Apple Scions Are Officially Ordered

Apple picking helpful hint:

It is really hard to pick apples with the neighbor's cows.

I finally ordered the scions yesterday. Mark Shepard of Forest Agriculture Enterprises in Viola, Wisconsin is our friend, permaculture resource, and source for trees & now apple scion. We have twenty-five trees to graft this spring & needed to make a decision on what varieties to grow. Mark knows what grows best in our climate from experimenting on his 100 acre permaculture farm. Here are the varieties we will graft and a little information about each one:

Liberty-ripens in October & is a good sauce apple & keeps for months in storage

Priscilla-ripens in August & is a desert-type apple

Spencer-ripens late October & is a good eating, pie & sauce apple

Golden Russet-ripens late October & is a good cider apple

Tolman Sweet-ripens late September & is good for cider & drying

Rhode Island Greening-ripens late October & is a good tart cooking apple

Zestar-ripens early September & is good for pies, baking, cider & sauce

We also ordered a couple crab apple trees scions for color & fruit.

Dolgo Crabapple-has huge white flowers, is a good pollinator & is a good jelly apple

Radiant" red flowering crab-has pink flowers, berries in the winter & is a good pollinator. The fruit is insignificant.

My mouth is watering as I type :-) This will give us apples that will ripen at different times & for different uses. We will have a lot of apples when they all start producing! Cider is always an option. There is a cider mill in Illinois we go to every year as much as possible. It's called Gould's Cider. Good old-fashioned non-pastuerized cider. They have over 400 trees on site & purchase apples from other growers (usually Wisconsin).

The Gould's have been friends of my family for years. I went there when I was little to watch them press the apples which is run by an old tractor.
We can always take our excess there or the Amish down the road also press apples. We have asked our kids to save wine bottles for us so we can process some hard cider too.

Speaking of old tractors...here is my daughter & son-in-law on their wedding day posing in front of his dad's restored tractor. It was his grandpa's first tractor on the farm.

So one more thing crossed of the long list of to-do's. It feels good. I decided yesterday was "apple day" & stuck to it. Today is therapy day again so I probably won't be doing much tonight. But that's okay. I'll go home & see if I can find another pint of frozen applesauce in the freezer...