Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction to Albemarle Ciderworks
Years ago I had the opportunity to visit the Albemarle Ciderworks in Virginia.
Now their climate is very different than mine.
I live in a very cold climate
and
Virginia's climate is humid and hot
with a long growing season.
So I was fascinated to see
the amazing vintage apple cultivars there.
And I started to wonder, I've done episodes on hardy apple trees, I've done episodes on heirloom apple trees, but I wanted to do a show about apple trees that thrive
in warmer climates in the South.
[00:00:36] Meet Larry Stephenson
And so in this episode, my guest is Larry Stephenson.
He is from Southern Cultured Orchards and Nursery.
He's located in Coldwater, Mississippi.
He's going to tell me about the top 10 apples that thrive in warmer climates. Now what I learned during this pre recorded interview is that
some of these cultivars can be grown in colder climates. You just have to try and some of them will produce fruit.
We talk about chill hours though and how that limits southern growers.
And we even discuss a drought resistant apple tree that he thinks people should try.
I'm Susan Poizner of OrchardPeople. com. I'm also the author of the
fruit tree pruning book, Fruit Tree Pruning: The Science and Art of Cultivating Healthy Fruit Trees.
So let's dig into the interview.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. Where do you live and what do you do?
I live in Coldwater, Mississippi, the northern part of Mississippi, about 30 miles below Memphis. I'm a full time nurseryman. This is my only income. I propagate and sell small potted plants, mostly fruit trees. I really specialize in, apples, what I call deep south apples that originated in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and were once grown pretty widely, commercially even around 1900 or before that.
I grow Besides that, I grow apples for different regions. I have my apple collection and my Arkansas collection and my Tennessee collection and I ship these heirloom varieties all around the country. I also grow pears, mulberries, Asian persimmons, figs. And increasingly more native plants. There's a lot of native plants that are right there on the edge between, being fruiting plants and ornamentals.
But there's a lot of interest in natives now. I stay busy. I find the demand for these kind of weird fruit trees.
And, what is the interest in these quote unquote weird fruit trees? Why are they special and different?
my targets are homesteaders and permaculture people and master gardeners.
I talk to a lot of people that want to have smaller backyard orchards, and they do not want to have a spraying regimen. They want to grow stuff that can grow without much care. And to me, the heirlooms that have a good history of being grown on wide scale before the invention of modern chemicals and fungicides.
that's my strategy for avoiding a lot of disease just by the variety that have, like I say, have a proven history of performance. And a lot of people agree with me and I find the interest in that. So I can't guarantee. any of my trees will grow, and produce fruit without some care and possibly spraying if you want pretty looking fruit, but, I think I'm on the right track.
[00:03:37] Challenges of Growing Apples in the South
What are the characteristics of the climate that you're in? What makes it different from growing in Toronto or growing in Florida or somewhere like that?
A good bit of difference because Mississippi is hot and humid. We get about 60 inches of rainfall a year on average. We have a 8 or 9 or even 10 month growing season. And it's 90 percent humidity all year round. We don't get dry. Even in the middle of a drought, it'll be 90 percent humidity. And that humidity and the heat fosters a lot of disease pressure.
Fungal and insect too. So People from California and Arizona and Texas are always sending me fruit to try that they think is disease resistant, but they haven't tested it for disease in that kind of arid climate. You bring them into this kind of humid, hot climate and disease leaps onto those things as soon as I open up the box, so we really test stuff in Mississippi.
It's a hard climate for apples, pears and mulberries and persimmons, figs, a lot of things like that thrive on this long growing season and heat, but apples, this is a hard climate for apples, but apples were once grown here commercially, in the days before Mass transportation and big refrigerator warehouses, everybody grew their own fruit and they had varieties of apples all over the world, even in the tropics and semi tropics that people grew for their primary food source and more people are interested in that today. Mississippi, you get down this far south and, I tell people from the northeast and northwest in Canada, you come to a place like Mississippi and forget everything you learned about apples up there.
It's an entirely different thing here with the long growing season. The chill hour theory applies to apples more than it does to some fruit. In this climate, you need apples and pears, too, that will produce with less than 1, 000 chill hours. You need low chill varieties. And most of the well known, northern varieties with the famous names and all the standard varieties at the big box stores, Red Delicious, Gold Delicious, and Bartlett Pears.
They sell those down here, too, and most years, they're not going to get enough chill hours during the winter to set fruit, so they really have a physical limitation on the amount of chill they get in the winter, so they don't stand a chance of producing down here, so I specialize in more lower chill varieties of apples and pears.
