Living in Lithuania, I particularly enjoyed the apple culture — everyone and/or everyone’s family member had apple trees. A family friend kept me supplied with bags of homegrown apples in the fall.
I used my family’s simple apple cake recipe, and took the cake to my friend’s family gathering. Everyone gushed over how good it was. When I returned for other gatherings they often served an almost identical apple cake.
To this day I wonder if they loved my cake because it was so like theirs, or if they started making it because they loved mine. My hunch is the former.
My trees didn’t produce this year thanks to the late spring frost and snow, but I plan to bake apple cakes with apples bought last week from Paul and Karen Teets in Eglon.
The Teets preserve heritage varieties and just darn good apples which might not even be named. Paul’s parents bought their farm with an orchard already growing.
Paul’s father read an article about an injured coal miner who had started to preserve orchards. Paul met this orchardist, Carlos Manning, now doing major work in the apple field, and learned to graft trees from him — “he got me started,” Paul said, adding “we got carried away with it.”
Now the Teets grow 150 plus varieties of apples (about 300 trees). Carlos regularly sends new ones.
They also build inventory preserving local trees. They told me folks sometimes don’t know what variety an aging tree is, but love its apples and don’t want to lose it.
Apples often don’t come true from seed, meaning a seed from an apple you love will most likely not grow into a tree producing the same kind of fruit — not necessarily as yummy. To get a tree which produces the same fruit, Paul grafts.
This involves splicing new growth from the old tree to healthy roots from another tree.
The process isn’t as easy as it sounds — Paul explained to me that you have to line up the layer inside the bark to allow flow from the roots to the new branch, which often means the new one won’t be centered on the old.
Another key element is “making sure your buds are facing up,” Paul said. If you don’t, you end up with a pretty funny looking tree.
Maybe in the spring I’ll learn a little more about the process if I try my hand at the art to preserve an old apple tree on my land — the taste of the apples from it pulls at my heart strings via fond memories from childhood through to adulthood.
Karen told me I’m not alone in having sentimental attachment to a particular apple tree. Many varieties are not available in grocery stores or even at markets.
Folks travel from other states to finally find apple varieties on the Teets’ farm for which they or their parents had searched for years. Paul and Karen tell touching stories about Sheep Nose Apples, Sweet July and Fallawater Apples.
Since I don’t have room here to write all these stories, I’m going to recommend you visit their farm (call Paul at 304-735-5878) to hear them firsthand. While I was there I not only learned, I also tasted many varieties of apples, and came away with a few bushels of different varieties and half a dozen trees.
“It started as a hobby, that became an obsession that we have to disguise as a business,” Karen told me. I can totally understand falling head over heels into the wide world of apples.
