I remember the cracks in the cement of that Somerset cidery – they looked like the Grand Canyon in miniature – having eroded away the floor with the drips of countless pints of acidic cider poured over the decades. And a handwritten sign in red letters: “55 pence per litre.”
Little did I know, but that day a seed was planted in my head, one that would take over ten years to mature. If you start an apple from seed, it will take anywhere from seven to ten years until it begins to fruit maturely. That was about how long that seed took to bloom in me.
It was 2005. I had just turned 20 years old and was on a semester abroad in London from my coursework at UCLA studying Political Science & History. The year before, my father, after a nearly decade-long battle with pancreatic cancer, had finally reached the end of his life. In search of some meaning in the experience, I sought to explore the world around me. As I hadn’t had much experience traveling solo, I joined a tour group to hike the Inca Trail and explore the Amazon rainforest in Peru. Most of my travel companions were much older, and of the few that were closer to my age (in their 30s), there was a couple from England.
At the end of the trip, they invited me to visit them in Somerset. That weekend trip to a lovely storybook countryside cottage would set in motion an alternative future life pathway in agriculture. The magical calling of those gnarled old apple trees had taken its place in my mind.
Several years after graduation, I decided to pursue a career in law, but I found myself dissatisfied with life as a paralegal, stuck inside all day organising papers. Now living in Brooklyn, I decided instead to follow my passion for plants and pursue a career in urban agriculture. Following that shift, after decades in the city, I decided a more rural lifestyle would help further develop my agricultural experience.
In the autumn of 2015, those seeds that had been planted 10 years earlier found the right conditions to come to fruition. Through a gathering of farmers, I met Andy Brennan and Polly Giragosian, the founders of Aaron Burr Cider. They were the first commercial cidermakers in the United States to revive the centuries old tradition of making cider from wild apples, which was not only a necessity across Colonial America (water sanitation not being a thing), but a tradition that had been lost to the hatchets of the American Prohibition (along with all those cider apple varieties).
I landed in a very special part of the world: the Catskill Mountains, once home to more than 14,000 named varieties of apples. The ancestors of today’s apple come from the Tian Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan, which lie at the 41st longitude line. The Catskills are along the 42nd. Apples that had naturalised themselves to this region were growing as part of the forest all around, and it was impossible for me not to notice. This was a region that was deeply connected to the centuries-old historical precedent of American cider-making, and retained the trees to prove it.
I found myself on an old farm, foraging wild apples from a 40-foot tree on a hillside with a spectacular view of the sun setting on the autumn foliage of the Delaware River valley below. A place where the old, gnarled branches of apple trees routinely reach their 100th year. And the 2015 season was one of the heaviest wild apple crops in a generation.
My wife and I started planting our first apple trees in 2017: standard trees on “Antonovka” rootstock, so they would live longer than us. And we never stopped. We named our farm “Wild Russet Farm,” a reference to the rough skin on the apple (my favourite characteristic of cider varieties) and a descriptive nod to our approach toward farm management. We learned to graft, propagate our own trees, and make cider and vinegar every season. And it all kept growing from there – from peaches and pears to plums and now pawpaws.
But you can only do so much alone. Taking my passion for fruit trees, the years of mistakes I made, and the lessons learned, it was time to help others forge their own path in the orchard. And what a perfect fit it was to find a position working with The Giving Grove: to bring the joy of fruit trees into the lives of so many community members across the nation. (To date, over 650 orchards across 16 cities, touching hundreds of thousands of people.)
I have learned so many lessons from working with apple trees. And as I find myself adding hard cider varieties like Yarlington Mill, a bittersweet cider cultivar born of the soils of Somerset, I think back to those cracks in the cement and smile. The direct link to the cider heritage that started it all for me.
Apples changed my life. And it is my hope that they can have the same impact on those that step into a community orchard across the US and the world.
by Ryan Watson, National Orchard Operations & Education Manager, Giving Grove
Reproduced here with kind permission from The Giving Grove.