The extent of my apple knowledge, I will admit, is limited to Granny Smith, Gala, Red Delicious, Pink Lady, and Fuji apples. Well, and then there was that autumn several years ago that Dad had to go to Montréal for business, and after I begged, cajoled, and whined enough, everyone caved and gave in to my desire for a road trip. On the way back, we stopped outside of Syracuse, New York—another place my parents have called home—at the Beak & Skiff apple farm and picked sixty pounds of Paula Reds. But other than that, I know nothing about apples.
I received a letter (I’ll save my soapbox about the lost art of letter writing for another day) from Tim and Leslie—the couple for whom I’ll be working—today that contained some information about their orchard. In the letter, they included a catalog of their trees for this season, and I’ve been studiously poring over it.
Tim and Leslie grow pears, plums, peaches, and apples. The orchard, at least this year, contains four varieties of pears (one Asian, three European types), four varieties of plums, one variety of peach, and twenty (twenty!) varieties of apples.
The different varieties of pears, plums, and peaches surprised me, because I’ll go ahead and admit my ignorance: I thought a peach was a peach, honestly—and the same goes for pears and plums. But the twenty different types of apples stunned me. I knew there were different varieties of apples, but I’ve never heard of any of these. They have beautiful names: Dudley Crab, Astrakhan, Beacon (regular and dwarf), Canadian Strawberry, Pomme Grise, William’s Pride, Baldwin, Fameuse or Snow, Lady, Liberty, McCouns, Newt Grindle, Tolman Sweet, Belle de Boskoop, Blue Permain, Rhode Island Greening, Hunt Russet, Keepsake, and Northern Spy. Is that not incredible?
I may know nothing about them now, but I assure you, by the time the season is over in mid- to late-November, I’ll be a veritable fount of information regarding apples.
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