It may not be official yet, but spring is poised to start springing, especially from where we stand: on our ladders, still pruning hard in the orchard. We can’t quite call what we’re seeing “silvertip” stage yet, but after a day or two more of warm weather this week, that is certainly where we expect to be, with many of our apple varietals exhibiting that telltale first stage of spring growth that lets us know a new season is officially begun.

We’ve been busy harvesting choice scionwood for spring grafting all this past month, and we’ve finished just in the nick of time. Then it takes at least a half a day to alphabetize all our carefully bundled twigs by variety and arrange them into bagged groupings, such as A-B, C-D, on down the line for easy retrieval come grafting time next month. Until then, the scionwood stays in the walk-in cooler so it all remains dormant until we need it, even as the orchard wakes up. We wish we could think about putting away our pruning implements, too, but looks like, as usual, and especially since winter weather kept us out of the orchard for so long this year, we’ll be pushing the limits of what should be dormant pruning right up to bloom when it starts in another month or so. In the meantime, it’s still a busy month for orcharding meetups.

CiderCon was enjoyed immensely earlier this month. It is truly exciting to hear about all the research underway on cider apples. For the most part, the fermentation chemistry of cidermaking has been based on wine grapes in modern times, since there is so little data available for cider apples, with the exception of institutions in France and England. As more research is done, we are all learning so much about the important ways that apples diverge from grapes in terms of quality production of alcohol. And what a privilege to be in the same space as so many esteemed cidermakers from around the world. So many valuable lectures, outstanding cider tastings, and good people. Cider is really growing up. In fact, CiderCon 2027 in Chicago has already made it onto our calendar as a must-go.

After a couple of local regional meetups, it’s now time to hit the road to attend The Berkshire Roundtable apple growers meeting a bit farther afield in Hawley, Massachusetts. It’s nice to take advantage of the long drive up the Eastern Seaboard to make plenty of orchard-related stops along the way. This year, for the first time, an appointment has been made to visit The National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland. It’s a pilgrimage of sorts.

If you’re an heirloom apple enthusiast, your bookshelf is probably populated with at least a few well-known American apple tomes. Lee Calhoun, the author of Old Southern Apples, spent quite a lot of time digging through the cartons of pomological watercolors at The National Ag Library (there are over 100 boxes comprising 7,500 watercolor paintings of American fruits, and about 70% of those are apples), rediscovering the vast resources the collection has to offer. The appointment to visit the library is only for 3 hours and you must inform the special collections librarians what you’re looking to reference so they can pull it from the stacks for you ahead of time. It seemed best to play it safe and stick to researching apple varieties via the extensive nursery catalog collection . . . until we were informed that there are over 150,000 catalogs available for perusal, stored in 4,500 boxes!

Perhaps the most valuable resource to explore is the handwritten “fruit history cards” recorded by pomologist William Henry Ragan from his personal research as he compiled Nomenclature of the Apple: A Catalogue of the Known Varieties, a prized reference for apple nerds of all stripes. Some of the information made it into USDA publications and beyond, but one wonders what other insights the cards may contain. We’re going to find out! You may expect a full report on the field trip to the National Ag Library in next month’s newsletter.

In other news, we enjoyed this month’s grafting workshop at Deep River Folk School so much, we’ve decided to offer a class on grafting at KFF this spring, as well. Please join us on Saturday, March 28th, from 1-4 pm, to learn how to propagate apple trees via bench-grafting, the simplest method, and one which can be built upon for future learning of all sorts of advanced grafting techniques, as well.

We’re limiting the class size to 5 individuals for this round to ensure extra one-on-one assistance as students concentrate on hands-on learning. We’ll also cover tons of information surrounding grafting, from rootstock choices to post-grafting care. Grafting knives will be available to use during the workshop if you don’t have your own, and attendees will go home with three grafted apple trees, the knowledge to meaningfully source supplies, and enough skill to risk becoming a grafting addict.

