DUMMERSTON — Fall is about apples. Crispy apples and apple crisp. Juicy apples and apple juice. Tart apples and apple tarts. Saucy apples and apple sauce. Festive apples and apple festivals.
Apples are as American as, well, apple pie. The first settlers brought with them bushels of apple seed, and the first trees grew small, hard apples that were pressed for cider.
“Cider was the drink of the day,” Ezekiel Goodband, orchardist at the Scott Farm on Kipling Road in Dummerston, says. “The settlers weren't careful in managing water, so oftentimes it wasn't safe to drink. The cider was for drinking, not for becoming inebriated. The alcohol was at a low level. It was not considered an alcoholic beverage.”
Under the careful pruning and grafting of Goodband, a lifelong orchardist, the Scott Farm now produces more than 70 kinds of heirloom apples.
Most of these varieties, like the Hubbardston Nonesuch, the pride of Hubbardston, Mass., in the late 1700s, are good for fresh use - or as orchardists say, for being “eaten out of hand.”
Others, like the Reine des Reinette (also known as King of the Pippins), make good cider. And still others, like the Calville Blanc d'Hiver, a 15th century French apple with a vanilla-like flavor, have a wonderful texture when cooked.
Goodband grows the oldest apple known in the New World, the Fameuse or Snow Apple, planted first in Quebec in the 1600s.
Then there's the Roxbury Russet, the oldest American variety: small, golden, and subtle, with a hint of tartness and a well-controlled sweetness.
There's the Lady Apple, which has been known since the Roman Empire; it was popular in the Renaissance when “ladies would keep one in their bodices and nibble on it to freshen their breath,” Goodband said.
Apples can be citrus-y as well as apple-y. The Ananas Reinette, for example, a small, yellow-skinned apple originally grown in France in the 1500s, offers a hint of pineapple; hence its name, which translates to “Pineapple Princess.”
And then there's the Northern Spy, a cooking apple named after James Fenimore Cooper's popular late-1800s novel The Spy. And another variety,the Blue Pearmain, has a literary flavor; in his journal, Henry David Thoreau wrote about how much he liked them.
Goodband also grows the large, deep-red Baldwins, for many years the most important crop of commercial apple in New England. Baldwins held sway in New England until the 1930s, when a terrible freeze killed most of the trees. The Baldwin were replaced by theMcIntosh.
“The McIntosh gets soft quickly and is vulnerable to all sorts of disease, but for a short time it's a wonderful apple,” Goodband said. “It has a great smell and taste when you pick it. It's like sweet corn. When I was growing up, we used to put the water on to boil and then go pick the corn. McIntoshes are like that.”
Every Columbus Day weekend, Scott Farm allows people to sample the heirlooms. This year, the tasting will be held on Sunday, Oct. 9 at 10 a.m., noon, and 2 p.m.
Well over 100 people show up from as far away as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts to listen to Goodband tell apple stories and to sample slices of the farm's apple varieties.
By early December, the apples are all sold, and Goodband is again pruning in the orchards.
“I'll start pruning in November and it will take me until April to finish,” Goodband said. “In order for trees to bear a regular crop, they have to be pruned every year. Some more lightly one year and more heavily the next, it depends on how they grow. It takes all year to produce a crop.”
Any grafted apple is essentially a clone of the original tree. For Goodband, it's like a chain letter being handed down through the ages.
“There's this continuity that appeals to me, this husbandry that says, 'This is fruit is of value,'” he said. “It's almost like an oral tradition, like the days before the printing press, when things had to be written out by hand.
“It's done hand to tree to hand. The varieties we have today are here because people took the cuttings and decided they were worth preserving.
“That's what I like - seeing people try the fruit. It's a brand-new experience, something they'll remember.”