It’s scion season in Maine, when people like Robert McIntyre, people who care deeply about fruit trees, start to pull strange packages of inedible things from their refrigerators. These would be small stems of apple or pear trees, harvested the year before, which have been sitting dormant and chilled while their caretakers wait for spring to stir so that they can graft them onto root stock. McIntyre co-founded Harpswell Heritage Apples about eight years ago, and along with his wife Dorothy Rosenberg and their friend Sharon Whitney, runs an all-volunteer effort to propagate old Harpswell fruit trees.
We called up the retired economist to talk apples, how a Bowdoin College fraternity inspired his early tree-planting efforts and what plants you take away in a divorce.
FIRST TREE: McIntyre got into the business of trying to save Harpswell’s centuries-old varieties of apples after becoming smitten with one particular tree (and its apples). It grows between the community’s firehouse and Mitchell Field, a popular spot to walk dogs, and McIntyre came upon the battered old tree while running sometime in 2006. “There is almost no trunk to it left,” McIntyre said. “It is a miraculous survival.”
BITTERSWEET: The tree was overrun by bittersweet, but the bittersweet hadn’t choked out the apples. “Some of them were very beautiful, with very little in the way of insect damage,” McIntyre said. And the flavor was “extraordinary.” They stayed on the tree much later than most apples, ripening only around November. “They are like immortal apples,” he said. “They will hang on the tree until they are knocked off.” He was lucky to get any, since for years someone with a firehouse connection had been harvesting them.
DETECTIVE WORK: The apples were delicious but not readily identifiable. McIntyre, Rosenberg and Whitney wanted to know more, and like most people in Maine who want to know more about apples, the road eventually brought them to John Bunker, apple expert with the seed and tree company Fedco. “Bunker said, ‘Oh it is a Baldwin, but either there is something about the soil or there is some genetic variation,’ ” McIntyre remembered. The texture is a little different, he said, and the flavor better.
“In the 19th century, there would be millions of Maine apples being sold on the streets of London,” McIntyre said. (Well, maybe thousands.) “They keep forever. It is sort of a noble apple.”
Bunker agreed to graft some of the apples, via Fedco, and they were dubbed the Harpswell Firehouse. “We thought, what a great idea to spread these around Harpswell,” McIntyre said. Thus, Harpswell Heritage Apples was born. McIntyre is also on the board of the Maine Heritage Orchard in Unity and is leading the effort to plant “safety” copies of some of the trees from that orchard in Harpswell. Backups, if you will, just in case anything goes wrong in Unity.
SHARE THE WEALTH: They charge $65 a piece for the young trees, which include the Harpswell Firehouse and several other varieties that once grew in great numbers around the agriculturally rich neck of land south of Brunswick. (If you can hold off planting until spring 2016, there should be Harpswell Pound Sweets and Harpswell Twenty Ounce trees available. And yes, that refers to the likely weight of the fruit.) Proceeds of sales go to various groups, including the Harpswell Heritage Land Trust, Harpswell Coastal Academy (a charter school) and Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue emergency fund.
JOHNNY MAPLE SEED: Starting in the late ’70s, McIntyre had a few teaching stints at Bowdoin. Whenever friends came to visit him in Brunswick, he’d take them to “the architectural museum,” he said, i.e. the beautiful old farms visible as you drive down Harpswell Neck, and along the way, he’d admire the remnants of old orchards. He wistfully remembers an entire orchard of Black Oxfords that was cut down 20 years ago. But back then he was more focused on propagating maples. He lived across from one of Bowdoin’s rowdier frat houses, Beta Theta Pi, and was desperate to block the noise from their weekend parties. “All the street trees around there were planted by me in the dark to try to make the Betas less obvious,” he said.
YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU: When he used to make a long drive through Canada to his first wife’s family’s home in Chicago, he’d collect apples along the way from abandoned farms and wonder about their history. He pruned the apple trees of a neighbor in Brunswick and found he had a knack for it. Then he started his own little orchard. “I planted some old varieties,” McIntyre said. “But then divorced and had nothing further to do with the trees. I did take my raspberry bushes and my irises though.”
ROOT STOCK: McIntyre’s fridge is loaded with triple-bagged scion wood from a handful of varieties (the triple bagging protects them from the ethylene gas given off by apples, other fruits and even some vegetables, which could cause sprouting), and outside he has about 30 buckets filled with grafts from last year and earlier. For rootstock, Harpswell Heritage Apples use Antonovka, a “classic Russian peasant village apple,” he said. “It produces terrific roots. The idea is to plant these trees all over Harpswell.” And to see what can be brought back from the trees still growing in Harpswell, some 100 to 200 years old.
“All these old trees are calcium starved,” McIntyre said. The trio has been feeding trees, including the Harpswell Firehouse, ground-up oyster shells and other fertilizers, and finding the response gratifying. “The tree will suddenly go back to producing apples like it did when they were young.”
HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES? McIntyre, unsurprisingly, has strong feelings about apples. He’s fine with having a glass of cider now and again. But he’s not going to pop open a bottle of French-style hard apple cider if you drop by. “That is a big thing in our culture right now,” he said, noting that Fedco’s catalog now offers cider-apple packages. “But I’m not excited by it.”
His preference is for sharp-tasting, sweet-sour apples. “I don’t like soft, mealy, God-awful McIntosh apples.” Or red delicious. Rosenberg likes to bake, and her apple and raspberry tart is a favorite. But ideally? He’s a purist: “I like eating apples – hard, interesting apples.”
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