I ran across this story on the Slow Food Blog the other day – link here: America’s Apple Traditions Renewed.

Here at Magicland Farms, we grow both the common varieties as well as the antique and rare varieties. We have over 100 different varieties of apples although we do not get crops from all of them each year. Let me describe a few of our rarer varieties to pique your interest:

Ashmead’s Kernel – It apparently is a seedling of NONPAREIL and has crisp yellowish flesh that is tinged green. It is sugary, juicy and aromatic with a tart/sweet flavor.

Calville Blanc D’Hiver – There are two things that cause this apple to really stand out: exceptionally high Vitamin C content and its superiority among the pie apples! This apple was first mentioned in seventeenth century France.

Snow – One of our most asked for apples, it is usually on the small size and, as its name indicates, its brilliant white flesh reminds one of newly fallen snow. It is aromatic with a spicy flavor. Snow (Fameuse) is thought to be one of the parents of the McIntosh.

Gravenstein – The yellowish white flesh is tender, fine grained and crisp with a well balanced acid-sugar content. Our trees are getting on in age and we don’t often have a great crop. For pies, they are fantastic!

Court Pendu Plat - We sometimes refer to this apple as “The Tree of Life” and laughingly refer to it as possibly being in the “The Garden of Eden”! Why? Because it is a very, very old variety perhaps dating to the times of the Roman Empire although it wasn’t until 1611 when it was officially recorded. The translation of the name from French means “suspended, short, flat.” This describes the way this flat apple lays tightly against the branch. This apple was widely planted in Tudor England. It is also known as the “Wise Apple” probably due to its late budding and flowering that allows it to escape late frosts. The flesh is a creamy yellow, firm and fine grained with a rich, brisk, acid flavor. It has a high Vitamin C content.

Hawaii – This apple is a cross of Gravenstein and Golden Delicious. At times, it has a hint of pineapple in its flavor. It stores well and is an excellent fresh eating apple.

Golden Russet – This is an old American apple of unknown parentage. The fine grained yellowish flesh is crisp with an exceptional sugary juice as well as a tasty tartness. It was known in the 18th century and was described in the book Fruits and Fruit Trees of America in 1859. Russets were grown along the shores of Lake Ontario during the 1800s. These apples were prized for their long storage potential in root cellars. Golden Russet fell out of favor in the early 1900s with the development of refrigerated storage and a preference for large, red apples.

Northern Spy - This is the famous pie apple and is also great eating especially for those who love an apple a bit tart. One of the best varieties for storing, this apple is juicy and crisp with a rich, aromatic, mildly acidic flavor. Northern Spy was found in an orchard at East Bloomfield, New York, grown from seedlings brought from Connecticut about 1800. It may originally have been called ‘Northern Pie Apple’ and is also known as ‘Red Spy’ and ‘Red Northern Spy’. This apple has more Vitamin C than average apples and has been in great demand by processors for frozen apple slices, baked goods etc.

One of the things we like to do in the Fall (if we have enough apples) is to set up a display of apples that can be bought by the pound. That way, you can taste many of these rare varieties for yourself and decide what your favorites are. We have many customers who enjoy creating their own taste tests for themselves and their families. We even had a teacher who bought a couple of each varieties to take to her second grade class for a lesson on apples. I bet they had fun!

This is one of the great things about buying local; you won’t find these varieties in any of the supermarket produce sections. You need to hunt out your local orchardist to find these interesting, tasty older varieties.

We sell over a hundred varieties of apples. Every week we have new varieties of apples ripening. We usually start out with Quinte in mid-July then Melba a week later and go on from there until late October and early November with Fuji, Granny Smith, Rome, Braeburn etc. It is hot here in July, August and often the first half of September and apples get soft fast. In previous years, we have struggled to find a way to keep them stored so that the warm summer weather would not cause them to lose their crispness. But we never really came up with a good way to store them; even storing them in shade and a basement caused them to deteriorate way too fast.

Last summer, my husband came up with the idea of converting an area of our storage building (where we usually store supplies and such) into a walk in cooler. His one problem was developing a way to control the temperature so that we could keep the apples at the right temperature to keep them juicy and crisp. The problem with using a room A/C was (1) The A/C’s thermostat would only go down to 62–this was no problem for my hubby, the real problem was that if you set it below 50F and it was humid the thing would ice up. Well, with his design it sensed the ice and it shut off the compressor until the ice melted! One smart gizmo! He developed a way to modify a everyday room air conditioner in order to allow it to keep the apples at a much colder temperature than the outside air. He called the controller, which uses a Picaxe Microcontroller (a tiny on-board computer) The Smart Room A/C Contoller. He was so thrilled with the design he wrote an article for a widely read Electronics magazine Nuts and Volts. The article was printed in the October 2008 issue.

