Category: The Orchard

Living in Northeast Ohio wild apples are everywhere. I remember walking through the woods as a kid and finding these trees with their small, green, tart apples; that frequently tasted so poorly that the only thing anyone used them for was for making cider. So when we bought our property and I began finding these wild apple trees I wondered if they were really only good for cider. After all even a “good” variety of apple needs proper amounts of sunlight, training, and good soil nutrients to produce good apples.

This is where the Found Apple Project comes in. The idea of this project is to see how these trees do when given the chance to make good fruit. This will be a loose informal conglomeration of notes, observations, and test results on the development of these trees. 

Categorization

The trees that I find will be catagorized using a “W” (wild) or a “U” (Unknown) with a number following the letter identifying the tree in the order that i have found it. 

EX. W001

        U001

The reason i am using these two separate designations is mostly to separate the trees that i believe may be a better variety or a historic variety with the designation “U”. These are trees that have been in a field, or in a backyard. A location that makes it seem like the tree was purposefully planted in that location. I have a much higher hope that the Apples trees designated as unknown will produce higher quality apples.   

Not all trees will be close enough for me to monitor consistantly. I will take cuttings from these trees whenever possibly to grow out in a test row to monitor and test them.

Unknown Apples

To be classified as an “unknown apple” the tree must appear to have been purposefully planted in the location. In essence  an old overgrown apple tree in a backyard, or in the corner of a field. 

Apples of this class will have scions collected from them and the original location marked if available. The scions will be grafted onto the standard rootstock I use. 

Grafts will be marked with a yellow tag using the classification of U# (where # is the number in which the tree was found in this classification) 

Notes will be taken in all effort to figure out the variety of the tree.  Where once it has been verified the tag will be updated and will be noted under its classification here.

U001

Wild Apples

To be classified as a “wild” apple the tree must not be located in such a way that it looks like it was purposely planted in that location. 

All apples under this classification will be tagged with a pink tag. And classified with the tag W# (where the number of the tree is the number it was found). If a cluster of trees is found the tag will read W#.# (where the first number is the number of the tree as a whole, and the second of the individual tee in that cluster once proven to be a different tree)

Updates will be dated so growth, bloom time, and apple ripeness date can be recorded. Apple sugar content, acidity, and tannin amount will also eventually be measured and recorded

If trees show promise they will be grafted out onto a G41 rootstock in the orchard for further testing.

There is no promise that these trees will be worth the effort of growing and this will be mostly used as a way to test for traits in wild apples.