When we sent the last edition of this newsletter, we were pruning June apple trees, not picking them! In the eight years since we have been sending out our monthly newsletter, we’ve put out some last minute or late installments (like this one!), but we never missed any outright that we can recall . . . until we fell off the wagon for the past three months! We appreciate all our readers who wrote to check on us, and we apologize for the lack of news this spring. We are doing just fine, but life in the orchard became busier than usual when we decided to pursue USDA Organic certification this past winter.

In the months since we first detailed our soul-searching over farm certifications in our August 2025 newsletter we surprised ourselves and decided to take the leap to pursue organic certification. It has taken a lot of time and work for the past seven months, but our efforts paid off and we are pleased to announce that Kordick Family Farm became certified organic early in June!

We see that ubiquitous little green and white seal on our signage now and think about how deceptively simple it looks. There will be a lot to keep up with going forward, in terms of daily recordkeeping, interface with our certifier, and annual inspections, but the really hard work of creating an extensive “organic systems plan” for our application, and putting together dozens and dozens of supporting documents is over. We’ll see how we like being USDA Organic, and in the meantime, will continue to maintain our Certified Naturally Grown (CNG) certification, as well. We really like the grassroots nature of the CNG program and hope it will continue to grow in the future as a simpler alternative to the National Organic Program for farmers.

Between getting ready for our organic inspection and the general hubbub of late spring, as orchard management tasks like spraying, mowing, and trap monitoring ramp up, we’ve been busy, and the weather hasn’t helped. (We’re farmers — you already know we’re not impressed with the weather, but this season, we don’t think anybody else is either!) North Carolina has been in a somewhat remarkable drought situation and, until recently, the apple trees really hadn’t had a good drink of rain since winter dormancy. Thankfully, we’ve had a few inches of rain in recent weeks, but between the drought and the high heat, our season is running 2-3 weeks early and has kind of caught us with our pants down, before we were even starting to think about picking fruit.

When our ‘Early Harvest’ June apples began ripening for an extra early harvest, we knew we were in for it. Our ‘Tarbutton’ apples are now in full swing, as well as ‘Red Gravenstein,’ but ‘Early Harvest,’ ‘Red Astrakhan,’ ‘Duchess of Oldenburg,’ and ‘July Tart’ are already in the rearview mirror. It’s only July 1st!!!

Thankfully, we were able to convince the wonderful Carroll County Cannery in Hillsville, Virginia to open up early for us, so that we could run right up and process our Early Harvest apples into a lovely applesauce. In recent years, it’s become important to us to try and highlight what makes individual heirloom apple varieties so special. In the case of classic “June apples” like Early Harvest, that are fleeting, fragrant, tender, and tart, you eat as many as you can fresh, but since they practically overripen between glances, most Southerners rush to put up as many jars of early applesauce as they can with this fruit.

This is the first time we’ve featured Early Harvest in a canned product, and we love the way the applesauce turned out: it’s unsweetened, so on the tart side, but there’s enough natural sweetness inherent to the apples to balance things out a bit for a really delicious sauce. We chop the apples in half, but keep the skins on, and cook them briefly in a large steam kettle (they are very tender-fleshed apples and practically melt into sauce when even a hint of heat is applied), then mill them through the cannery’s old-timey “pulper” machine to strain out any seeds, skin, and stems. The resulting applesauce is silky smooth with excellent, mildly tart flavor that really showcases why people have loved Early Harvest apples for over 200 years. You can currently find KFF’s Early Harvest Applesauce in our Etsy Store, along with other early season specialties we’ve been cooking up, or come visit us at this Sunday’s Trade Street Farmers Market in downtown Winston-Salem, NC, to pick up a jar.

KFF will be at the Trade Street Farmers Market in Downtown Winston-Salem, NC this Sunday, July 5th, from 10am-2pm!

This new market is held the first Sunday every month, and evokes a festival as much as a farmers market. We’ll be there with fresh summer apples for sale, as well as hot-off-the-canning-line Early Harvest Applesauce, Tarbutton Apple Jelly, Apple Blossom Jelly, Wild Blackberry Apple Jam, and more! This will be our first time attending the Trade Street market, and we’re excited to see what all the fuss is about.

