The apple of their eye? It’s not Granny’s
Northern Spy. Sweet Sixteen. Blue Pearmain. Karmijn de Sonnaville. Ashmead’s Kernel. Rose du Kluj. Gloster 69. Wolf River. Reinette Simerinko. Cox’s Orange Pippen. Belle de Boskoop.
How do you like them rare apples? You likely don’t, unless you remember some of the obscure varieties growing up in another country, hang out at apple festivals or seek out an independent apple grower. A handful of those growers, like Jim Rahe of Annie’s Orchard in Langley, are producing apples that aren’t Gala, Granny Smith or Ambrosia, and are preserving those heritage varieties.
“I do it because I like growing apples,” said Rahe from his sevenacre property where he and his wife, Mary Ann, have been tending their orchard for 35 years. “I always have, since I was young.”
They once grew as many as 250 to 300 varieties and now have it down to 50. The Simon Fraser University biological sciences professor, 78 and retired, grows 60,000 to 80,000 pounds of apples a year, most of which are sold locally.
“We hope that he never gives up on this Annie’s Orchard ‘hobby,’ as he is a conscientious and ambitious grower,” said Margaret Butschler, one of the apple buyers for the annual Apple Festival at the University of B.C. Botanical Garden (Oct. 14-15 this year).
Without these independent growers, “these varieties would be lost,” she said. “It’s a lot more lucrative to grow grapes.”
Annie’s Orchard produces 50 varieties on about 1,500 trees and attracts loyal customers that include immigrants who every fall stock up on the apples: The British for their Cox’s Orange Pippen and the Dutch for the Belle de Boskoop, which holds its shape for strudel, for instance.
“You can’t buy advertising like that. When they find us, they call everyone they know and say, ‘Hey, I found some Belle de Boskoop,’ ” Rahe said.
And lately there’s been a high demand for juice apples for a growing craft-cider industry, he said.
Rahe, when he started out, didn’t have a business plan and, because he worked full-time, didn’t scaleup the business as other soft-fruit growers have, with pick-your-ownfruit, a restaurant, winery or small grocery store. The orchard nets less than $30,000 a year, but they don’t run it for the money because they enjoy fulfilling a niche market.
“Although, if we weren’t making money, we might not enjoy it,” he said.
While Metro Vancouver offers the right climate for growing some apples quickly — between 90 and 100 days and “nothing’s better than picking one off the tree and having the juice burst all over your face,” says Rahe — none of the big sellers like Honeycrisp or Ambrosia can be grown large-scale except in the Okanagan.
Combating disease in orchards is a big problem, and independents could never compete with the large growers on price because of economies of scale, he said.
“If we can provide apples the commodity industry doesn’t want to and we can do it better than the other orchards, we’ll always have a niche market,” he said.
Molly Thurston, who with her husband, Matt, owns and run the Claremont Ranch Organics in Lake Country near Kelowna, are both employed horticulturists who grow about 30 heritage-apple varieties on an acre of land as a labour of love.
Almost all of the 2,000 pounds of apples they grow are sold to the UBC Apple Festival (which last year sold 36,000 pounds).
“It’s more out of interest,” she said. “It’s nice to see varieties that we don’t see on a daily basis.”
She said most commercially grown apples are sweet, whereas the heritage varieties offer more complex flavours that are valued by chefs and cider-makers.
“It’s just like wine-tasting; each apple has a different taste on the palate,” she said.
One of her favourites is the Golden Russet, which she said is “short and squat, not an attractive apple and it’s quite tart.” It’s green and russeted over like Bosc pear, so “it’s not something that when you walked into a store you would be wowed by, like a shiny Ambrosia or a gorgeous Gala,” she said.
Thurston, like Rahe, sees their orchard as a niche and considers it important to preserve some of the heritage varieties.
She marvels each year during the UBC festival at the eager buyers who line up before the doors open and rush in for their favourites.
She likes to experiment with new varieties by grafting trees herself, but isn’t expecting to create a bestselling hit because the niche apple market is small potatoes.
Rahe also grafts and sells apple trees, but there are obstacles to creating the next big thing in the commercial apple industry, including the seven to 10 years it takes to create a new variety, the cost of patents and having to sell 98 per cent of the rights to a big nursery.