Fresh apple season has came to an abrupt, early end for us over the past few weeks, but we’ve only just harvested our “hedge apples.” One of the more bizarre plants in our landscape is ‘Osage Orange,’ which produces lumpy, chartreuse-colored fruits in the fall that are colloquially referred to as hedge apples and look like something from a Halloween prop department. The relatively spherical shape is pretty much what hedge apples and true pomme apples have in common, and that’s it. Biting into a hedge apple is only a reward if you like hard, pithy cucumbers, although some people do seek the fruit out for medicinal purposes.

Native to the south-central United States, chiefly Texas and Arkansas, Osage Orange has been a useful weed for much of its history. That is, useful to any human brave enough to bear the considerable thorniness of its branches. Osage Orange trees are covered with almost talon-like thorns and could be called “nature’s barbed wire.” In fact, it was often used in such fashion to confine livestock on the American frontier before the real deal was invented. The trees shoot up sharp growths from the base and, without pruning, entangle themselves into a deadly fortress-like hedge that is fairly impenetrable by man or beast.

A member of the mulberry family, Osage Orange has characteristically hard, dense wood, and has also been used historically for woodcraft, fence posts, and weapon-making. The trees are now found far beyond their historical range, and are grown widely throughout the U.S. and even into Canada. Osage Orange plants are useful to us at KFF as rootstock for grafting Che Fruit, aka melonberry trees, another somewhat unusual species in the mulberry family. We’re afraid that the only use we’ve ever found for Osage Orange fruit is to freak people out with them (a trick), or use them for fall decorations (a treat).

Perhaps we ought to experiment with hedge apple jelly at some point; Osage Orange fruits are actually quite high in pectin. Now that we are all but done with fruit harvest, we can get busy cooking up our favorite things from our real apples. At the top of the list is always crabapple jelly. We have been making jelly from a mix of our crabapple varieties for several years now, and we are always blown away by the response to it.
Rarely does an order come in for a single jar; typical orders are for quantities from 2 to 6 jars at a time, sometimes even more, even from first-time buyers. We’ve finally caught on to the fact that you just don’t see this old-time jelly much anymore, which is strange because it’s such an American classic.

We use a steam juicer to gently extract the juice from crabapple fruit, then cook it with sugar and a little lemon juice until it is ready to set. We make sure that we have enough richly red crabapples in our jelly mix to produce the ruby-red hue typical of traditional crabapple jelly. Crabapples have enough natural pectin that we don’t have to supplement with any at all to ensure a good set. The extreme tartness that wards off casual grazing of most fresh crabapples is transformed into nuanced flavor by the addition of sugar and is ultimately what makes this flavorful jelly so memorable.

Brilliantly red ‘Dolgo’ crabapples do a lot of the heavy color lifting, plus a yet-to-be-identified large crabapple we grow, that is unusually large in size, with deeply red-fleshed fruit. ‘Hyslop,’ an old, traditional jelly crabapple, brings plenty of body and mouth-puckering acid (this is before the addition of sugar, remember), along with ‘Whitney’ crabs.

Crabapple jelly isn’t the only colorful canned good in our larder this season. This year we had some of the most strikingly colored red-fleshed apples we have ever seen and we used our ‘Burford’s Redflesh’ fruit to make some exceptional applesauce. Some seasons, the color saturation of our red-fleshed apples’ interior has been disappointing: bubblegum-pink if we’re lucky, but this year, the fruit was as consistently, shockingly red as beet roots.

In the past, we’ve made a smooth applesauce from our Burford’s Redflesh fruit, and while the texture has been pleasingly silky, the intial antique rose color suffers from oxidation, resulting from milling the cooked apples so fine. This year, to try and better preserve that outrageous color, we went chunky: we hand-peeled and cored all the apples, then rough-chopped them, before briefly cooking the fruit with only enough sugar to take the edge off of the naturally tart apples. The result is just gorgeous, but it’s not at all too pretty to eat.

Our biggest product news is that APPLE CIDER SYRUP IS BACK! Last season’s freeze losses meant we could not boil much syrup at all, and so we have been sold out for the better part of a year. Now that temperatures have cooled, we can enjoy the quintessential cool weather work of boiling fresh apple cider down for hours over a fire. We’ve missed that wonderful smell! You can find Baba Yaga’s Apple Cider Syrup and Crabapple Jelly for sale in our online Etsy store. Quantities are limited on our Burford’s Redflesh Applesauce, so please contact us directly at cheers@kordickfamilyfarm or 336-351-5186 if you would like some, or stop by and see us at tomorrow’s Trade Street Farmer’s Market in downtown Winston-Salem.

