All about apples

Since the Oak Spring Garden Foundation established the Bio-Cultural Conservation Farm (BCCF) earlier this year, we have been brainstorming the best ways to highlight and share the heirloom crops we grow both at the farm and on the rest of the Oak Spring land. 

OSGF apples waiting to be converted into butter at the Prince Edward County Cannery.

Canning has been among the foremost of those ideas, as a way to preserve the food and create products to support the farm and share with our guests and the wider community. What better crop to start with than apples: a fruit with a rich and varied history in the U.S., and a very special place at Oak Spring (our Apple House is proof of that - now used as a conference space, it was originally built by the Mellons for the sole purpose of storing and sorting the estate’s annual apple crop. )   

Last week, BCCF team members traveled to the Prince Edward County Cannery in Farmville, VA, in order to turn 800 pounds of recently harvested apples (including the Winesap, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Arkansas Black, and York varieties)  into sweet, spicy apple butter. With the help of the wonderful cannery staff, the BCCF came away with over 1,000 jars of product, a very successful first foray into canning.

Besides sharing them with our residents and visitors, OSGF hopes to begin selling the jars on site during special events and at local retailers. Keep an eye on our website and social media pages for updates.   

To see went into the canning process, watch the video below.

Fun facts about the Amazing Apple

Malus pumila by Sarah Matilda Parry, 1794/1828. See more of her botanical artwork on our Google Arts and Culture page.

There are a LOT of apples in the world. 7,500 varieties of apples are grown world-wide, with 100 varieties of apples grown commercially in the United States. Many of the heirloom species that graced the backyards and farms of the colonial U.S. fell by the wayside as preference for bigger, shinier, grocery-store apples grew in the 20th century. However, many modern seed-savers and farmers are attempting to preserve and promote lesser-known heirloom species (some with wonderful names like the Winter Banana, the Northern Spy, and the Virginia Pilot.) 

There’s a reason those grocery-store apples look so perfect. That apple you just bought at the store could be up to a year old. Many large-scale fruit distributors treat apples with a compound called 1-methylcycloprone, which extends the fruit’s shelf life by blocking a gas called ethylene that naturally regulates apple aging. The use of the compound, along with other chemicals and by selecting only the prettiest fruit for sale, keeps store-bought apples looking far different than the spotty ones growing on your backyard tree.

Johnny Appleseed was a real person,  but he wasn’t planting apples for eating. Johnny Appleseed’s real name was John Chapman, an industrious nurseryman born in 1774 who saw planting apple seeds in the expanding west as a great business opportunity. He sold the orchards to arriving frontiersmen, who used the sour fruit to make hard cider. Decades later, many of those same booze-producing trees were chopped down during Prohibition.

You wouldn’t want to eat an apple grown from a seed, or a wild apple, for that matter (they are native to Central Asia.) There is a reason the pioneers benefitting from Johnny Appleseed’s efforts only used the fruit for fermentation: wild apples are, in the words of naturalist Henry David Thoreau, “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” Due to a genetic characteristic called heterozygosity, apples grown from a seed are different from their parents, meaning that it is hard to selectively grow tasty apples in the traditional way. For this reason, most apple growers graft their trees in order to produce an edible fruit .