Once you know how to graft, every tree looks ripe for scionwood harvest, and the ability to propagate trees upon whim leads to endless opportunities. You’ve been warned. If you’re interested in attending our grafting workshop, please send an email to cheers@kordickfamilyfarm.com, and we will send you a list of available scionwood ahead of time so you can choose your varieties. Cost to attend the workshop is $55, and payable the day of.

Join us at Bloomtime Cider Fest on Saturday, March 14th! Our friends at James Creek Cider House in Cameron, NC have invited us to set up, along with other vendors and cidermakers, in celebration of spring in North Carolina orchards. We think we experience an early bloom in Stokes County, NC towards the end of March, but in Cameron, a little over two hours southeast of our orchard, peaches and apples start blooming even earlier, hence the timing of this particular event!

We will, of course, be bringing plenty of our special apple blossom jelly, made from our Hewe’s Crab apple blossoms, as well as other KFF orchard sundries, and potted heirloom apple trees for sale. We will also have an educational display set up regarding apple propagation, including production from seed and grafting. Come on out and smell the flowers for an early taste of spring and, as the same time, enjoy the great taste of NC cider on pour from several local makers!

What a perfect time to be writing and thinking about Limbertwig apples. After last month’s installment relating some of the general history of the Limbertwig apple family, as well that known about the ‘Royal Limbertwig’ specifically, we decided to check in with Dr. Cameron Peace, who is leading efforts to map the apple genome from his lab at Washington State University. We asked whether or not any Limbertwig samples had been analyzed yet, and much to our surprise, the news came back that our friends at the Southern Heritage Apple Orchard of Horne Creek Farm in nearby Pinnacle, NC, had recently sent in many of their Limbertwig varieties to Dr. Peace’s lab.

Overwhelmingly, so far the Limbertwigs are coming back as varieties that are not particularly closely related, in terms of parent and grandparent varietals. Southern apple aficionados have always claimed that Limbertwig apples boast a very particular, common flavor, while orchardists tended to place emphasis on a common weeping habit amongst Limbertwig varieties. Jason Bowen, who manages the Southern Heritage Apple Orchard, and we all agree that, ultimately, very few of the Limbertwigs actually exhibit that supposedly trademark “limber,” weeping habit (although ‘Red Limbertwig’ exemplifies it).

Our featured apple this month, Myers Royal Limbertwig, has always had a reputation for being an uncommonly delicious, uniquely flavored apple. Ditto for Turley Winesap, which could make sense, because the DNA results for Horne Creek’s Myers Royal Limbertwig and Turley Winesap are a dead match! How’s this for a coincidence: at the CiderCon scionwood exchange earlier this month, a fellow grower encouraged us to take a piece of his Turley Winesap wood, saying that it surpasses even Stayman Winesap in terms of excellent flavor. We allowed ourselves to be convinced that we needed some.

The Turley Winesap wood was swaddled up with great care and intention, and made the long trek home unto KFF, where we began to plan for our glorious future planting. No need. We’ve got 4 lovely Myers Royal Limbertwig (Turley Winesap?) trees growing already! This Limbertwig was named for the Myers family of Cades Cove, Tennessee, but apparently first grown by a Mr. George Powell in Cades Cove. In the 1980s, Herbert Myers supplied both Lee Calhoun and nurseryman Reverend Henry Morton with scionwood for the Myers family’s namesake apple tree and claimed the fruit made the best cider he had ever tasted.

Speaking of Henry Morton, he is sort of the hero of our whole Limbertwig story. Mr. Morton dedicated himself to rescuing and propagating old Southern apple trees, and came to specialize in specimens of the Limbertwig family. He eventually started a small nursery in Gatlinburg, Tennessee to disseminate grafts of the “old-fashioned apple trees” he saved, ensuring that endangered varieties would endure into the future.

Mr. Morton’s chief collecting grounds were the area surrounding the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In his catalog introduction, Mr. Morton recounts that when the park was formed in 1928, it took over what was previously prime orchard land, “well over 600 acres of commercial apple orchards. According to many people’s estimation,” to say nothing of the countless homesteads containing private orchard plantings. Though the orchards fell by the wayside, remnants of these former orchards still remained in the area, and when people displaced by the park moved, they sometimes took trees with them, in the form of apple seeds or scionwood.

