July is bare-rooted apple tree ordering time! It’s been a long wait, but we now feel confident that we have the water infrastructure, system establishment and knowledge in place to be able to grow apples (without killing them) at Milkwood Farm. Oh happy day.

As our forest garden slowly creeps across the hillside, greener and more dense with every season, I’m beginning to believe that our rocky ridge could truly one day be an edible forest garden and holistic orchard. And so it is time to chose the first batch of apple trees to plant. But which to chose?

Black Oxford apples (not sure we can get this heritage variety in Australia, or if it would suit Milkwood Farm – still gorgeous!)

While a small part of me groans at the fact we didn’t plant all our fruit trees when we arrived at Milkwood Farm, the majority of me is very happy that we did not. We had no gravity-fed water and a severe drought those first 3 years, so in retrospect it was lucky we didn’t go crazy on the plantings.

Now, however, we have the beginnings of seriously useful infrastructure. A top dam for gravity-fed irrigation water to ensure our forest garden systems don’t cark it during the establishment years, and a forest gardener extraordinaire (Dan Harris Pascal) who’s taken on Milkwood Farm’s edible forest garden systems.

We’re also about to finally actually move onto Milkwood, and into the tinyhouse. This changes everything. The forest garden will now be at our back door, not over the hill and around the bend. The orchard will be where we pass through daily on our way to the chickens in the straw yard.

And so, what has been until now an ongoing design, planting and establishment exercise on a windswept hill (speaking about the forest garden here) which we’ve been cautious about investing too much energy into as we wouldn’t yet be able to tend it as a part of everyday rhythms, is about to transform into the ‘zone 2’ of our lives on a daily basis. Can you feel my excitement yet?

I digress. Apple trees. There are so many amazing ones. Which to chose?

Right now is a very good time to chose and procure you apple trees for temperate Australia. At this time of year you can buy them bare rooted, as the trees are dormant. Apples travel a lot better at this time of year due to their dormancy.

We’d like to grow a variety of apples that produce at different times, to stretch the Milkwood apple season out for as long as possible. We want varieties for eating, storing, cooking and drying. Some cider apples would make me very happy also.

Dried apples, pear and nashi from last Autumn’s efforts, made with apples from the orchard down the road

Our production goal would be to have about 5kg total of apples coming off the various trees per day for as much of apple season as we can manage. This might sound like a lot but we have a lot of apple eaters at the farm these days. And last season I took some notes, and this is what i found we went through:

• During our on-farm PDCs, we go through about 10kg of eating apples per day (for 40-ish people).
• For a normal day with on-farm crew + wwoofers + interns, we go through about 1.5kg of apples per day.
• With my new fruit dryer (which i am in love with) i can process about 6-7kg of apples per load. We could easily do 1 load per day if need be.
• In the event of having too many apples (god forbid), we can convert them to bacon via piggies. I see no downside here.

Suitable varieties differ from climate to climate, but here’s my current best-guess of what we should get, based on advice from the Brookmans and Pete the Permie, and what I know does well near Mudgee from other orchardists (who are sadly not organic, so how useful their yields are as reference I don’t yet know).

For advice on what apple varieties would do best in our climate (600mm yearly rainfall, 780m altitude, low humidity, temperatures up to 35ºc in Summer down to a couple of -14ºc nights in Winter), I asked Pete the Permie who with his wife Sylvia are the heritage apple keepers at Mt Telopea Permaculture.

Heritage Apple Varieties suspected as suitable for Milkwood Farm:

• Akane – early ripening, crisp eating apple
• Blenheim Orange – mid season ripening, great eating
• Belle de Boskoop – mid to late ripening, good eating / cooking / drying apple
• Fuji – mid season ripening, juicy and crisp
• Granny Smith – mid season ripening, eater, cooker and excellent drier
• Cox’s orange Pippin – mid season, ‘UK’s best eating apple’
• Kidd’s Orange Red – lateish ripening (but not too late, so it won’t catch our heavier frosts) – good keeper and eater.
• Kingston Black – late ripener – world’s best all-round cider apple! Mmm cider.

What have we missed? Should we be preparing to poke our own eyes out rather than dare to consider not planting a {…insert amazing heritage apple variety, robustly suited to Milkwood Farm’s climate, here…} ?? Please tell me if you have any blazingly excellent suggestions.

Another friend to me during this exciting but slightly daunting time of ‘getting it right’ in the apple department has been this book, which I am currently reading and enjoying bigtime: The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way  by Michael Phillips.

This is a darn fine book. DARN fine, I say. It’s all about apples as a forest edge plant and is basically a master work on permaculture apple growing and holistic orcharding as an integrated ecosystem. Michael’s writing is easy to get along with and engaging – the whole book was a pleasure to read.

It’s also densely packed with hard-won knowledge and very important fundamentals about all aspects of apple growing, from the soil food web all the way up to arboreal fungus.It’s already filled in a bunch of holes in my knowledge that i didn’t know i had (specifically, ramial woodchips rule).

I really feel like I’m in with a chance to successfully be harvesting kick-ass apples in 5 years with this excellent resource, and the advice of various apple enthusiasts at my side.

Among the 80 varieties of organic apples that Michael Phillips grows are (clockwise from upper left) Golden Russet, Erwin Bauer, Rhode Island Greening, Cox’s Orange Pippin, and Black Oxford. Image by Stacey Cramp

We’re very much looking forward to getting these apple trees and their associated guilds of herbs, shrubs and berries designed into and planted within both the nucleus forest garden at Milkwood Farm, and also the second-phase forest garden, which will be watered with greywater from the tinyhouse.

All of which will be pollinated by the honeybees in the Warré apiary just uphill, and partially fertilized (fingers crossed) with a little integrated forest garden duck system… come on Spring!

Further apple lurve:

• Michael Phillips’ website, with lots of resources and articles
• Organge Pippin – UK website with lots of info and heritage fruit tree register
• Mt Telopea Nursery – home of ‘Pete the Permie’, his wife Sylvia, and all their apples. The Allens’ craft fruit trees to order for a wide range of climates, and are generous with their knowledge.

Many thanks to both Peter Allen and Graham Brookman of the Food Forest for their help through the apple woods!

>> More posts and resources on designing and implementing edible forest gardens