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Salute' Vittorio!
In the late nineteenth century, the city of Aspen was discovered for it's silver ore deposits, and was quickly settled and exploited for this precious metal. Twenty miles away in Basalt, homesteading farmers settled, irrigated and fenced their farmland. Most of the early homesteaders were Italian immigrants, and they settled here to raise food for the large mining camp in Aspen. Basalt is elevated 2,000 meters above, while Aspen is nearly 2,400 meters above sea level. At our latitude of approximately 39 degrees north of the equator, there is a significant growing season difference between Basalt and Aspen, about a month earlier in the Spring and a month later in the Autumn.
When the settlers moved west in their wagons, they collected everything they thought they would need to carve out a living in the wilderness. Their journey usually took them by barge down the Ohio River from the eastern states, arriving in St. Louis, Missouri, to buy or build a wagon, and to acquire tools and animals to start their farms. On the Ohio River portion of the trip, they met and bought smaller provisions from vendors, among which were farmers selling small fruit trees, mostly apple trees, and selling seeds so the settlers could plant their own trees, if the potted ones did not survive the journey. Seeds had a few advantages, in that they were far more portable and space conservative than potted trees, and required no watering on the journey. It was well understood among 19th century American Farmers, that a good, productive apple tree was worth a great deal. They knew that there were few taverns, and even fewer people producing alcoholic beverages in the homesteaded lands. In order to have alcohol, which many people thought of as a safer beverage than water, settlers would have to grow fruit trees, build presses and root cellars, and brew and store their own hard cider. A hard day of work and a long Winter were two of the most compelling reasons to produce your own alcohol, and everyone made this a high priority when they settled on their new land.
Today, there are a few hundred surviving apple, pear, apricot, plum and cherry trees from this era in our valley, aged between 110 and 140 years, which are still producing fruit. Jerome and I began studying these trees five years ago, with the express intention of finding the best fruit, and propagating these trees through the art of grafting, or "cloning" them, essentially taking a piece of the tree and inducing it to live in a new place, producing the exact same fruit. When an apple tree grows from a seed, it's genetic variability, multiplied by the bee's gift of pollen from another tree, makes each tree grown from seed, unique. Sometimes it will create a unique variety of apple that is superb, sometimes one that is terrible, or anywhere between these extremes, and it will take ten years to find out. A grafted apple tree produces exactly the same fruit as it's tree of origin, and it will begin to produce within 5 or 6 years. Pears also don't grow "true from seed", but their DNA variability is not as wide as that of the apple. Most of the stone fruits, apricot, plum, cherry and peach, DO "come true" from seed, but they are also faster to production when grafted. With all this good news, we've come more than two centuries, Europeans more than two millenia, cultivating fruit trees, and by grafting, we have precisely replicated and quickened their fruit to market. The bad news is that by grafting, we stop the evolutionary progress of that fruit variety, while it's pests hone their evolutionary talents with impunity.
So we are doing both, grafting and growing from seed, and a hybrid approach we call "Frankensteining" an apple tree. This means we grow it from seed until it is about our own height, with many branches, before we graft a new branch or two on it, even a couple of different varieties, which will then begin producing well before the original tree displays her unique wares. If the new and unique fruit is very good, we can prune the tree to favor it, and if not, we can prune to favor the grafts.
About 12 years ago I gathered a few neighbors with apple trees, and coerced them to join me in buying a cider press. Since then they have all moved away and willed me their share. This machine is almost entirely built of strong maple wood and metal, and it is manually operated, with a big crank wheel to grind the apples into a large basket, where a large vertical press screw presses a large wood plate don on the apple mash, until it releases its nectar of cider into a bucket at the bottom. This simple machine is a very popular device in the Autumn, and I love gathering the people and the fruit, helping them to get the cider from their apples. I always end up with plenty of cider as payment, and all of the apple mash. The mash is great material for many things. It can be layered into my sheet-mulch composting system, to feed the worms and make new soil for our vegetables. It can be fed to Jerome's rabbits, turkeys and chickens. It can be femented with a very high gravity yeast and some water, then filtered and distilled to make an apple grappa. It can also be spread over fertile ground, mulched, and allowed to winter over and become a bed of seedling trees in the Spring.
