My wife and I took a drive on Sunday around the county so that I could check out to see how the area apple trees looked. I have a few roadside trees that provide me with a bounty of fruit in the fall. My trees at home are either small from being planted last year or for being cut down to six foot high to rehabilitate them. Apples are the number one grown backyard fruit here in the northeast, but apples are fairly new to North America. Before the pilgrims, there were no apples in North or South America. Apples originated in the mountains of eastern Asia some 4,000 to 10,000 years ago and made their way to Europe via the Silk Road. 

When colonists first came to North America they brought apple seeds and seedlings as foundation stock for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, around 1640. The first officially recognized tree was a seedling grown in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, planted by Pilgrim Fathers known as the Roxbury Russet Apple, which is still commercially available today. Apples have become one of the most important fruits because of their many uses and their extremely long shelf life. Think about strawberries, blueberries, peaches, and pears. They have to be used quickly after harvest as they all have a short shelf life. If you don’t use them quickly or process them like canning or freezing, they start to get soft and moldy. Apples can stay firm for months on end. 

In the seventeen, eighteen and early nineteen hundreds before refrigeration, apples played an important role in the growth of America including the American revolution. When we think of cider, we think of that sweet juice from fresh pressed apples in the fall. But in Europe, cider is what we call hard cider here. And that is what many of the early apples went to. Apple products like hard cider were one of the major exports from the colonies back to Europe. But apples themselves have so many uses. Anyone with young children probably has a jar of applesauce in the fridge right now. Apple butter is used as a sweet spread on toast. My great-great-grandmother had a boarding house in Callicoon Center in the early nineteen hundreds and my aunt still has her recipe book today. It included apple cake, apple tarts, apple bread, sweet and hard apple cider and, of course, apple pie. 

The fact that apples could be stored in the root cellar for almost ten months even back then, meant that fresh apple baked goods could be made almost year round in the boarding house. Northern Spy apples were first introduced right here in New York around eighteen hundred and quickly became very popular because of their extremely long storage life of almost a full year. My aunt has a Northern Spy apple tree in her backyard that was planted by my grandfather some seventy years ago. So if you think you might want a backyard fruit tree and only have room for one, think apples.

And a last minute tip for the week. Now that the forsythia are blooming, it is the time to put down pre-emergent crabgrass controls. These products are the most effective products to prevent crabgrass, but they do not work if you put them on too late. Crabgrass will start to germinate when the forsythia blossoms start to fall. So you have about another week or so to get the job done.