Apples: One of America’s Most Sustainable Crops

By Marissa Ames
Updated on September 26, 2022
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by Andrea Lawrence

What are the most sustainable crops to grow for food security? Perhaps, in your growing zones, oranges or peaches win for best fruit crop. Hot, dry climates might call for dates or raisins. But for me, growing organic apples is best. Perhaps that’s because they grew well in rural Idaho and its chill hours. Or perhaps it’s because my community knew more about growing and preserving apples than any other fruit.

“It’s not that bad. It’s organic. Just cut the worm out.”

I laugh even as I type this. For us, “organic” was how we grew apples, but it did mean carving good fruit away from crumbly black worm tunnels. Modern techniques for growing organic apples include moth traps, fruit barriers, and organic insecticides, like bacterial toxins that only target caterpillars. But for us, apple season meant getting a call from a friend. “Hey, get this fruit before it all falls!” Then, we’d ride to the friend’s farm, load up brown paper shopping bags, and process apples for the next few weeks.

Wormy apples are just fine for ciders and applesauce, Mom said. Cut off the good part, toss it in the pot. Throw the bad part to the chickens. Simmer the fruit, drain juice into canning jars, mash fruit. Applesauce became pancake topping and the replacement “oil” in recipes — that is, if we didn’t eat it directly out of the jar.

As an adult, I graft scions from friends’ trees onto my own, so those trees produce multiple varieties from one trunk. I research my location’s chill hours, and then buy unique varieties that I couldn’t find at my local garden centers. My current farm has young ‘Pink Pearl,’ ‘Niedzwetzkyana,’ and ‘Smokehouse’ apple trees.

Maybe because of where and how I grew up, I consider growing organic apples to be integral to year-round sustainability. Towering perennials produce an abundance if that last killing frost arrives on time — an abundance that will carry you through years when the late frost strikes as blossoms are most vulnerable. Apples’ storability, their versatility for recipes, and the long lives of the trees themselves place the fruit at the top of a list of sustainable fruit crops for food security.

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