It's a big thing. It's a different scenario than what you'd have in Toronto. A great deal. I often envy my northern friends when it gets cold in the winter and it stays cold there. And in Mississippi we have weather and spells, it'll be 80 degrees one week and 20 degrees the next day Fahrenheit.
So that's a hard thing apple growers and about December, I'm waiting for my apple trees to drop so I can put them in boxes and ship them. I envy my northern friends whose trees will just go dormant and stay there six months dormant and not need any care. it's harder for me, my stuff, my trees, basically apples just barely go dormant and they'd only stay like that a couple of months.
And then they start leafing out again. It's warm again.
[00:06:56] Understanding Chill Hours
You talk about chill hours. Now, if for northern growers, we don't even think about it. You go to your fruit tree nursery catalog, they don't even write how many chill hours, they just assume you've got a cold winter, and your fruit trees will go dormant, right?
There's just an assumption. So a lot of people aren't familiar with this idea of 1000 chill hours. So do you literally
take your calendar and mark down how many hours, today we're below freezing or, what can you tell me a little bit about what is, what are chill hours?
it's actually a theory, most apples originate or more widely grown in more northern climates.
chill hours are defined as hours between 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 45 degrees Fahrenheit, during the dormant season. hours below zero, below 32 degrees, below freezing, don't count, they count as zero. Hours above 45 degrees count as a plus one. So it's just a little formula you run, they run hours above 45 degrees Fahrenheit, subtract from each of your hours.
I do not personally keep track of that. Because the United States Weather Service and the USDA do, and you can find that information. They have a particular website. I don't recall it right now, but you can find that information, and you can get it from local extension agents. They can tell you how many chill hours you get in your specific region.
Apples, persimmons, mulberries, a lot of things, are fluid on that. They will grow over a wide range from north to south. It's really apples where I get specific about that. you're right, that information is hard to find. You don't see those in fruit tree catalogs much. They hide that information from you.
But you grow something like Northern Spy or Red Delicious, Gold Delicious, all those famous old northeastern apples. And if you really research them, maybe you can find out they have, they need 1, 200 to 1, 500 chill hours every winter and We just don't get that here, so the physical requirements literally aren't met, and they don't have a chance of producing.
And in Mississippi, after an especially cold winter, everybody brags about all the apples and pears they've got. And that is why that tree was sitting there waiting for its physical requirements to be met by that amount of cold. And after an especially cold winter, you'll get fruit, you'll get apples. But after a mild or normal winter, which is common, you won't.
So I grow varieties that will set fruit with a lower chill limit.
Fantastic. essentially, your choice is so important, both if you live in cooler climates and in warmer climates. In cooler climates, we'll look at the climate zone, we'll look at all sorts of information, but for you guys, chill hours is so important.
I want to go into some of your favorite low chill heirloom apple cultivars. But before we do, I just want to clarify. If I lived near you in Mississippi, I could go and buy
a Red Delicious apple tree. And it needs a lot of chill hours. I can plant it and it will survive, will it not? Or will it survive, but it just won't produce fruit?
Yes, it's no problem. It'll survive, but you might get fruit after a spacey cold winter. The tree needs that physical signal of cold and it translates. Into a chemical signal from the tips of branches. It goes down into the tree. It needs that physical cold, to actually set fruit buds and produce and it has something to do when they leaf out in the spring.
So yes, and they do. So they sell Red Delicious here and in St. Petersburg and in Tokyo and in Spokane, every place in the world. The nursery business sells Red Delicious, Gold Delicious, and Bartlett Pear. You can find them anywhere. But your fine cultivars for good apple growing regions, and the reason they're grown commercially on a wide scale, they are not the best varieties you can find.
The taste of some of these heirloom varieties will surprise you, when the apple's more than anything else. You have to get specific as to your climate. And I will say, a lot of these southern varieties, low chill apples, They would do quite fine if you take them further north and sometimes I believe the quality may even be improved, but the reverse is not true.
You cannot take a lot of northern apples and bring them this far south because they have a definite that chill limit. Which won't be met. A few do, and I have a few northern varieties, from Wisconsin, or Minnesota, or Canada, that will produce in Mississippi, or Russia, that will produce in Mississippi. I have a couple of good Russian varieties, or Scandinavian varieties that do fine here.
And you have to test them, to see. Not many, but, It's a thing, like I said, I'm more specific with apples than other places. I grow a bunch of weird northern and Appalachian apples and English apples that are heirlooms. I grow them because I can ship them to their proper region where they should be grown.
