From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. When I bought my place decades ago, it was nestled in a tiny piece of former farmland with a little 1880s house and no garden. There were however five giant apple trees at least a century old even then, all overgrown but still willing to bear fruit despite their age and years of neglect. I'm very attached to them even though I still don't know their names, which was why I wanted to talk to today's guest, Jamie Hanson, the orchard manager for Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa, who knows a thing or two about heritage apples. Seed Savers has a major collection in each year, it distributes cyan wood and root stock for grafting new trees from the historic ones in its collection, and teaches a series of virtual courses on every step of how to do that and grow ones of your own and care for them. We'll also learn how old apple trees like mine can now be identified through the relatively new process of DNA testing. So more in a moment, but first, these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs, a third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Moeng Seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Urbel Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMoengSeeds.com. And by Whiteflowerflower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants on the web, Whiteflower Farm.com. In her role as orchard manager for seed savers exchange in Decora, Iowa, Jamie Hanson oversees more than a thousand apples in the collection there in two eight acre orchards. Jamie's interest in the intersection of history and horticulture began during her studies at the College of the Atlantic in Maine and she joined Seatsavors in 2022. I'm so glad to welcome her today to talk about old apples. Hi Jamie, how are you? Hi Margaret, I'm great. How are you doing today? Good. What a great job you landed in. Sounds very good to me. Yes, the perfect job for me. That's for sure. I haven't been out to Seats Averson in a very long time, but what a wonderful organization. So and you know, people think seeds, but there are these other collections as well. They're not literally seeds because you don't grow an apple from a seed, do you if you want it to be true to the variety? Right, that's exactly correct. So an apple from seed will be a brand new variety. The result of not only the fruiting parent, so the apple that you got it from, but also the pollen parent. And so to preserve apples, we have to grow the trees out in an orchard. Yes. So to set the scene, sort of, tell us about the breadth of the collection there. Like, how many trees, how many varieties do you think you have? I mean, it's fast. Right. Yeah, it is a very large collection. So we're kind of in the midst of a big kind of overhaul of our collection, which I can talk about later on.

But as it currently stands, we have 913 trees.

And we're not quite sure how many varieties, but our estimation is somewhere between four and 500.

And we're really just figuring that out through DNA testing, like you'd mentioned in the intro.

Right. Because even though, of course, an institution like Seatsavers does meticulous record keeping and so forth, it's not always clear when things are passed along, handed down, etc., etc. Over so many years, I mean, some of these are very, very old varieties and the provenance and especially the name, oops, right? There can be, sometimes it can be lost, yes? Exactly. Yeah. So not only can it get mixed up once it gets to seed savers, which is always a possibility in any collection. But even when we bring something in, we're relying on sometimes 200, 300 years of stewardship of people keeping the right name and being able to differentiate it from other apples, which historically has been incredibly difficult. And the geneticists that we work with at Washington State University has found that an average of 25% of apples in historic collections are misidentified. Wow. That's pretty amazing. How old are the oldest Apple varieties in your collection? Do you know what I mean? Like historically speaking, not to the age of the trees, the individual trees, but the varieties. Yeah, so we have an apple called lady or a pee and we know that it dates back hundreds of years in France and there's rumors that it dates back to Rome. We haven't been able to confirm that. So whether or not that's accurate. We don't know. But generally speaking, we have apples from the 1600s up until 1960s. Yeah, what really fascinated me, and as I said in the introduction, you know, I have these old trees, and I have no idea what they are. They're just my friends. And the idea that, what is it for like the past six years or so, we've been able to avail ourselves of DNA testing of apples

as that around the time frame. I didn't even know that. I didn't know it could be, it could happen. And you just mentioned Washington State University and I believe that's myfruittreetree.org is the part of it that does, that you can look up and find out about how to send in leaves in a special test kit and so on and so forth. And anyone can do that right now.

