can do the same with applesauce, condensing to make apple butter. A crock pot set on low is great for this, but you’ll need a screen over it to stop spatter once it gets thick.
In general you want an apple tree for health. Not only your health, but the health of the planet. Not only do we need birds, bees and trees, but kids need summer jobs. They need to learn essential life skills. With apple prices escalating, it’s smart to get ahead of the game. You know your apples are organic and have been treated well.
If your tree ends up producing an insane amount of apples, more than you can use or share with friends, that’s where you can start selling or at least reach out to local groups like food banks tacking issues of food security. All those problems of hunger in Venezuela, a country that was a lot like Canada, all because people weren’t prepared and food self-sufficient. California wells are drying up, and you already see produce prices escalating. It’s just smart to get organized, plan ahead, and get planting here.
If you want to really step it up, perhaps with a mini-orchard, but picking and processing is an issue, check out OAFVC, the Ontario Agri-Food Venture Centres to really crank your produce through straight into food-ready bags and containers. They’re all about making life easy for small scale people, producers and start-ups.
But back to harvesting. First of all, grounders. Have you considered a catch-net? It’s basically garden netting held up off the ground by stakes. The center of it is held up around the tree trunk. The apples fall into the net and roll down safe and sound. Easy collecting and it saves a lot of cleanup. For super-high apples that you can’t safely reach with a ladder, use a fruit picker. These look a lot like an hand. They attach to the end of a pole or paint stick and you reach up around the apple and twist. The apple falls into a bag or basket just below the picker.
The other thing about a catch-net is that you can just shake branches to get them to fall. If you clean out the catch-net regularly, the falling apples don’t hit any others and remain unbruised. Let Nature do the work for you! Just let them fall into the net. You could even have the apples roll into a part of the net where they can fall right into a container!
Now consider storing. A refrigerator is good for the amount of apples you’ll eat in a month. But they take up space and a tree produces a lot more. It’s a bit ridiculous heating your house and then also paying to keep a small part of that house cool. You might be embarrassed thinking we’re the smartest species on the planet. Living in Canada, there’s no shortage of cold air 6” through the wall behind the refrigerator! One solution is a cold pantry. Plenty of room to store food. It could be a bump-out on your house. Insulated walls. A thermostat that controls a fan to draw in cold air when needed. Same deal if you want to build a basement cold room.
We used to use root cellars. Perfect ground temperature, perfect humidity. The ground temperature 4 to 6 feet down is the same as the temperature in your refrigerator. It never freezes and costs nothing. But how to use that perfect air in a basement cold room? A farmer in Nebraska that grows oranges in winter has a solution. He laid corrugated black plastic pipe in a trench around the building. Filled it in of course. Blows air through the pipe into the greenhouse using a 12 Watt fan run off a battery attached to a solar panel. Never freezes, perfect temperature. Perfect thing to do to save the planet along with your budget.
All those trips to the store, burning gas. Costing you time. In the winter, crazy prices for food, shipped across the country, clogging highways with trucks and putting out over 2 kg of carbon dioxide and pollutants for every litre of gas burned. As prices get higher, your time is worth more. It’s probably time to get smart and change the way we do things.