And I grow them because nobody else is. And I want to keep those genetics alive. They're worth growing. They're excellent fruit worth growing. And there aren't many of us that want to preserve these type of heirlooms. So I grow some unsuitable apples that I would never recommend in this climate. But they should be grown elsewhere, and I ship scion, good business, shipping and trading, scionwood to far off places.
I see. So you had mentioned to me before we started to record that you grow the trees for the trees, you are not growing the trees for the fruit. you're not the guy who's going to go to the farmer's market with the fruit, you give it to your customers, you say, these trees thrived in this region.
For hundreds of years before pesticides and fungicides came along, they should thrive now and either your customers are happy or they are not. so the question is, are your customers happy when they plant these trees? They are preserving these beautiful genetics. Do they then call you and say, Larry.
The fruit not working out for me, like, how does that happen?
They don't complain. That's a cool thing about my business. All my customers leave happy and satisfied. I tell them, I can literally, in Mississippi, in Alabama, in Georgia, in Tennessee, in this region, I can find where people are from and match them to the nearest, closest, apple that originated near them, within a few miles of them.
And it's remarkable how often I can do that. I'll ask somebody in their hometown and I can often supply them with an apple that originated there or a pear and they find out that and they're just happy as they can be to find that apple that was grown commercially in their county or town at that time, so they love it. It's a tiny little niche market, everybody doesn't appreciate this kind of stuff. So you have to find people that have a little interest in history and antiquities to where this thing is. But one thing about it, I don't have competition. Nobody else is crazy enough to grow this kind of weird stuff.
And I do find the customers, I connect with customers pretty well. And then when they find out what I'm growing, they're delighted to get it, and we travel a long way from different states to get this stuff, because like I said, I'm getting to be one of the few sources.
Larry. In the first part of the show, we talked about why the southern climate where you are in the Mississippi area and the areas nearby, why it's unique, you've got a lot of humidity, you've got an incredibly long growing season, and you've been telling me that you're turning to some old heirloom varieties that survived for hundreds of years before growers started to use the pesticides and fungicides that we use that many conventional growers use today.
I want to go through and hear about some of your top favorite cultivars that thrive and produce a beautiful harvest. Which is the first cultivar you'd like to talk about?
[00:15:06] Cauley Apple: The Southern Favorite
Cauley apples, C A U L E Y, from Grenada, Mississippi, was once widely grown throughout the South and Appalachians and fell out of favor.
all the Cauley apples originate from one tree that was found in Grenada, Mississippi in the early 1900s. Cauley is about the most productive apple that you can have. Big, green fruit, four inch diameter or sometimes bigger. heavily productive and high quality. Cauley will do, much farther north.
Cauley's interesting. They're solid green down here for me. They look a little bit like a big Granny Smith. The farther north you grow them, the redder they will be. So in the mountains of the Appalachians and farther north, the Cauley will be a red apple. Cauley's my number one apple for a long time and will remain that.
I find that very interesting because essentially what you're saying is that you guys eat them when they're green, which we might think aren't ripe. What do they taste like and does the flavor change as it turns more red?
Sweet, not the flavor that Cauley is ripe in August for me, and they'll be sweet but pretty hard, and they'll soften up later, but the taste doesn't change.
Every apple is unique. No, you cannot judge apples by their skin color. you'd think every green apple is tart like a Granny Smith that you've eaten at the grocery store, and all yellow apples would be like a Golden Delicious. highly on the sweet side. No, that is not true. You cannot judge them like that.
You can have a green sweet apple or a red tart apple. The heirloom apples will surprise you. Red Delicious is not the apple taste. That's the only apple selection we had when we were growing up and that you could find at the grocery store. That is not the apple taste. Apple taste will vary surprisingly.
So these heirloom apples You can grow better apples than you can buy at the grocery store.
I just, I think it's so funny that you also grew up with Red Delicious. I had no idea how lovely apples were now. My best friends know that if they want to make me happy, go and get an interesting apple cultivar and bring it to me as a gift to taste.
All Red Delicious come from one limb sport of a Hawkeye Delicious was the original Red Delicious.
It was a big, green and red striped apple and actually better quality. All the modern Red Delicious came from one limb sport of Hawkeye Delicious in New Jersey about 1914. And, everyone would be Since that worldwide last 100 years came off of that one limb sport because, they had a darker, more consistent skin, a tougher skin, and a tougher skin.