The cider we receive from all the apple trees also has many uses, beginning in our kitchen. Last Autumn I fermented and bottled about 50 liters of "champagne cider" from three different trees. All the bottles of this beverage are aging in boxes in the basement, the yeast still consuming sugars, carbonating the champagne. They will be ready to drink right about the time Spring has sprung, the snow has melted and the new plants are emerging. Treasure in the basement, awaiting it's many moments of enjoyment. When I visited Sam and Bean for their New Years Eve Party, I left one bottle of each of the three trees I harvested for champagne, in their refrigerator with a suggestion to await its best moment.
Our new cider discovery this Winter came from an essay I read on the internet, an essay written by Henry David Thoreau, the Colonial American who wrote "Walden Pond", in 1862. Titled "Wild Apples" Thoreau described the use of this fruit by the westward moving settlers. He wrote that when a homesteading family's seedling apple tree began to produce fruit, they did not judge it too quickly. If the tree produced apples that were too small, maybe hard and with very little liquid in the ripe fruit, they would leave the fruit on the tree, to wait and see. When the Winter had begun to set in, and the apples remaining on the branches had frozen hard and thawed several times, the apples had turned brown, and when thawed, were soft, appearing to be rotten, they would finally be harvested and pressed for cider. The settlers knew that this state of a young tree's fruit was its final test, the final determination of whether the tree was destined to be a provider of fruit, or a provider of firewood. Upon reading this historical account, I began to see these old apple trees in a new light. The very large, overgrown trees with small apples, began to seem like they might have a value we had not previously recognized. Prior to this, we had focused only on the trees producing large apples we could peel for pie, applesauce, and apple butter.
Since they had very little liquid when the other apples were ripe, we had ignored these little fruits, instead wondering how the trees had managed to escape the axe during their early years. The hint from Thoreau almost 150 years ago has actually shown us the reality, which is that these seemingly worthless trees are treasure in disguise. One of the trees I harvested for champagne cider was one of these mysteries, and after several freeze-thaw cycles, the fruit provided us with the sweetest cider of the season. We harvested about 45 liters from this one tree. I gave a quarter of it to the friends who had helped me with the work of harvesting the apples and pressing the cider, I prepared half of it for fermentation, and the last quarter I risked in an experiment to see if I could boil it down to the consistency of maple syrup, to replace this nectar we import from Vermont. The results were stunning, and agreed to by all of my friends who tasted it, as a resounding success. The result was nearly as sweet as maple syrup, and it had a distinctively "apple" flavor. Moreover, the "carbon footprint" of this discovery is an almost miraculous comparison. Vermont maple syrup is distilled by heating from 40 parts of tree sap, to one part of syrup. From our sweet apple "ice" cider, we found a syrup of similar consistency and sweetness, boiled from 6 parts of cider to one part of syrup. In one of several experiments I conducted on this, by error I was distracted, and ended up distilling the cider down from 8 parts cider to one part syrup, thicker than honey. When we tried to pur it on pancakes, it held the shape of a ball, not spreading out like a syrup. A little more thought revealed that this extremely thick foodstuff is actually a good way to store cider, if you don't want it to ferment, and you don't want to refrigerate it. Next week our youngest daughter March will come home, and I will take her and a number of her friends on a hut trip into the backcountry on skis. We will bring a small jar of this super-thick sweetener with us, to reconstitute with boiling water, into fresh-tasting, hot cider, using snow melted by the wood stove we fire up to heat the hut.
Finally, I wanted to tell you about a discovery I made after using a pruned fruit tree branch as a Holiday tree, decorated with tiny red lights. I wanted to use the naked apricot tree branch because I thought it was beautiful in the living room, as the centerpiece for our family gift-giving a couple winters ago. I had placed it in an old christmas tree stand, and as a matter of habit, I filled the water basin in which the base of the branch was mounted. Three weeks later, the fruit buds on the entire branch began to open. I looked into the water basin, and the water had all been sucked up into the branch, so I filled it again. Over the next two weeks, that branch produced apricot blossoms all over, and filled the house with their perfume, "winter blossoms" we call them, and they are the best encouragement I've ever seen, to trim our fruit trees every year.
Ciao, Vittorio!
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