Henry Morton would eventually piece together what he rightly estimated in the 1980s to be the “largest collection of Limbertwig varieties available for sale anywhere.” And he guaranteed that his varieties were true Limbertwigs, having sampled fruit from all the varieties he propagated, and finding them to meet his high standards representing “distinct Limbertwig flavor.” As mentioned previously, Herbert Myers supplied Mr. Morton with his original Myers Royal Limbertwig, which Morton pronounced to be “a very large and excellent variety” of Limbertwig. Indeed, the fruit is on the large side for a member of the Limbertwig family, and has rather firm, juicy flesh, as well as nice aromatics and fine flavor.

One of the most interesting aspects of mapping the apple genome is how to reconcile the history of an apple with its parentage once known. It turns out that Red Limbertwigs have some pretty head-scratching ancestry, but we’ll get to that in due course as we run through the rest of our Limbertwig apple features. Now that we have to look at Turley Winesap as a possible alias of Myers Royal Limbertwig, there is the business of history to sort out. Turley Winesap, of course, has its own dedicated history as an Indiana seedling apple deriving from an Indiana Horticultural Society-solicited cross of ‘Winesap,’ dating from the early 1900s.

In centuries past, orchardists in Tennessee and Indiana might have come to blows over whether or not Myers Royal Limbertwig and Turley Winesap are distinct varieties are not. These days, we’ll let the apple detectives have at it, but we’re already looking forward to some side by side taste testing of fruit. Could it be that a scionwood mixup way back when or in more recent history can explain the match between Myers Royal Limbertwig and Turley Winesap? Or perhaps a Turley Winesap planting or tree persisted, forgotten, in the Tennessee mountains, to be adopted and perpetuated by George Powell and then the Myers Family. So many possibilities. It’s pretty interesting to be a spectator when apple history starts revealing itself in real time.

And if you think this is a hot pomological topic, wait til you get a load of the big apple news: it was recently determined that ‘Hewe’s Crab,’ the most prolific spring bloomer in our orchard, is not the excellent pollenizer we all thought it was, but actually, a triploid variety that has effectively sterile pollen, incapable of cross pollinating with other varieties to produce fruit! Not only that, but Hewe’s Crab has also been proved distinct from ‘Virginia Crab,’ previously its synonym! Thanks to our friend Salem for sharing the writeup on the Hewe’s news from The Journal of the American Pomological Society. Delving into the ancestry of apples via genetic testing is proving to be as shocking as it can be for us humans.

For many religious observers, it’s time to gird up for the season of Lent, but even if you’re abstaining from rich foods, you can have some cake and eat it, too. The focus on this apple dessert is, appropriately, the apples. The fruit is coated in just enough thin batter to come together quickly as a simple, yet lovely, unleavened cake that is suitable for Passover and vegans, as well. Virtually all the sweet flavor comes from apple, and it turns out that is plenty enough.

1 and 1/2 cups of apple juice (more if needed)
1 and 3/4 cups of all purpose flour
3 large apples
2/3 cup frozen raspberries
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon of Baba Yaga’s Apple Cider Syrup (for added flavor)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon corn starch or potato starch
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon or apple pie style spice mix
pinch of salt
powdered sugar for dusting

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F. Sift the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt together into a bowl. Then, in a separate, larger bowl, mix the juice, oil, cider syrup, and vanilla together. Gradually add the dry ingredients from the first bowl as you whisk together with the wet mix. Use more juice if you the batter is too thick; it should be like pancake batter. Set aside.

Peel and core your apples, then slice into quarter-inch pieces. Gently mix the apples and the raspberries with the batter, making sure the fruit is well-coated. Let sit for 10 minutes. Coat a deep-dished baking pan with the oil, then sprinkle the starch on and rotate until it makes a fine, even layer over the pan’s inner surface.

Add the fruit and bake for about 45 minutes. Once the cake has cooled a bit, sprinkle with powdered sugar and enjoy warm.