TasteTrip
Passion fruit
By Christy Ann Conlin with photography by Dan Callis
On the hunt for Nova Scotia’s heritage apples in the Annapolis Valley
“A LOT OF COMMOTION over an apple,” drawls Anthony Morse, my husband’s cousin, as he crosses the yard and attempts to diffuse our heated debate about which is the
best apple. I love the old varieties, especially the Gravenstein, but James, my husband,
is crazy about a sexy new cultivar called the Honeycrisp.
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Morse’s Farm is in Berwick, N.S., in the pastoral Annapolis Valley, one of the world’s
premier apple-growing regions. Berwick, where James and I rent a house on a neighbouring
orchard, is known as the Apple Capital of Nova Scotia. But the Morse family farm, in operation
since 1842, now grows strawberries and market vegetables rather than Gravensteins, or even
Honeycrisps. Anthony gestures to the surrounding fields. “You’re not going to
find either of those here. This was all orchard back when our fathers were children.” He
points to the pumpkin patch. “Maybe you’d like a pumpkin?”
During the Second World War, the bottom fell out of the apple market and the Nova Scotia
government paid farmers for each tree they cut and burned. It’s said the sky above
the valley was black with smoke. They set the brush alight and turned the ash back into the
soil, and from it has grown the scaled-down exportoriented apple industry of today.
I’ve had a long and tasty relationship with the old “Grav.” I picked Gravensteins
as “drops” when I was a child. The first pie I ever ate was made with them. The
flesh is juicy sweet, and the skin is downright fragrant. On a warm autumn day, the fruit’s
perfume is hypnotic.
The Honeycrisp, however, is a farmer’s favourite — an enormous apple with a
lovely flush of colour and a full-bodied sweet taste. Crunchy and succulent, it’s all
things to all people — a wonderful cooking fruit and great for eating. It transports
well and has a long storage life, which is what a commercial apple farmer needs to be competitive.
By contrast, the Gravenstein doesn’t keep well. It ripens in the summer and then quickly
softens, its skin becoming oily — clearly an apple with a limited future.
An apple in decline. Many a farmer is tearing out the old varieties and replacing them with
Honeycrisps, the bold new apple that promises to save the industry from Chinese domination.
But I still love the vintage varieties, the forgotten apples, now exceedingly rare: Astrachan,
Ben Davis, Gano, Wolf River, Yellow Bellflower, Cox’s Orange Pippin and Strawberry
Pippin.
“Where can we find some of the apples of yore?” I ask Anthony and James.
They smile and shake their heads. “Try a U-pick.”
AND SO WE HEAD OFF, about 20 minutes east of our home, to Elderkin’s Farm Market,
U-Pick, Bakery and Cider Company in Greenwich, N.S. It’s a chilly autumn day with a
moody grey sky. My five-year-old stepdaughter Anna pipes up from the back of the car: “Why
are we going to an apple U-pick when we live on an apple farm?”
“We’re looking for some nostalgia,” I say.
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