Heirloom Orchards: The Art and Science of Growing Old-World Apples
It was a rare and welcome opportunity to safely make a farm visit when Heirloom Orchards invited OGC to tour their stunning orchard just outside of Hood River, Oregon. It was the height of apple season, with the last of the Ashmead’s Kernel having just been picked and packed onto trucks and Arkansas Black and Winesap still enjoying their last couple weeks on the trees, deepening in both color and sweetness. Accompanied by Emily Johnson, we surveyed what had yet to be picked and spent some time talking about her work to perfect their harvesting schedule. The day was too gorgeous not to spend a few extra moments ogling the apples and snapping photographs as keepsakes.
The Art
Emily shares that a central challenge in selling heirloom apples is their appearance. A russeted apple like D’arcy Spice poses a challenge to consumers who eat with their eyes first and are used to encountering more modern varieties of apples that are often larger and with fewer cosmetic quirks. For the initiated, heirloom varieties with all their irregular sizes and dappled and russeted skins, their rustic appearance is part of the appeal. The phenomenal flavor, though, is what truly inspires the heirloom fanatic.
Emily Johnson joined the team at Heirloom Orchards for a three-year-assignment with the goal of refining and perfecting their growing techniques. Emily walked OGC through some of the challenges of growing and marketing their 18 varieties of heirloom apples, as well as demonstrated the testing methods she’s using to meet these challenges. Her background in science and enthusiasm for old-world apples is helping secure Heirloom Orchard’s place in the competitive Northwest apple market.
“We have lots of these older varieties of apples that aren’t modern by a lot of standards, both in flavor and appearance. These old varieties were selected for taste first and people didn’t care as much what they looked like. They’d choose the apple that tasted the best, stored the best, made the best cider.”
“I think we have much more interesting and delicious flavors in our apples. They’re not by today’s commercial standards at all easy to grow. We’re trying to learn more about them and what maturity measures we can use to determine what’s ready to pick.”
“Our apples sell themselves once people get to taste them. They have a really intense and amazing flavor.”
Cox’s Orange Pippin
Winesap
D’Arcy’s Spice
The Science
In a small building that sits just at the entrance to rows of apple trees, Emily has created a compact field-lab. Throughout the season, she brings apple samples here to run a variety of tests. The data collected over her three years will help to pinpoint accurate growing and harvesting schedules for each of the 18 varieties Heirloom Orchards grows.The hope is to not only create efficiencies in their work, but to also produce the largest yield with crops that possess the ideal size, color and flavor traits specific to each variety.
Penetrometer Pressure Test
As she begins demonstrating the pressure test, Emily laughs, “whoever told you that post-harvest wasn’t sexy, they were wrong.”
“We don’t want to measure the firmness of the skin, so for a pressure test we cut it off. We’ll measure in three places on the apple knowing that the side of the fruit with the sunblush will be the firmest.”
Starch Test
A quick spray of iodine on cut apples reveals the starch content in blue and the sugar content in white.
Sugar Content Test
Using a garlic press to macerate the fruit, Emily squeezes juice onto a brix refractometer.
“The D’Arcy Spice yielded a reading of 18.4 lbs of pressure, which is very firm, typical for an heirloom. Honeycrisp are usually picked when they read around 15 lbs of pressure. I’ll test the apple in three places, take the average of the three testing spots, testing 10 apples total, to determine where the crop is as a whole in its readiness to be harvested.”
Emily has created starch charts for each variety based on the Washington State scale that shows the progression of sugar development in the fruit over time and leading up to the ideal harvesting date.
Emily peers into the refractometer. The sugar in the juice will bend the light that moves through the refractometer resulting in a percentage scale of sugar concentration.
With these three tests, utilized consistently over the span of three years, Emily is working to create harvesting schedules for each variety that are perfected nearly down to the day. While her work is largely data-driven, her passion for heirloom varieties is evident in the way she enthusiastically describes the attributes of each variety and in her dedication to fastidiously researching them.