Right. Yeah. So myfruit3.org and you can contact them. They'll send you a test tube in the mail. And then you collect some leaves in this little test tube filled with silica beads. Send it back in. And in a few months you'll have either a response that says it matches something in the data set so they can tell you what it is or you could get a result that's unique unknown. And that's almost more exciting because if you have a very old tree it could be something that is considered extinct or that we thought we had we had lost. So yeah, it's a really fun kind of program and like you said, it only really got started in 2019 when the geneticist there, Cameron Peace, met with some people who are working with the main hair to gearchured and that kind of boosted this Apple DNA program. And then really only I think in the last few years it's become publicly available where anybody can submit samples for $50. So it's very affordable relative to other methods. And you collaborate with other institutions with other collections, important collections of historic of heritage apples. I think it's called the historic fruit tree working group. Is that right?? Is that the name of the group of other collections? Yeah, so the Historic Fruit Tree Working Group is not only collection managers. So people like me, the folks at the main heritage orchard, Horn Creek Farm and North Carolina. So the collection managers, but we also have historians. We have people who work in tech, we have geneticists, we have this whole group of people who are working together to, on a national scale, organize ourselves around Apple preservation and work on identification and the DNA. And then also filling in the historical context when we do know that we have a specific genetic profile that matches an apple like Baldwin, a very common historic variety. And so the work that the various participants in a group like that are doing, I mean, is there, with everything that's going on with a climate and so many factors changing that are affecting plants of course. Is there more of a rush even more of an issue with preservation and so forth? Are there any other pressures that are accelerating this kind of work at this time? Yeah, this is a really exciting time in Apple Preservation, not only because of the DNA and the access that we have to all this information, but also because if we're talking about an apple tree that can live maybe to 200 years old, we're getting to the point where at least the Midwest settled in the mid 1800s. We only have 20 more years generously to find these lost apples and identify them. And so we're really, yeah, at an exciting time where the next 20 to 40 years really is our last chance to find these extinct or lost varieties before they're gone forever. And especially, yeah, and especially in the Midwest where so much farm land is still agricultural land where things are being tilled up, the fields are being extended, old orchards are being bulldozed. That's even more of a push here in the Midwest that every year we're losing more and more old trees. I see that I didn't put together the time. It's a matter of history as well of the number of years that have elapsed. I didn't put that together in my head. Wow. And apples, they don't grow everywhere really well. I think they're recommended for what zones 4 to 8 is that correct. So we were just talking about the Midwest, for instance. And so it's a relatively cold winter zone, shorter season zone, like I'm in the northeast. But so apples are they are like a zone 4 to 8 generally speaking? Generally speaking, yeah, there's a few outliers there, but for the most part, kind of the farthest south, you can go is Georgia. There's a couple trees that can be grown in North Florida, but any farther south than that. And it's just too warm because apples need a certain number of chilling hours. And that depends on the variety, but essentially, they need a period of cold to be able to produce fruit. Right, exactly. So, to make a new tree from some of this old genetic material that you're hoping to track down and that it exists in so many of these collections and so forth already, I wanna hear a little bit about the process because obviously even if one finds a nearly 200 year old tree and it represents something unique, you don't just let that stand there as the only representative of that genetic material. So the sort of grafting and so forth and this this course that you all teach virtually from seed savers, I just kind of want to understand, how does it work? How does one make an apple from the genetics, from a piece of one of these old trees are actually maybe two, maybe rootstock and cyan wood from two different trees? Right, yeah, so it's really a simple process. And it takes, we teach the class in about two hours. And then there's follow-up classes to kind of walk through the process. But, yeah, so the process is in the winter when the tree is dormant. So no leaves on the tree, it's sleeping for the winter. For here, it's about December to March. We'll go out and collect what's called cyan wood and that's the previous year's growth. So if you look at the ends of your branches you'll see this piece of wood that has flat buds and there's a little branch collar. If you have looked at a picture