When we purchased Concinnitas Farm, it was littered with old fruit trees. Mirabelle plums. Italian sweet plums. Pears. Apples. This year, we decided to dedicate more of the land to fruit trees, but this time in a more organized fashion to make it a bit easier to farm. With an eye toward eventual cider production, we decided to focus our small orchard on cider apple production. The next question: which apple varieties do we plant?
Those who have worked with us or followed our progress know that our approach to grape growing has focused on diversity and innovation. In our vineyard, we have focused largely on alternative varietals and clones, planting eight different varieties and clonal selections that are not widely planted around the Willamette Valley. So, we decided to take a similar approach when it came to developing our apple orchard.
Within the last few years, the USDA has begun releasing Spanish cider apple trees from quarantine that have not previously been available in the United States. We naturally thought these would be a great fit for what we were trying to do at Concinnitas Farm. However, after a little research, it became clear that these varieties are still quite difficult to get your hands on. Luckily, we managed to get our hands on several this year: Blanquina, Coloradona, Cristalina, De la Riega, Perico, Raxao and Teorica.
This week, we had some gorgeous weather here in Yamhill and decided it was time to plant our trees. The semi-dwarf trees were planted on a NE-facing slope where we will plant most of our orchard. The ones on dwarf rootstock were planted along the outside of our garden fence (still a bit of a work in progress, but enough to fit the trees we purchased). Progress was periodically slowed by family picnics and visits to the neighbor's longhorn cattle. Oh, yeah, and planting our hops rhizomes (Spalt Select, Tettnanger, Fuggle, Kent Golding, Hallertauer, Serebrianka).
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