We know, we know — we still owe you a final Limbertwig installment, but since that’s been on pause for the last few months anyway, we’ve got another fun update for our readers, that will catch you up on a bit of our spring doings, to boot. In the last newsletter we sent, we mentioned that we would be making a pilgrimage to the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland to check out the famed (well, in certain circles anyway) pomological watercolor collection. We made an appointment months ahead of time with the very officious staff (this is a federal institution, remember) and had several emails back and forth to establish protocols and let the special collections librarians know what boxes of materials we wanted to look in. (They have over 100 boxes comprising 7,500 watercolor paintings of American fruits, mostly apples, AND they have over 150,000 nursery catalogs in 4,500 boxes!)

Friends, we’re here to tell you, if you’re into apples and planning to be anywhere near south-central Maryland, do yourself a favor and make a pit stop. Er, make an appointment to make a pit stop, and make sure to ask for really, really specific directions to the library building. It took a little while to find the right complex, let alone the right building, and knocking on locked doors ate up more than an hour of appointed viewing time, but once we were shown to the inner sanctum of the Special Collections level of the library, it was like traveling back in time.

The librarians had pulled boxes of material for us and we were allowed to look at it in a special room, under supervision, after checking at the door any bags and jackets we could conceivably use to purloin historical documents. Surprisingly, given that we were leafing through documents and nursery catalogs that were often hundreds of years old, we were not required to wear gloves. We were allowed to take photos, and it quickly became apparent that 3 hours (minus 1 by the time we found the library) was nowhere near enough time to even scratch the surface. We focused on pomologist William Henry Ragan’s boxes of personal notes for hundreds of different apple varieties, a veritable treasure trove of information, but we couldn’t even stop to read, just snapped a photo of anything of interest and moved on.

We had also requested to see certain historical nursery catalogs, and while we were briefed on library workings, nothing could have prepared us for the setup. The catalogs are boxed according to year or year range, rather than by nursery, and are not in any kind of alphabetical order. For example, if you want to see the Prince Nursery (Long Island) catalog from 1771, you receive a box full of catalogs from around that year, and you paw through them until you light upon the one you’re looking for. You’re just (gently) tossing aside the other incredible documents of historical record to get to the one you’re looking for.

On that note, it was truly spooky to be surrounded by so much history. And it was astonishing to pull out one of Ragan’s hand-scrawled notes in almost impenetrable, old-style cursive, perhaps with an associated, folded-up newspaper or catalog clipping, and unfold it, only to realize that the crease on the paper was still fresh. It gave us goosebumps to think that only a handful of apple nerds had looked at these papers since they were written in the early 1900s. In fact, you can kind of count on one hand the few authors and researchers who have visited to view the pomological watercolor collection and associated materials — we know a lot of them personally!

After our visit to the library, we continued on to The Berkshire Roundtable apple meeting that had given us the excuse to make the trip in the first place. While there, we talked with our friend, Lydia, the orchardist at Eden Specialty Ciders in Vermont, and she let us know that we hadn’t needed to take all those hundreds of photos of Ragan’s apple notes. A few years ago, she did an amazing service to the American apple community and, over the course of a couple weeks related to research for a thesis project, scanned all of the notes, then diligently uploaded and organized them into an easy-to-search format. Lydia was kind enough to share the link with us and give permission to share it with others as we saw fit, saying that her goal was “to make these cards a usable resource for all.” Pretty cool, Lydia.

Likewise, if you can’t make it to the National Agricultural Library in person (but you should — there is so much national heritage to take in there), you can now surf the recently digitized collection online. But there’s something about putting your hands on these old documents and leafing through the pages. Which sort of leads us to this month’s featured apple at long last. While at the library, we were able to pay our old friend, ‘Summer Banana,’ a visit.

