Our apple season is now over, but what a record-smasher it was! In previous years, we’ve typically pressed about 600 litres of cider. This year, we made over 2,200 litres! That means we picked about 4.5 tons of apples! We also pressed over 800 litres of cider from apples other people brought us to process for them. So our little press churned out over 3000 litres this year!
Why was this year so good? There were two main factors: a bumper crop of apples, and a low crop of bears.
Wild growing apples tend to produce well every second year. Last year was not a good year at all, so we were hoping for a good one this year, and we got it. Apple growers in eastern Ontario did not have a good year, but that was because a late spring frost hit the apples at a tender stage in their development. Wild growing apples are more diverse, which means they’re not all developing at the same pace, making them less susceptible to being damaged by the same weather event. They’re also probably more resilient and able to withstand more severe weather. They did germinate and grow up without any human coddling, after all.
It’s for these reasons that we are planting the seeds left over from our apple pressing in a one hectare area of field, hoping to create our own orchard of wild apples (we currently pick from our neighbour’s). If all goes well, in about 10 years we’ll start making cider from our own apples, grown in an orchard in which every tree is genetically unique.
Most orchards are planted with genetic clones of popular apple varieties. A named apple variety, such as McIntosh, is a clone of the original McIntosh apple from years ago. Orchardists clone their trees by grafting a branch of the tree they want onto a root stock of a different variety. The branch determines the fruit, so with a branch from a McIntosh tree, you get McIntosh fruit. (The MacIntosh computer was named after this apple, but they got the spelling wrong, which, when taken together with the misspelling of “googol” as Google, doesn’t say a lot for the literacy skills of the dotcom set).
But when you plant a seed from an apple, you get something completely different when that tree begins bearing fruit. It’s a crap shoot. You might get a good eating apple, or you might get some small, pucker-inducing orb not good for anything. The evolutionary rationale for this is that trees are long-living organisms – an apple tree can live for over 100 years – and they need to put a lot of genetic diversity into their offspring in order for some of them to survive whatever changes in climatic conditions might be coming down the pipe.
But we’ve found that the diversity in wild growing apples is good for cider—when you mix a lot of different tasting apples together, you tend to get a superior cider to what you would get by simply juicing some commercial eating apples. This is because good cider should have different ratios of tannin, sweetness, and sourness in it than what you get from an apple bred to taste good out of the hand. And this explains why most hard cider on the market in North America is basically swill. Unlike in Europe, where there is a tradition in cider making of growing apples specifically for it, like wine, in North America we tend to just dump whatever leftover eating apples there are into cider making. It’s starting to change, particularly in Quebec, but most of the cider industry here is still in the “Baby Duck” wine stage (remember that?).
In fact, the apples planted by Jonny Appleseed and other European pioneers in North America (the apples themselves were pioneers, too, originally hailing from Kazakstan) were first thought of as juicing apples – specifically for making juice to turn into alcohol. These early settlers didn’t have many other good sources of alcohol, and turning apples into hard cider was a good way to preserve them without refrigeration (and get drunk). And hard cider has to be the easiest alcohol to make – wild yeasts on the skins of the apples provide an instant primer for fermentation, and failed apple cider is called apple cider vinegar – also a valuable product.
But enough about apples. As for the bears, their cycles are more mysterious. Every few years, there seems to be a big bear year; the local papers are full of stories of close encounters. Theories abound – whether it’s a lack of food driving them out of their usual haunts and into ours, or a surplus of food the previous year leading to a boom in the population this year, no one really seems to know. Most likely it is many factors. Three years ago, we had a very good apple year, but it also coincided with a very good year for the bears, and the ground under the trees we picked from was carpeted with the partially digested remains of apples that had passed through the guts of bears not long before.
Interestingly, when bears eat apples in the fall, they just want to strip as many sugars out of them as possible, to help them fatten up for winter, so most of the fibre just passes quickly through them. The remains left on the ground look a lot like the “pomace” we are left with after pressing the juice from the apples. Bears’ guts become biological apple presses in the fall. It becomes a race between us and the bears for the apples. We have a ladder, but they can climb. Their weight usually offers some free pruning services on the side that we tend not to offer. So far they’ve been much more interested in eating the apples than eating our employees or us.
Other reasons this apple season was so good for us were that the fall weather was exceptionally nice, with three weeks of unseasonably warm and sunny days, which made it very easy to motivate ourselves to go picking; a new employee, Alex Meloche, who showed up at just the right time and proved to be a good and enthusiastic picker; and the fact that we had a poor maple season and were looking for another crop to pick up some of the slack. It’s another reminder of the importance of diversity on a farm.
In addition to filling our freezers with one litre bottles of sweet cider, which we’ll be selling all year (and maybe into the follow year if it’s a bad one for apples, which it probably will be), we’ve also frozen several buckets of the stuff, which we’ll be warming up and selling at the Wakefield Christmas Market, and we’ve got nine carboys bubbling away, destined to be apple cider vinegar in a few months (and some hard cider for myself!).
You can buy our sweet cider at our farmstand at 225 Shouldice (currently open Friday to Monday, 10am – 6pm, but in November going to our winter hours of Saturdays 10am – 4pm), on our online store, or at the Marché Outaouais. We’ll also be at the Christmas Craft Sale at the Meredith Centre November 4 and 5 and the Wakefield Christmas Market on December December 9.
Like maple syrup in the spring, wild apple cider in the fall is a sweet, pure taste of what our Gatineau Hills have to offer. Taken together, these two gifts offer satisfying bookmarks to the growing season, marking the beginning and the end of our yearly labours.