While providing advice on renovating old orchards, this writer to the New England Farmer gives more documentation that old orchards were not always made up of (what we call today) named “heirloom” varieties. Sure, 19th century orchardists weren’t all growing Red Delicious and Granny Smith. And yes, they were growing some interesting tasty fruit. But it wasn’t always a known, named variety. As we’ve found in other documents, seedling orchards were still prevalent as late as the mid 1800’s (and later?). It wasn’t until the temperance movement garnered strength (reducing the call for cider), that named varieties increased in value and popularity.
Most likely, today’s old orchards that are in need of renovation, are comprised of old named varieties. And it’s fun to figure out what you may have. But this advice from “Evelyn” on renovating an old orchard (ca. March 1851) still applies, even though it was directed toward seedling trees. We provide it in three parts:
The New England Farmer and Boston Rambler
Boston, Saturday, March 29, 1851
Vol. VI, No. 13
Renovating Old Orchards (part 1).
MR. COLE: - The fruit growing business is undoubtedly, under careful attention, to be henceforth a prominent employment of the New England farmer. We infer this from the fact that the healthfulness and luxury of the choice varieties are much better understood now than they were a few years since, when our apple orchards, for the most part, bore natural and very ordinary specimens, when not one garden in half a dozen furnished a single pear tree, and these in the main produced worthless insipid affairs; - when a cherry tree, unless it were some of the old varieties, of moderate and scrubby growth, producing when they produced at all, a small inferior fruit.
Then, in many places, the farmer who could sell his Seek-No-Furthers and Greenings for 12 ½ cents and 17 cents a bushel in autumn, thought he was doing a pretty fair business. Now he can sell the same varieties at the same season for fifty cents a bushel.
It is no wonder, then, that fruit culture is becoming more popular than it once was, and that many old orchards are undergoing a remodeling by grafting, and that many young trees are being set. Nor is it strange at all that in this grafting of old trees and setting out new, that many are in the end disappointed in their realizations. There are doubtless approximate causes for these failures in success which are so often realized.
Yours, &c., EVELYN
I love that statement: “when not one garden in half a dozen furnished a single pear tree, and these in the main produced worthless insipid affairs.” Statements like that remind us not to over glorify the old orcharding days of our farming ancestors. Well, not too much, at least.