So they were better for storage and shipping. The original Hawkeye Delicious We'll do this far south and it is a better quality apple.
it's interesting because I was told that Red Delicious used to be delicious. That years and years ago, maybe the first trees had really yummy apples. And it's like Honeycrisp.
The first time I had a Honeycrisp apple, I could not believe it. In fact, Honeycrisp was when I really fell in love with the possibilities of apples. But today they're so expensive and I buy them and I think this is just okay. And it depends what soil they're grown in, what climate they're grown in. Red Delicious, probably the same thing happened.
It still has that beautiful shape. It's almost iconic how pretty it is, unfortunately, and doesn't really taste that great.
Honeycrisp. is one I preach against in this climate. It needs way more cold hours than we get. And even up in Michigan and Minnesota and Wisconsin where they grow Honeycrisps commercially, the farmers there hate them because they're very disease prone. And the Honeycrisps in the grocery store are expensive. They're excellent quality. I love Honeycrisps. Who wouldn't like them? they had to grow, they culled out nine out of ten apples to get that one beautiful, perfect Honeycrisp that you see in the apple selection at the grocery store.
So that's why they're so expensive. They're hard to grow and take a lot of spray. And that's not the one I would propagate especially for this climate.
Oh, definitely not. Even here, I can grow it here, but I wouldn't grow it. There's so many other interesting things.
So let's go on to your number two apple.
[00:19:21] Captain Davis Apple: A Civil War Legacy
Number one was Cauley, C A U L E Y. let's talk about number two, which is Captain Davis. That's an interesting looking apple. Tell me about the history there.
It is. There was a Captain Davis from Kosciuszko, Mississippi, served in the Civil War, and after the war ended, he walked back home to Kosciuszko, Mississippi, somewhere in the Carolinas, somebody gave him some apples, and he saved those seeds and planted them when he got home in 1865, and the family has, propagated and grown that apple since that time in that region.
And I've since found out, the family has moved to the Midwest and California and they've carried that apple with them. They don't call it the Captain Davis apple. They call it just their family apple. But so it's been grown some nice little medium size, half red, half yellow apple. Usually the color can vary, but that one's got a good history behind it, so I can sell them just on the basis of that, and it's productive and a good, trade to grow, and it's climate hasn't been tested farther north.
Okay, so this is not for northerners to try necessarily. In terms of the look, it's, red and with some green, some yellow, not a profoundly gorgeous apple. What about the flavor? It has to have a good flavor if people are going to grow it.
It is mostly sweet. Captain Davis has a few sour notes.
It is not my number one eating apple. I would say Cauley and a lot of others are better. But, it's good. It's better than average, you say. Better than Red Delicious. But it's got a few sour notes. Might please some people. I like mostly sweet apples. I like them highly sweet.
So Captain Davis is more a historical apple with a great story. Let's move on to your next one.
[00:21:09] Chickasaw Apple: Sweet and Productive
Chickasaw. Tell me about that one.
Chickasaw from Chickasaw County, Mississippi, a random seedling. Great big, red and green striped apple. Highly productive, highly on the sweet side. Literally limb breaking loads every year in August.
So that's one of my best sellers.
Wow. So limb breaking loads. So basically very productive.
Cauley and Chickasaw and several could use thinning, thinning the fruit in the spring when it's still small.
Okay, and it's a large apple. I see a picture of somebody holding it in their hand. That's a big apple. So it's ripe in August. Is that early season for you?
Is that considered an early apple?
In Mississippi, North Mississippi, most apples will be ripe in August.
Okay. And so, tell me a little bit about the flavor. Is that one that you find sweet enough for your taste?
Fresh, highly sweet, mostly on the sweet side. I don't recall that I've stored any very long or cooked with any, so I can't report on that.
But it's a good fresh off the tree apple.
Okay, next we've got one with lots of interesting pictures. I find this one intriguing.
[00:22:22] Yellow Hamilton: The Roadside Gem
Yellow Hamilton. Tell me a little bit about Yellow Hamilton. Why is that? What, how did that make it into your top 10?
That is a roadside tree from Hamilton, Alabama.
just a, tree, random seedling that grew out from probably an apple core. Somebody threw out the car window. A road, I think in the 1940s or 50s. But it's an excellent apple. Cauley, Yellow Hamilton, and Chickasaw, I tell people could be grown commercially in this climate if you wanted to. I would not. I don't grow them commercially.
