Since he retired from a law enforcement career, Dave Benscoter has developed a passion in finding heritage apple species.
Now, he and Keokee Books in Sandpoint have developed a tool they hope will help them find more lost apples in our region. They’ve created a website, LostApples.wiki.
This interview edited slightly for clarity and brevity.
Dave Benscoter: What we try to do there is first of all, let people know about Lost Apples, what they are, and then also provide a way to get a hold of one of our committee people and either come take a look at their orchard or if it's outside of our driving distance, we'll send them instructions on how to send apples to us. And that's really the first step is to find these old homestead orchards and then try to identify the apples in the orchard.
The apples that we look for are considered extinct if they haven't been seen since basically 1920. And there are lists of apples that we know are not extinct. The Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon maintains about 5,000 apple varieties there. Up at the USDA Center in New York, they have a large orchard. John Bunker at Fedco in Maine has a large orchard. And then there's a fellow down in Virginia that we contact who has a huge orchard.
Once we pick our apples, I send them off to the apple identification experts in Oregon. If they cannot immediately identify the apple, then they start looking at the old books, old watercolor paintings.
An apple has 50 characteristics, and I cannot identify an apple. I know about 10 varieties of apples and all the other ones are just red and yellow and difficult to identify, especially with 50 characteristics.
But these experts in Oregon have been doing this for years, and they know exactly what to look for. And they whip out their books and pictures and go through. Usually what happens is they narrow it down to maybe a short list, and then they'll say, you know, we need to take another look at this next year. And usually the second year, maybe the third year, they'll be pretty convinced of the name of the apple. And then, well, is this apple a lost variety?
If we can't find one at any other orchard around the country, then we're convinced that it is lost variety and we make that announcement. And then we start making those apple trees to get them back so that they never become lost again. And the Temperate Orchard Conservancy keeps two trees of every once lost apple that we've recovered. It's a conservancy, so we'll never have to worry about those apples being lost again.
Doug Nadvornick: So if they're keeping two of each, do they just take branches if somebody wants to buy one of those or wants to have one of those for their own orchard or their own home?
DB: They do pretty much the same thing that we do once they have a grafted tree. We also have an orchard that we've planted with lost varieties. TOC will plant their tree. We plant our tree. As that tree grows, it produces new wood, new branches, and we can take those branches.
Some people want to graft their own trees and so we'll send grafting wood to them and other people. And it has to be local people, because we can't mail these apple trees. But if they say they want a lost variety, we, in the spring, when all the wood is dormant, we go out to the trees and cut grafting wood, and then we order rootstock, special apple rootstock, and graft the variety that people want onto the rootstock.