you would know. But you're taking this little piece of wood from the end of your branches, and you can store it in the fridge. So we wrap ours in some wet newsprint, or damp newsprint, put it in a plastic baggie, and we put it in the fridge. And then we take what's called root stock, which is essentially most of it's grown out in the West Coast, but it's all of these genetically identical trees that have little root systems, but they don't produce great apples, so you don't really want to grow that. So if I have this old tree and I want to grow it, I need to attach it to my root stock. And yeah, in March, April, we do that process, which essentially looks like cutting these these two pieces. So my sign would from my tree and my root stock that I've bought from a nursery and attaching them to each other. And we tape it up and grow it outside. And in the next year, our trees this year grew about three feet. So already after one season, we have a three-foot tall little tree. Well, so, okay, so I've, I've grafted the cyan wood, the desired variety that I want to have apples from on to the rootstock. And where, where does this, where does this how? Where does it stay right away? right away. I'm out how long to do it. Yeah, I? Yeah, I don't put it out in the yard and say goodbye to it right then, do I or do I? Right, you're exactly right. Yeah. So there's usually a storage period. So right after I make my graphed union, I'm going to wrap up the roots of that tree back in some wet newsprint. And then here we put it in a root seller for two weeks. Okay. For a lot of home growers, they don't have a root seller. So a chili garage, your basement, really anywhere that's a little bit cold and where your tree won't be disturbed, it can just sit there for a few weeks. And that's kind of giving your tree the first chance to try to heal that union that we made where we've cut into these two pieces of wood. Okay. Okay. So it does sort of rest and hopefully begin to heal, as you say, heal itself together in this wrapped in the wet newspaper in a cool place in the dark, I guess, as well, right? It's not sitting out in the sun somewhere, whatever. Right, exactly. Yeah, and then at that point, after the two weeks, we would plan it out in something like a little nursery bed. Like you have a garden, a garden is a great place. And what's the success rate? Like if, I mean, is it, do you know what I mean? Like, so you get, you have a root stock and you have a piece of sign wouldn't, if you wanna make sure you get an apple or you hope to make sure you get, what's the odds? Like, how, how many does one need to try to achieve it? Or is there a high success rate? Yeah, generally it's pretty high. In our grafting class where we're teaching people over Zoom. They're very first time grafting. The average person gets three out of their five trees to take. So 60% here on the farm, we generally will graph two if we want to make sure that we have one. But really our success rate is closer to 80 to 90%. Wow. And would those be semi-hardwood cuttings what you were describing, like how would you say it was last year's growth that I'm taking? So it's hard, but it's not green or anything. By the time the about August, your kind of fresh wood from this year will start to harden. Okay. Okay. Okay. Huh. And they grew that much in the first season, as you said, that's amazing. And then the aftercare, I think the thing that mystifies people, especially when they purchase young fruit trees, is then what? Because they grow like gangbusters as you were saying. And it is sort of like to have the eventual architecture of a tree that's going to be both sound structurally but also productive and so forth. Like, is there a lot of them pruning in the early, in the next early stages of its life? When do you go, when do you begin pruning it again? Like to you know. Yeah, so in that first season when you make your graft union, we do something called this budding, which is you have this tree with between the roots stuck in the sign what you might have 15 buds, but you don't want all 15 buds to grow because then you're gonna have a really bushy tree. That's what I was wondering, right? Okay, okay. Right, so in our first year we just go in with our thumb and we just push those off and we do that once or twice a week until it really starts to slow down, but I'd say July is really on the really late end of things. At that point, you'll select one bud from your cyan wood to the top of that tree and that will grow up. That's how we have our three-foot tall tree the first year. In terms of pruning, I like to say there's a lot of ways to do it right and not so many ways to do it wrong. You're such an optimist. For sure, yes. So our trees, we won't cut them usually for the first two to three years. And then I might make what's called a heading cut. So I'd cut off the central leader to encourage lateral branching. Right. Okay. So it's not a right away thing. The disbutting is what we need to really keep after, sort of saying to it, no, no, no, not yet, not yet. That's really important. Otherwise, you'll just have a completely crazy thing. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. That's what I wondered, because was visualizing, I mean, the way young fruit trees grow,

