It seems like apples have been on my mind a lot lately… For starters I’ve been reading up on the fruit’s interesting history. Originating in Kazakhstan, the spread of apple trees across the United States can be attributed largely to Johnny Chapman ‘Appleseed’. In the 1800s, Chapman started planting apple seeds throughout the American Midwest. The religious claimed him as a hero, as someone who spread both the gospel and nutritious apples. But his intentions weren’t quite so pure, doing more to fuel alcoholism than religious fervour. That’s because apples are extreme heterozygotes, that is, an apple grown from seed won’t resemble its parent, and is usually inedible. That’s okay if you ferment apples for cider, but not okay for eating – edible apples need to be grafted so they’re clones of their parent.In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan explains how the apple’s wholesome healthy image is largely thanks to a PR campaign from the early 1900s. Before the 20th century, apples in North America were grown mainly for alcoholic cider. That all changed in the 1920’s during the American Prohibition when the sale, manufacture, and transport of alcohol was banned. The saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” was invented by the apple growing industry when prohibition killed the cider market. The apple’s new image stuck, and cider became a forgotten part of North American culture.
For some reason I’ve always had romantic notions about apple picking, maybe I can attribute that to novels like The Cider House Rules and Fantastic Mr. Fox. I’ve always thought it’d be nice to enjoy a simple outdoor lifestyle climbing trees, travelling south along with the harvest. So I recently decided to give the apple picking lifestyle a try and started working part-time at nearby Merridale Cidery. Remarkably, when Merridale was founded in 1980, it was one of only 2 orchards in North America devoted to growing cider apples. It’s a small-scale organic cidery that makes delicious cider of varying flavours and potencies.
That's 800 pounds, only 3200 to go...
The work itself isn’t the glamorous clambering about trees that I anticipated. I was a bit surprised to learn that I’d just be picking the apples off the ground after other workers go around and give the trees a good throttling to drop their fruit. It’s both meditative and physically tough if you push yourself. You get paid by the crate, so there’s lots of incentive to pick faster. On my first day, I managed to fill 5 crates, that’s about 4000 lbs of apples. But yesterday I barely filled 3 crates because I was sorting through smaller apples half-eaten by deer. I won’t make a career of it, but it’s eye-opening and humbling to experience the life of an apple picker.