But they could be grown commercially for fruit production. From what I've seen of their quality. And, production, it, looks a little bit like a big, Golden Delicious, and the flavor profile's about that same, highly on the sweet side, Yellow Hamilton is a better selection than Golden Delicious for us down here.
That's a good substitute. Don't grow this, grow that. Because I'm assuming that Golden Delicious would not thrive in a hot, humid climate.
Doesn't get enough chill and it gets too much fire blight and cedar apple rust.
And with something like Yellow Hamilton, what would you say the chill hours are?
Like 800, 400, 200? What would the ideal chill hours be?
Less than a thousand. I'm getting eight or nine hundred chill hours average and average is iffy thing where there's no average. I see them produced pretty well with that. I suspect they would do with 700 chill hours, but that's what me and my friends and my customers do.
We test the chill limits on these things. How much or how little they can take and I'm selling them in a, considerably southern climate farther south than me and those customers will test those so
That's fantastic that you're collecting feedback like that
Oh, yeah, every customer I sell to I think it's like expanding my own orchard I want them to grow it out and take care of it and report back to me, you
know, I love that because I feel the same way with my students.
I've got students, I teach fruit tree care to students from across North America. I have students in Norway, in New Zealand, in Australia, and I feel the only thing I don't get to do is go and taste the fruit, but I do get to hear their challenges and the opportunities and I learn so much more by, from my students.
So it's the same thing here. I
can't test them all. I have several acres of orchard, not enough. I need another 10 acres. Or I can't afford to grow every single variety that I'm interested in on a single stem, so I just have to go by others reports.
Okay. Let's go on to the next one.
[00:25:01] Shell of Alabama: The Complex Apple
It's called Shell of Alabama.
Yeah, that actually deserves to be in my number two spot, right behind Cauley. Shell of Alabama originates right north of Mobile, Alabama, a gulf coast apple. And in the early 1900s, Mr. Grangell Used to ship train loads of, Shell apples up into the northeast, which kind of reverses the normal flow of apples, usually the northern states and northeast, they ship apples down here, but he shipped a high quality apple up there and there's still a very small apple industry with only Shell apples in, Appleton, Alabama, right off on on the Alabama, Florida, line.
Still excellent quality apple, and I'm really producing Shell about 300 miles above Mobile, and I think maybe the quality is improved. It's not an early bloomer, it's only slightly early bearing about late July or the first week in August, so Shell is a all around apple.
So I sell a lot of Shell. It would be my number two that I grabbed this year. Shell, and the quality of Shell, they're medium sized. They look like a small Granny Smith. But the first bite, you can tell that's not Granny Smith. Because Shell is the most complex apple, tasting apple I grew up. It is sweet and tart and astringent and a little bit of everything all at one time.
And, leaves a very Cleansing, taste on your palate after you've eaten the Shells. So Shells, excellent little apple.
It's interesting that you say that because you say you're a sweet apple guy, but you like the complexity of this apple. It's like there are certain apples that I really that have almost a fizzliness.
Like they've got, I am a sweet apple person, but this is just so juicy and lovely and whatever. So it sounds like Shell of Alabama is even with sweet apple people like you and I, it can entice us. I wanted to say, you said Mr. Green Shell, ship trainloads of these. Now, excuse my ignorance. Is there a person called Mr.
Green Shell? Is that a person? Is that a company?
That was the name of the man, Mr. Green Shell. He had a fairly substantial apple industry in Appleton, Alabama at that time. So I bet that's documented and you can find it. But, that was his name, that was his business and they got famous.
Amazing. And I love the fact that there's Appleton, Alabama showing that apples, was, there was an industry. Of course, the climate is changing, but it was probably still humid and hot then too. So they managed to have a whole apple industry,
[00:27:35] The Story of Cotton Gin Alabama
Next I've got here, Cotton Gin.
Tell me about
that one.
Cotton Gin Alabama. That's a new one. I want to I've already grafted every single stick I had there. My friend Stacy Russell is in Fulton, Mississippi, and he's almost 80 now.
He's still an active apple explorer, and he is a source of a lot of these things. A lot of things I grow were his discoveries, not really mine. He's got a reputation as an apple hunter in interests, so he goes all around and people send him stuff all the time. He found this in Northwest Alabama on Cotton Gin Road.
There's, apple here, and I found it in his orchard. He has a personal collection of 600 trees. It's not a commercial orchard, just his collection. he's a collector. I looked at Cotton Gin Alabama two or three years ago after three or four months of drought, a bad drought, and I was going through his 600 tree orchard, and the ground was full of early drops, because he had a good fruit set that spring, we had typical good spring wet weather, and they set a big crop.
