Having an apple orchard has been a long-standing dream of ours. The orchard at Birch Bend started small. When we bought the farm there were 8 well established apple trees on the property – some of which we know the varietal others are unknown (but amazing apples!). Since they were already bearing fruit, we used these trees to experiment with cider making and pruning, as well as collecting scions to later graft and propagate additional trees.
Cider — With the harvested apples, we baked, made applesauce, and pressed for cider. Much to our surprise, we loved the process making cider. In the first year of pressing, we just kept the plain, fresh cider but the following year we started experimenting with creating hard cider.
As we learned more about cider making we decided to focus our orchard on heirloom varieties known to make delicious cider. Instead of focusing on more common varieties like Honeycrisp or Golden Delicious we looked for heirloom cider apples like Kingston Black, Asmeads Kernel, and Roxbury Russet. In our first year we grafted 30 trees, followed by 150 the next year. This year we’ll be grafting over 200 trees – all of which are unique, heirloom apple varieties.
Learning more about apple trees and watching the trees we graft take off has been an exciting chapter for us at the farm. Stay tuned as the orchard continues to expand!