If you might be interested in making one yourself, go to Magicland Electronics for more help.

The room was built using 1-1/2″ insulating foam panels for the walls. This part of the project was designed and built by my boy, Matthew. We used it last summer and it worked quite well. We then stored our left-over apples in it when we closed up last December and they look the same right now as when we put them in there–most types are still fairly crisp.

So now we can keep our summer apples during the hot weather without fear of deterioration and, over the winter, we can store apples for sale in the spring.

In trying to grow anything at the farm, deer and other critters prove to be one of the biggest problems we have. In years past, the deer have been known to devastate whole fields of sweet corn, destroy nearly three fourths of our bean crop and make it darn hard to pick the few beans they are so kind in leaving to us and take bites out of our pumpkins and watermelons making them useless. The raccoons have done their fair share of damage as well, especially to the early corn. It has proven to be very frustrating and discouraging to us.

However, last year, we decided to put up some electric fencing around certain crops at the farm; the watermelon, the strawberries and some of the corn (if I remember right). Much to our surprise, it worked very well. So this year we decide to fence in most of the farm, except for the main orchard. The guys have been out digging post holes and cutting down trees to use as posts. This week with the exceptionally beautiful weather, much progress has been made in putting up the posts for the fence. The above pictures show some of the work that has been done.

From what I understand the entire east and west boundaries of the farm have had the posts set in the ground. Now we need to work on the north and south edges. Some parts of the west side of the fence you can see when you drive by.

One of our crops that has been steadily growing in sales year, these last few years (hey, we never grew them before 2004!), has been heirloom tomatoes. A few years ago, few customers even knew what they were and we were even less knowledgeable about the matter. Now we have customers seeking us out because they want to try them.

We found out about them from a doctor friend who gave us a Brandywine from his garden to try. The little gift started us off on our heirloom tomato adventure.

Below are some of the varieties we are hoping to offer this year, along with a brief description of each. And I say hoping because you never know what, if anything, we are going to end up with come this summer. This is not a complete list but just a tiny sampling of what we plan on growing.

The following varieties are ones we have planted in the past and love:

Mortgage Lifter – This heirloom was developed in the early half of the last century in West Virginia. The story goes that he made enough off of the plants to pay off the mortgage on his farm. (Happily, though our home is mortgaged, our farm isn’t.) These tomatoes resemble Brandywine in flavor, but present a much better appearance. This is an excellent full flavored tomato.
Green Zebra – This is a beautiful small green tomato with dark green stripes. It never turns red but has the best flavor of any tomato, in my opinion. The flavor is excellent with a sweet-tart tang to it.
Kellogg’s Breakfast – This is an orange beefsteak tomato, originally from West Virginia. It is meaty with a terrific sweet, tangy flavor.
Paul Robeson - This is one of the most highly regarded black tomatoes; the flavor is full, sweet and tangy with a full rich flavor typical of black tomatoes.
Aunt Gertie’s Gold – A yellow golden tomato that has a good flavor and balance of sweet and tart. I prefer Kellogg’s Breakfast but this is a very good tomato.
Brandywine – This is a large reddish pink tomato that is a legend among heirloom tomatoes. It produces large fruit with a superb flavor. The main problem we have with these tomatoes is the fact that they don’t produce much salable fruit. We are trying a new strain this year to see if it is any better than ones we previously grew.

New varieties we are trying this year: (descriptions are from the seed catalogs)

Red Rose - This is a cross between Brandywine and Rutgers (the original Campbell soup tomato) with the crack resistance of Rutgers combined with the flavor of a Brandywine.
Stupice - This is an early, cold tolerant tomato from Czechoslovakia. They are small (2 oz.) tomatoes with a sweet flavor.
Rocky - A plum shaped tomato that is sweet and tangy. Supposedly makes an excellent sauce.
Delicious - A large meaty beefsteak tomato. This is the variety that holds the record for the largest tomato ever grown.
Stump of the World - A bit smaller than Brandywine but more productive with excellent taste.
Virginia Sweet - A large red-gold bicolor tomato that is very productive with a sweet and rich flavor.

And of course, although not an heirloom, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we are growing SunSugar/SunGold cherry tomatoes again. These tomatoes are wonderfully delicious with a sweet fruity flavor. These literally fly off the shelves when we have them available. One of our regulars is obligated to buy a pint everytime she comes to the stand as her grandson absolutely adores them. If you haven’t tried them yet, you must give them a try!