But under the heat stress, the heat and drought stress with no water for three months, everything dropped early. So I was walking on a carpet of tons of apples with every step and I came to this one tree in the middle of his orchard and the ground was empty under there and the apples were on the tree.
This was early August. The apples were still on the tree. They had not fallen like the other couple of hundred other varieties he had. They were still on the tree, and they were ripe, and it was early August, and they were big, about 4 inch diameter, red and green model, Good quality, highly sweet. When I cut them, the flesh didn't brown.
It stayed white like Granny Smith. So that means it's good for drying, or you can use them in apple salad. And I stored some, and after six months in the refrigerator, they would not shrink, shriveled up like the other apples. So that means it's a good storage apple. That adds up to a lot of good quality, so I want to grow lots and lots of Cotton Gin Alabamas.
It's excellent tasting, doesn't brown, stores, so that's, survive during a drought. That's the main thing, which I can't claim that it is arid climate apple. The trees themselves need a certain minimum amount of water. Of course, to live, but I saw Cotton Gin Alabama, , produce fruit well when nothing else did.
So that's the way you test things and evaluate them and Cotton Gin Alabama looked great after no water for three or four months.
I think that's incredible and I think that's the kind of thing like everybody's looking for a drought resistant apple tree, because Again, the climate, sometimes these days you can have a summer that there's no rain and what do you do and, something like by diversifying with a crop like this, you can really, maybe have some trees that can still hold on to their fruit.
. And have you had any Northerners order that? Scionwood for that? To craft their own trees?
I get some Scionwood from Stacy, but I, grafted, I have to hang on to some for myself, so I'm not selling that Scionwood, but I'll have Those in this fall, some scionwood I just don't have a lot of, but I intend to market that.
I can't claim that it's, like I said, an arid climate apple, but I, just say what I just did say it and that's a lot of good qualities for it. So I'll, yes. People have
to try when you're, able to let go of your scionwood for propagation. I'm sure there's a few listeners in this show that'll say, okay, I'll try it.
Next year, I actually have a long waiting list for some of those things. Pontotoc and Cotton Gin Alabama. I bragged about them a lot on Facebook and showed the fruit and given samples of fruit to people over the last few years. And they're pretty impressive, so everybody wants those. I introduce those things to the market a lot, rather a lot, and I like doing that.
when you got some worthy cultivars, spread them around.
[00:31:41] Dixie Red Delight: A Striking Appearance
Next one, Dixie Red Delight. I am loving the look of this apple. It is almost like a russet apple, but it's got russet, it's got red, it's got olive green. It is a really pretty, interesting looking little apple. Tell me about it, Dixie Red Delight.
Pretty from northern Alabama. A Methodist minister found that or grew it from a seed in the 1950s. North Alabama. And it's great big, about four inch diameter, pretty looking, ripe in August, mostly on the highly sweet side. A lot of my favorite apples are like that. a great apple for this climate. I don't know it's southern and northern limits, but, when I give people samples of Dixie Red, they like them.
[00:32:27] Pontotoc: A Sweet Surprise
We'll move on to Pontotoc. What's that right? Tell me about
there's a Pontotoc County, Mississippi, and they used to have a USDA and state extension service, a research station there. And I got that from my friend, Stacey Russell. And when I've given people Pontotoc apples over the last few years, they've all agreed that's the best one that they've tasted this year.
Best of all of them. Dark red, almost purple looking is so red. And they have a white scarf at the top. They look just like a big, Asian plum that you see at the grocery store, a big purple one, just highly sweet, crisp, got all the things you want if you like sweet apples. Pontotoc is really highly flavored, sweet, but it's not blandly sweet, it's still complex.
So it's just a high quality apple. And I found a man that worked at that Pontotoc research station. And. I don't know if they had an actual apple research program there, or they were just growing out some local stuff just to test them a little bit, but they bulldoze that under eventually, research programs only last so long.
So they bulldoze that apple plot under and before they did, the guy that worked there, name was Joe Goforth. That's a cool name, ran out there and took some scions from some of his favorite apples. And my buddy Stacy Russell got them from him. And, now I'm growing them. And I want to popularize them because it's an impressively good looking and good tasting apple.
So Pontotoc, from Pontotoc County, Mississippi.
And do we think there's a chance the Pontotoc would thrive in a slightly more northern climate or no evidence yet?