Last year we featured that wonderfully sweet, early apple that grows so well for us here in the NC Piedmont. It was trademarked by the J. Van Lindley Nursery in Pomona, NC, near Greensboro, after the nursery paid $75 in 1900 for what may have been the original apple tree in South Carolina. With regards to the apple’s origins, we let our readers know the following:

“Unfortunately, we don’t currently know anything about the apple’s history before the nursery purchased its tree in SC. Historian alert: we just learned that the Greensboro History Museum possesses an extensive collection of manuscripts related to Lindley Nursery, including financial records. While the collection was acquired in 1995, processing wasn’t completed until 2001, and it’s possible that some of the papers shed more light on the origins of Summer Banana. We didn’t have time to do the legwork before this newsletter went out, but we’ll be looking for an excuse to visit the museum and do some research. If anybody beats us to it, please let us know what you find out!”

A friend let us know that he had visited the Lindley Nursery collection at the Greensboro History Museum in the past and did not remember seeing anything that might shed some light on the origins of Summer Banana. We arranged to look at the early J. Van Lindley Nursery catalogs in the National Agricultural Library’s collection while visiting earlier this spring, and found the original listing for the apple in the nursery’s 1902 catalog:

“(Trademark.) In offering this new August Apple, we are giving our patrons an apple unique in name, flavor and quality of fruit. We secured this most peculiar flavored apple from the rural districts of Marion county, S. C., and paid $75 for the original tree and full control of same. Our agent secured a half dozen samples of the fruit and sent them to us by mail. We gave one of the specimens to a lady in our office the day they arrived and who was totally ignorant of the name of the apple or its history. The moment she began to eat it, she stopped and remarked: “It tastes just like a banana.’ Thus the strong and true banana flavor of this apple was detected instantly by a party who knew nothing whatever of the name of the apple; had never heard of it before, and as above stated did not know anything of the peculiarity of the fruit or that it was a new variety. We offer this valuable new summer apple with full confidence of its success. We believe it will succeed wherever the Early Harvest succeeds, and we predict that it will soon be recognized as the leading summer apple of its season, ripening about six weeks after Early Harvest, or about half way between this old standard variety and the standard fall varieties. The Summer Banana produces its fruit in remarkable uniformness of size of specimens, most all specimens being of the size of the plate shown on last page of catalogue cover. The true color as near as can be shown can be seen on the plate. It is a superb eating apple, having a pronounced banana flavor. We have full control of this variety and genuine trees of same cannot be secured elsewhere. All others under similar or different names are fraudulent. 50c. each.”

Now, we could have looked at a digitally scanned version of the 1902 Lindley Nursery catalog online, and we’re sure grateful that we can, but what a privilege to be be able to leaf through the old pages in person, even if we didn’t uncover any new information regarding the origins of Summer Banana. As mentioned earlier, we didn’t have time to do any reading as we rushed through boxes of material at the library, so did not see the mention of the Summer Banana’s picture on the back cover of the catalog. After closing the catalog, we just happened to to flip it over and notice that the bright, striped apple gracing the back page was labeled Summer Banana. Another picture was excitedly snapped, the catalog boxed up under the librarian’s watchful eye, then the apple detectives plunged back into the treasure trove of pomologia.

We must be getting excited about our national birthday party or something: we felt the need to start eating like it’s Independence Day last weekend and, of course, for our impromptu cookout, we grabbed what we had on hand . . . apples.

This isn’t a recipe, per se, more like a prescription from disinterested parties: make apples the star of your cookout, you’ll be glad you did. First of all, in case you didn’t know, the secret to a perfect burger is to add a bit of applesauce before patty-ing. The sauce doesn’t impart a ton of flavor, but keeps the burger nice and moist, especially if grill cooking is involved.

Next, go to the KFF website and scroll through the recipe section to find the one for Cider Baked Beans. This is like replaying our greatest hits, huh? Beans are slow-cooked for hours with cider syrup, onion halves, and mustard, with some fresh apple tossed in for good measure towards the end of cooking — here you have the perfect picnic side.

Finally, we hate to be obvious, but you know what you know what goes really well with a burger and beans? Apples, you guessed it. Saute’ up some savory fried apples: all you need to do is melt a bit of butter in a pan, fry a handful of sliced onions, add some fresh sage and a few tart, firm-fleshed apples (we use Red Gravenstein this time of the year) cut into quarter-inch slices or a little larger, toss in a bit of salt, then cook briefly for 3 or 4 minutes until tender.

Ta-da. Grab some sparklers and it’s a happy Fourth of July!