Thank you to everyone who has come out to see us at Trade Street Farmers Market in Downtown Winston-Salem, NC these past few months! It’s been wonderful to see you all and we’ve enjoyed being a part of this unique market, which boasts an unusually nice mix of vendors and a bustling city-street atmosphere. We will be at market again this Sunday, October 4th, from 10am-2pm with apple cider syrup for sale, hot-off-the-canning-line pink applesauce made from ‘Burford’s Redflesh’ fruit, crabapple jelly, apple butter, and much more! Note, there is currently the potential for light rain on Sunday morning in Winston, but this market is rain or shine and there are plenty of tents and downtown establishments for you to duck into to get dry if it comes to that!

Next up on our to-do list is to work up the inventory for our annual heirloom tree sale on Saturday, November 7th. We will be open from 11 am to 4 pm, and have dozens of varieties available for sale.

Two weeks prior to the event we will release our availability list to anyone who is interested. Please contact us on or after October 24th if you would like to receive a copy of our 2026 tree availability, or just come on out the day of the sale.

We are sorry, but we are unable to reserve trees ahead of the sale day, to ensure the best selection the day of. If you cannot make it to the sale day, you are welcome to make an appointment with us to come out after the fact and shop our remaining trees.

A Hubbardston Nonesuch apple tree is quite a pretty sight. The Brothers Downing remarked upon its “handsome branching head” in their 1858 Fruit and Fruit Trees of America publication, and the 4 trees in our orchard never fail to turn our heads. Even early in the season, when adorned with small, unremarkable, unripe fruit, there’s a symmetry to a Hubbardston Nonesuch tree and its set — even if we skip a year or five’s pruning — that catches the eye without fail, yet it retains enough feral character somehow to keep things interesting, like an apple tree out of a fairy tale.

This year, we made sure to keep our eye on the crop itself, too, and catch the fruit at ripeness — wow, what a treat! Surprisingly sweet and aromatic, with an antique-y character about it that’s appropriate to its age. A seedling apple sprouted just outside Hubbardston, Massachusetts around 1780, the original tree grew up on the farm of one Barzillai Gleason.

Gotta say, while Hubbardston Nonesuch is a pretty good, evocative name, wouldn’t you be even more predisposed to like this apple if it had been named something like ‘Barzillai’s Wonder’? Oh, that the baby names of yesteryear would creep back into style.

At any rate, in the ensuing decades after the original Hubbardston Nonesuch grew up, locals were enamoured enough of the fruit that they began to refer to it as the “Nonesuch” apple. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people in America liked a lot of apples enough to assign the exact same name to a lot of apple trees, so by the time nurseryman Samuel Hyde of Newton, Mass got ahold of scionwood in the late 1820s and began to propagate trees for sale, he wisely saw fit to expand the name to reflect its origins as the Hubbardston Nonesuch.

Interestingly, while the moniker “nonesuch” was undoubtedly intended to reflect, quite accurately, the apple’s high eating quality, it’s fair to say that nonesuch of these apple trees are quite alike another either. For centuries, the variability of Hubbardston Nonesuch has been remarked upon, with the given terroir leaving so much of a mark on fruit appearance and flavor that, historically, positive identification of the variety was considered difficult.

In our orchard, Hubbardson Nonesuch produces reliably full crops of fairly large, crisp, richly-flavored apples that ripen in September. For all the variety’s variability, it’s never quite been determined what growing conditions suit it best. Southern nurseries carried Hubbardston Nonesuch from the time it become widely available in the 1850s, and we sure like what it’s doing, parked here in our red clay and high heat, so far from its New England home.

It’s finally time to slow down and taste some fall flavors. Don’t be in a hurry to make this small-batch recipe; the longer the sugars in the onions, apples, and cider syrup caramelize over necessarily low heat, the more delectable. The sweet and savory smell will get you: if you haven’t sneaked more than a spoonful or two by the end of the cooking process, you’ve done something wrong. And OK, if you’re in a hurry, you can sprinkle on a little granulated sugar to hasten the process, but that would make you such a cheater. If you don’t have apple cider syrup, you can sub in some Balsamic vinegar and honey, but why would one ever be without apple cider syrup?

a few Tablespoons of butter
1/2 onion, sliced very thinly
2-3 lbs apples, peeled, cored, cut into 1/4″ thick slices
salt and pepper
a few Tablespoons apple cider syrup
a sprig of fresh sage, sliced thin, or sprig of fresh thyme, chopped

In a heavy bottom or cast-iron pan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the sliced onion and turn the heat down to medium-low or medium. Cook the onion slowly, stirring occasionally, until translucent and starting to caramelize, about 10-15 minutes.

Add the apple slices and season with salt and pepper. Stir to coat with the butter and onions. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally, until apples are cooked through and starting to caramelize, about 15-30 minutes.

Drizzle cider syrup over the apples and stir to coat. Continue cooking for another 10-15 minutes, stirring frequently, until satisfied with level of caramelization.

Toss in fresh herbs and stir to coat, about 5 minutes before removing from the heat. Adjust seasoning to taste.

Serve warm on crackers with cheese, on crostini, on a sandwich, or over vanilla ice cream, or just get at it with a darn spoon, which may be best.