I am familiar with and, you know,

it'd be like, wow. So it's the disbutting, that's the key thing. And then the identifying a leader comes a little bit later, a little after that. Right, yeah, and like I said, there's lots of ways to do it right. I know a lot of people do like to cut their

centrality after their first year.

It's really dependent on how big your tree is,

what kind of shape you do it right. I know a lot of people do like to cut their centrally after their first year. It's really dependent on how big your tree is, what kind of shape you're going for. But personally, like I said, I like to wait till the second or third year. Okay. So I want to just sort of shift gears a little bit from the process. And I'm not of course with the transcript of this show over on a way to garden.com. I'm going to give links to everything like about the course that you all offer and so forth and you know so the people can when it's time for registration can sign up for it and you sell very inexpensively the cyan wood on the exchange the sort of oldest part of seed savers exchange not in the seed catalog the retail seed catalog but on the exchange various the sort of oldest part of seed savers exchange, not in the seed catalog, the retail seed catalog, but on the exchange, various varieties will be listed each year on the exchange. And I saw something that were like $5 for a piece of Simon or $8. I mean, it's nominal, really, I think. And those are delivered when, if I didn't have my own tree that I wanted to reproduce to clone I would order I could order something and when is when are those delivered? Yeah, so ordering starts as soon as it's published so I think it just in the next few weeks. Yeah, and then we start shipping about the 15th of January and our last cuttings will go out about the 15th of March. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I didn't, you know, that's not a part of the exchange that I knew about. So that was really kind of fun to just click around and look and again, I'll give more information about that with the transcript of the show. So now I just want to shift to just ask you about apples. You must, you must have seen every extreme of fruit and probably of tree, the character of the trees as well. But the fruit, the range is so wide, yes. I mean, an apple is not an apple. It's not one thing. They're not all one color. They're not all one size. They're not all one flavor by any means. Are there some that you from this collection that you just always want to point out to people, especially when they visit in the harvest season, you know, in the fruiting season? Yeah, there are a couple that are my personal favorites that I like to point people towards. One is called Russia Kpermein and that's a historic apple from England in the 1800s and we don't know anything about it except that it was first grown by a blacksmith. But that's made its way to our collection and it's just this amazingly sour, russeted apple. And another that I really love is called Quaker Beauty and it's this kind of ping pong ball size to yellow apple. It's a crab apple. It's a large crab and it's amazingly sweet. It's like candy. It's two bites and then you're done with it, which I've said tend to prefer since I'm sometimes taking bites out of 15 apples in a day. That's enough. That's big enough for you in terms of apples. Yeah. You just had large crab apple and I was always fascinated by and I care about the exact dimension, but there's like a diameter dimension at which point below it, your crab apple and above it, your enapple or something. Do you know what I mean? It's like I was an inch and a half for whatever it is, but it's some diameter. I, that there's a cutoff point roughly speaking. And yeah, the large crab apples are kind of beautiful too, by the way, I think, in the landscape. You know, when they're in fruit, it's kind of unexpected, you know, all those. Right. Yes. Generally, two inches is our cutoff. And yeah, I think that there's this big misconception that crab apples are unpalatable. And really, there's such a range in all apples. But in crab apples especially, I mean, beautiful, kind of ornamentals, and then also something like quaker beauty that's just a small kind of snacking apple. Yeah, I love crabs. I think they're wonderful. Yeah, they are. And any others that you that you especially like very much. Yeah, I mean out of the four to five hundred there's plenty of apples that I could say but one that I noticed this year tasted amazing and was completely pest and disease-free is called Rustycoat and it's a recited apple. And we don't know a lot about the history. Rustycoat is kind of a general term that was used for a number of apples historically. But our orchard is completely no spray. So no sprays organic or non-organic. And that really gives us the opportunity to see how these trees behave and how resilient they are. And we do sometimes have pest damage to fruit or some fungal diseases that don't damage the health of the tree, but maybe somebody coming from a traditional sense of buying apples in the grocery store might look at it and wonder. They're still completely safe to eat, but Rustycoat, like I said, is one that was just exceptionally free of any blemishes with no spraying at all. Yeah. And that is really the test, I think, because, yeah, I mean, I, you know, my trees aren't sprayed and I, you know, I want to, I want to make applesauce, I want to leave the skins on so that when I blend it, it's pink applesauce. And, you know, I want to know that they were cared for that way. Like you're saying, sort of a no spray method, yeah. In the last couple of minutes, maybe two minutes or so, just in general, sort of the, the the highlights of what you think here you are caring for all of these trees, and that's an enormous responsibility. But are there some key points to caring for apple trees? I feel like the pruning, like lightning their load and not having them bear all those water sprouts and suckers and you know, they tend to get a little bit full of excess wood that's not really very productive sometimes. That's one thing that I spend time on. I don't know about what you think are the most important things in their care. Yeah. So in terms of a nosepray orchard, pruning is a huge one, not only to allow air flow and light into the tree, but also like you're saying to reduce fungal problems to reduce any breaking of limbs, especially on these really old trees. So pruning is a huge thing. And then generally orchard sanitation. We're cleaning our tools between every tree, where picking up apples as they fall to the ground to disrupt the pest and disease cycles. And here we send all of our drops to a local pig farmer. You can also compost them. But yeah, picking up all the apples and then also late in the season, either gathering up the leaves and composting them, sending them to a yard waste site. We know that a lot of fungal diseases are perpetuated by leaves sticking around on the ground into the new year. Yes. Yes, this is an exception where leave the leaves is not a good idea. I totally agree with you. Right. Yeah. Well, Jamie Hansen from SeatsAvers, as you can tell, I'm very interested. I have a personal interest, so you know I'll be ordering the test tube to send my leaves off to see if I can find out what my old friend's names are. But thank you so much for making time today and for the work that you do there. It was great to meet you to talk to you. Yeah, it was great to meet you too. Thank you so much for having me. I hope I'll talk to you again. Sounds great. And I hope I'll talk to all the rest of you again

to no don't miss an episode. You can subscribe, free to the podcast version of the show on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts. And you can find me anytime at awaytagarden.com or on Facebook and on Instagram as at a way to garden and happy gardening meantime. writing support for a way to Garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web colorblends.com. And by high-moving seeds, Wolcott Vermont Flower, and Urbal Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMohingSeeds.com and by White Flower Farm, offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On web whiteflower farm dot com.

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