This has not been tested. Probably, like I said, I'd say a majority of these deep south apples will do just fine when you grow them further north.
Most of them aren't early bloomers. You wouldn't want them to bloom too early. Most of them will do fine, but like I said, the reverse is not true. Most northern apples you can't bring down in this low chill climate and succeed. But some will.
So this Pontotoc, it's way down in the list. It's like number seven or something.
Would you, because of the flavor, would you pop it up to number two or three? Or we've already got a one and a two that you were passionate about. Would you put it higher up in the list?
Cauley and Shell are going to be my number one and two. Pontotoc and Cotton Gin Alabama might take the third and fourth spot, just because I like the flavors of them and they're impressive and customers want them.
But like I said, I have limited sign wood. I've already grafted them this year. So I'll get more and more, yeah, and people will like them and they'll be impressed with the taste. So my, favorites change every year. Everybody always asks me, what's my favorite, but that changes. Multiple times during the year, depending on what I've tasted.
[00:35:11] Aunt Rachel and the Joy of Apple Tasting
I will tell you something, people always ask me what's the best tasting apple you've ever had. And I've had one answer for the last year, and that is Aunt Rachel, which comes from, North Carolina. David Vernon runs Century Farms there, and that was his Aunt Rachel's apple growing in his Aunt Rachel's front yard.
One year I was at my friend Stacy Russell's orchard, 600 trees, and a friend and I were running through the orchard and we were snatching one after another and taking a bite and throwing it down the ground. We wanted a good idea of the taste profiles of all these different things. Cauley, Chickasaw, Captain Davis, we were eating them all.
They were all ripe in early August and we came to the Aunt Rachel tree. And we stood there. It was such a difference. We stood there and ate every single Aunt Rachel we could eat, down to the core, they were just that delicious. We didn't take a bite and throw it down. They would just knock you out of flavor.
I've never tasted another apple like that.
Okay. And so did you ever tell David that you love Aunt, his Aunt Rachel Apples?
I haven't talked with him a while. He, and a man named Lee Calhoun preserved a lot of the old Southern apples, mostly North Carolina and Appalachian types, but he had grows more of them and he still does grows them and sells them and he.
He was a disciple of Lee Calhoun and so am I, but David Vernon and Century Farms did a lot to preserve a lot of these old varieties of apples. And some of my, I think my regional Cauley tree may have come from him even. We get them from friends, just a small group of us apple collectors folks.
Amazing.
That's so wonderful. What a great story. I just thought it was in David Vernon's orchard and there you guys are prowling around, stealing them, eating all the yummy apples.
My friend Stacey Russell who let me go in his orchard and I do my Now I will say I don't tend to my trees very much because I'm not growing them for actual fruit production.
I do a dismaying amount of work in my orchard for fruit production. I need two more. But Stacy Russell sprays conventionally. He has three tractors hooked up with different sprayers, mostly fungicides and insecticides. So he sprays conventionally. So he gets big. Pretty looking fruit where I do not always, with the unsprayed apples every few years.
So his place is a good place for me to grow and sample these things and look at the growth habit and disease resistant and stuff So he has older and longer bearing trees than I have. So I'm sampling and doing evaluations at a friend's place and my own,
Fabulous. Okay. We have two more apples to do.
The first one is
[00:37:52] Yates and Sebren Apples
Yates from North Georgia. Tell me about that. It sounds like it's a 300 year old cultivar.
Probably at least, a Yates North, well from 1844, Matthew Yates in Northern Georgia. Yates is a, crab apple, about two inch diameter tree, apple, beautiful when they're young, red and green striped, and right before they get ripe, they turn ugly and gnarly.
But Yates is one of my toughest apples, and all around. Most consistent bearers. I don't sell that many people seem to get turned off when I tell them the fruit's only about two inch diameter. Yates has a lot of astringency, but it has a lot of sugar too. So Yates is an excellent small eating apple.
I'll eat Yates all day long. I don't mind if it's only two inch diameter. A few people want specifically crab apples. I don't distinguish between a crab apple and a regular apple. It's the same genus and species. If the fruit diameter is two inches under, we call it a crab, but that's the only difference.
Some people want specifically crab apples, so Yates would be my number one seller,
And, it's, it could be if somebody is growing it and spraying and, even using organic or holistic sprays. It is an interesting looking little apple, but it could be like, if it's got the sweetness, kids might like it for little snacks.
It's sweetened, and it's got a different astringency and tannins that, people are thinking maybe Yates is our number one choice for cider, if you want to make cider in this region. so people are trying cider out of it.