A lot of our time has been occupied with starting our tomatoes and peppers in the basement, using fluorescent lights, these past few weeks. Basically we start the seeds in seed flats and continue to transplant them to bigger peat pots as they grow until they are ready to be planted in the fields come May. The tomatoes destined for the High Tunnel will be planted sometime in late April, I believe.

We have a wood stove in the basement which we keep fired up to give the seeds the warmth they need to germinate and grow. Once the weather warms up, we begin to put them into our unheated outside greenhouse to give them the benefits of the sun.

As you can see from the pictures below (sorry about the poor lighting but it is the basement!), we have set up shelves and fluorescent lighting around the wood stove. The heat from the stove helps the seeds to germinate better.

And below is a picture of what results from the above process. A tiny plant that we hope will eventually give us lots of luscious tomatoes starting in July!

Again, we are trying some new varieties of sweet corn at Magicland Farms this year. We do a lot of research into what varieties deliver the best flavor and yield so that we can continue to provide high quality sweet corn to our customers. This year we are adding Mirai sweet corn as well as Optimum sweet corn. We are excited to offer these two varieties as they promise to deliver extremely high quality sweet corn. Both have the supersweet gene but are not supposed to have any of the annoying supersweet tendencies toward toughness, super crispness (almost hard) and lack of flavor, but instead, it is claimed, have a creamy, tender texture with the luscious sweet corn flavor we demand in our corn.

One of the biggest problems with selling sweet corn is ensuring that we will have an adequate supply during sweet corn season. One of my husband’s biggest nightmares (literally, he has bad dreams about this!) is that he is without a steady supply of sweet corn during July, August and September. And one of his biggest headaches is figuring out when the first picking of sweet corn will be ready.

This year we are going to use growing degree days to help us calculate when each patch of sweet corn (we plant about 30 patches) will be ready. Simply put, a growing degree day is a number which is calculated based upon the ambient temperature or how warm it is during the day. The cumulative growing degree days from the time the corn is planted will let us know how fast a crop is ripening.

Normally in July, the average growing degree day is 22, during June it’s about 19 and the same for August. Our very early corn will ripen about 1350 gdd after planting and the later variety about 1750 gdd after planting.

Matthew is writing a Windows based computer program to help with calculating these growing degree days. We hope to test it out this year and perhaps sell the gdd software next year.

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The MF 135 tractor that we use at the farm died on us in June of 2007. The only way to revive it was to do a complete overhaul of the engine. Our brave and daring son did most of the work on the rebuild with consultation and assistance from his dad. I call him brave and daring because he had never done anything like this before although he is very mechanically inclined.

Apparently what happened was the center cylinder’s exhaust valve (the 135 has 3 cylinders) broke and practically destroyed the center piston. He removed the cylinder head and had all the valves repaired/replaced. Then he replaced all three piston sleeves and all three pistons. Since the piston sleeves were the dry type, he had to make a gadget to pull out and push in the sleeves. He and his dad were very pleased with the design of the piston puller/pusher–it uses a threaded rod and some special nuts and stuff.

Well, after some minor setbacks and ingenuity, the tractor is FIXED! It started up today very well and sounds like it is running fine. Looks like it will be ready for action as soon as the spring planting season starts.

Our 225 pound pumpkin

Our 285.2 pound pumpkin

Having a giant pumpkin at the stand has proven to be an attraction in and of itself. We position at least one of the pumpkins so that it can be seen from the road, which has brought people in to visit at the stand that might not have stopped otherwise. Our regular customers also love to take a look at them and learn about them.

Well, we have seeds available for sale from two of our most recent giant pumpkins. If you check out our Giant Pumpkin Seed page at our website, you will find out all the details on ordering. A packet of 7 seeds, with growing instructions, is $4.50, free shipping.

In answer to many of the questions I get at the stand, here’s the way we move those giant pumpkins:

Michigan agriculture blooms with lifestyle farming, specialization

Here’s a story I just ran across on Mlive.com, the Michigan news website. It was interesting to me because we, too, are a family farm. My husband originally bought the property back in the early seventies, one parcel in 1970 and the other in 1972. The roadside market, as it is now, was started in 1985, although from 1975 through 1984 he sold his produce across the street, with the help of his kind neighbor Mildred VanBuskirk.

It is nice to see that others are trying their hand at this rewarding lifestyle although it is sad that, more often than not, one must also work off the farm in order to make ends meet.