Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste by Best Bill;Sacks Howard L.;

Author:Best, Bill;Sacks, Howard L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: appalachia, oral history, seed saving, plant genetics, storytelling, beans, tomatoes, apples, corn, gardening
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2013-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Apples

In the part of Haywood County, North Carolina, where I was born and raised, we had our favorite apple varieties, which included the June Apple, Northern Spy, Yellow Transparent, Winter Banana, and Horse Apple. We also had numerous sweet apples that did not have names and were probably grown from seed and not grafted. Still, the nameless varieties were good for drying and cooking, and some for eating fresh as well.

The June Apple, a red apple darker on one side than on the other, was the earliest and smallest, and we always ate them fresh. The Yellow Transparent was known for its sweetness, but it had to be eaten within a day or so of ripening, so the apples had to be watched closely. The Horse Apple was my mother’s favorite for making green-apple pies, which she made in abundance during the two or three weeks before they ripened. The ripened Horse Apple did not quite have the flavor of other apples but was still good. The Winter Banana was a good keeping apple but not really that flavorful. The Northern Spy had a distinctive flavor that made it our favorite for both eating and cooking. We also had an unnamed variety that was best for making dried apples for later preparation as fried apple pies. My personal favorite apple for eating fresh was the Sheepnose, a reddish apple with an elongated shape, similar to a sheep’s nose.

Apples and other tree fruits have a long history in the Southern Appalachians, and on many farms, remnants of old apple orchards can still be found. During my several summers of measuring tobacco acreage for the federal government in Haywood and Madison Counties during the 1950s, I noticed that most small farms still had their own apple trees, sometimes suffering from neglect but yielding enough to meet the family’s needs for fresh apples and for canning and making jelly, applesauce, and dried apples.

Historically, almost every extended family had at least one highly skilled tree grafter who kept favorite varieties going. Over time, and with the advent of so many fruit tree companies springing up, grafting skills have largely died out. The person in the Southern Appalachians who has done the most to rescue older apple varieties is Harold Jerrell of Rose Hill in Lee County, Virginia. Not only does he graft hundreds of heritage varieties, sometimes called “antique” or “heirloom” varieties, but he has also trained hundreds of other people in the art of tree grafting during the past twenty-five years, not only in Lee County but also in surrounding counties in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Recently retired, Harold was the longtime agricultural extension agent for Lee County, Virginia, a narrow county stretching fifty miles on the south side of Pine Mountain opposite Harlan and Bell Counties in eastern Kentucky. It joins Cumberland Gap where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky meet and contains many miles of the Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone traveled and, to some extent, created while moving back and forth between North Carolina and Kentucky.

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