Okay, last one. Sebren?
Sebren SEB R E N. Sebren's one of my low chill varieties.
It is from, Lena and Ludlow area of south Mississippi, south of Jackson, Mississippi, about 50 or 60 miles off the Gulf Coast. It is a, small to medium green apple. Sebren is right there on the edge between being a cooking and eating apple. Some sour notes to it, but it's a lot of sugar at the same time, so you could use them for either.
I believe I've cooked a lot with Sebren apples. But that's one, I will sell between Jackson, Mississippi and the Gulf Coast for that specific region. It originates there and does quite well and is pretty productive. The farther South there's a huge demand for apples among the gulf coast in Florida right now and in Louisiana.
People there want to grow apples and pears. And the number I think you can grow gets smaller and smaller as you get down into the gulf coast. The farther south you go, the harder it is to grow apples because of the chill hour limits. and I can find a variety like Sebren and Shell. Yes, that's what I want to grow because they will produce with a lower chill hours, like five or six or 700 chill hours. A Shell probably a good bit lower than that. So there's a demand for them. People down there want to grow apples. And those are some of the ones I will grow to sell there.
It's so interesting.
[00:40:46] The Business of Growing Apples
you said to me that now you do this full time, but I guess, is this like a retirement project?
Did you feel like you've been somebody who's been passionate about, fruit trees forever? But is it not a, is it a new thing for you or?
I started as quite a young man, just, I think I planted some trees when I was a teenager. I had some land, family land, and it was, some of it was cleared. I didn't want to fence it and didn't want to run cows, so I thought I'd plant an orchard.
That's what you do with unused land like it. So I thought I'd plant an orchard, and it got to be a hobby, and increasingly busier hobby and then a small part time business. And I retired. I did not retire. I've never retired. I never will. I quit a factory job about five years ago, my wife and I moved a hundred miles north where she had a better job opportunity up here.
And rather than find another factory job at my age, I thought I'd do this is a full time business because I realized I was making 10, 000 a year as just a part time business, when I could get to sales for the last few years before that, which is no fortune, but it's enough to encourage us to think that maybe I could make a full time business of it.
So I've only been the full time business for, the last five years. People keep asking me how I'm enjoying retirement. I work harder and longer hours than I've ever had in my life. There's no retirement for me. This is, for the first time in my life, and I'm 64 years old I'm doing something that I actually enjoy.
I'll do this until I just drop dead. I'll probably increasingly less and less as I get less physically capable as I grow. But this year I've got bigger propagating plans and everything. I intend to get big, do bigger, better business for a while because, like I said, I'm lucky, finally, this time of life to find something that I enjoy and I'll be doing, even if I couldn't sell them, I'd be doing this for myself and still experimenting and exploring.
lucky that way. And I'm lucky that I am connected with enough people that want these kind of weird and exotic, rare fruit varieties. So I do find a market for them. I'm sold out right now. I'm looking around. I've got big selling events coming up in April. I'm looking around desperately, really scrounging for what I can take to those events.
And I typically do. Every year I've done this. I found the demand and I'll ship, I have customers coming to my house in my high tunnel, and I've been shipping boxes of trees all winter. And I cannot hang on to, Enough inventory to have a good showing in the spring. I have in ground beds inside a high tunnel and I planted those with intent of digging them and potting them in January.
And that would be my spring inventory, but I had such a demand. No, I dug them up and put them right in cardboard boxes and shipped them out. So I've got very little left, declining selling events because I don't not have the right varieties to take to that region. it's a business. I'd never encourage anybody to get into the nursery business, but you can do it successfully.
I'm selling out. Everything I can grow, fast I can grow it.
You said you don't have a website, but people can find you on Facebook. How can they find you if they want to learn more?
Facebook page for Southern Cultured Orchards and Nursery. And I posted my inventory of grafted trees I had and scionwood that I have to sell, but that's all, in the last month, but that's, this is already obsolete.
I have thousands of people that follow me. Customers or potential customers.
Fantastic. thank you so much for coming on the show today. This has been a delight. I have learned a lot and talking about apple varieties is one of my favorite things. It's hard to find people who understand that. So I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
I've had a good time. Thanks for having me.
Earlier in the show, I promised you that I'd have some more resources for you on this topic. If you go to orchardpeople.
com best fruit, trees, to grow. you're going to find a bunch of other articles and many of them are on popular and interesting apple varieties, Now finally, if you want to learn more about fruit trees and fruit tree care,
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