Not All Apples Are Created Equal

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Why are apple orchards, both large and small, so dependent upon chemical insecticides? Is there a way out? Apple expert James Dierberger is on the case.

Statistics show that apples are the most heavily sprayed fruit grown in the country. If this is necessary, what must the apple crop have been like several hundred years ago, before chemicals were in widespread use? The question of growing acceptable apples as well as bypassing the world of chemicals had been germinating in my mind for several years. It had its roots in my own orchard observations regarding apples and pests ...particularly the insect kind. My interest can be traced back to the early 50s when I was growing up in Chicago. We didn't have orchards in the city, but we kids could find green apples to occasionally throw at each other in a spring-training—like exercise that occurred each fall, presumably in anticipation of winter's snowball fights. I knew back then that there were more than just fancy red store-bought apples, since we were not al lowed to take table fruit for ammunition. In the mid-70s, I had graduated from col lege and taken a job in Connecticut, and I was lucky enough to buy my own home with suffi cient land to allow a gar den and a respectably sized orchard. In 1978 I planted four apple trees and taught myself how to graft by practicing with pruning on some wild crabapple trees. To my surprise, about one third of these attempted grafts were successful. I contacted the State Extension Service for additional information. I was amazed to find what I could order through the mail. Over three hundred different varieties in the form of scion wood 1 as well as size-controlling rootstocks were just an envelope and a few dollars away. The rootstock would allow me to create trees that would grow anywhere from four to 24 feet in height. Even more amazing was my discovery of the U. S. Germ Plasm Repository for Apples at Geneva, New York, where more than 3,000 varieties are currently being kept for future plant breeding experiments. I read and reread the available literature and spent many long winter nights deciding which of the many varieties I should order.

After reading about the characteristics of these different varieties, I decided that my orchard should be a "preservation orchard." I would specialize in Old American Apple varieties, most of which have been traced back several hundred years. The apple descriptions I found were all tempting and I managed to select what I thought would be 50 of the best varieties. One wonders what distinguishing characteristics or attributes our ancestors saw in each of these varieties that made them worth preserving through so many generations. My plan called for the use of a strip of land that paralleled my driveway for the orchard. It was 300 feet by 50 feet and would comfortably hold an orchard having 18 rows with four trees in each. I planned on adding 10 different varieties each year, completing the orchard in the fifth year when the trees from the initial planting would be ready to produce their first fruit.

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