Bev Sidnick, of Hoodoo Ranch at Spences Bridge, BC, shows an apple tree where a bear has reached up, pulled down a branch, and started eating the apples. Bears were a huge problem at the ranch until Bev and her husband Bob Howard obtained three large dogs.
Facts gathered by BC Agriculture1
British Columbians consume 25 per cent of the apples grown in BC. That’s about one hundred apples per person per year.
In nature, a protective wax shield covers most plants, flowers, and fruits. While an apple is still on the tree it develops this coating of plant wax, which slows dehydration.
Apples are the second most popular fruit sold in supermarkets, ranking next to bananas.
In Norse mythology, King Rerir prayed to have children. Hearing his plea, the Goddess Frigg sent him an apple of fertility, by way of a crow, which dropped it in his lap. The queen ate the apple, resulting in a six-year pregnancy and the eventual birth of their hero son, Volsung.
In February 1884, Jessie Ann Smith prepared to leave her home in Scotland with her new husband, fruit-growing expert John Smith. They were headed to Spences Bridge, part of British Columbia’s dry belt, where today, standing amid the cactus and sagebrush on the ridge above Hoodoo Ranch, you can still see the line in the hillside where the Cariboo wagon trail once carried gold-seeking prospectors.
“I would like you to take these with you,” said Jessie Ann’s father, pointing to several little apple trees he had growing in his garden. “It is a new variety of apple called Grimes Golden. John might like to try it in the orchard he is developing.”
So begins Jessie Ann Smith’s adventure-filled memoir, Widow Smith of Spences Bridge.2 Her story covers the gamut of perilous exploits associated with pioneering a new land, including confrontations with rattlesnakes, bears, and cougars; brutally cold winters; a herd of cattle drowning on thin ice; and John Smith surviving a mining accident, in which he was buried up to his neck in a slide. But it is also the story of Jessie Ann’s love affair with apples, especially the Grimes Golden, for which she became famous. Even today, in Spences Bridge, you can see one of her beloved trees—unmarked and unadorned, but still a landmark of living history.
Hoodoo Ranch gets its name from the huge hoodoos that rise above it (partially seen here on the left). The ranch, one of the few in BC that grows heritage apples, is a spot of greenery amid the desert-like landscape.
Amid all their adventures, the Smiths had created a substantial orchard of over 3,000 trees by the time John died in 1905. Now the “Widow Smith,” Jessie Ann, and her children set about maintaining the orchard and selling the fruit which, at its peak, amounted to 12 tons of apples—contained in 20 railway box cars (each holding 630 boxes) and sent to Vancouver, Calgary, and beyond—along with cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, and pears. But it was through fruit exhibitions, which the BC government began using as a means to promote exportation, that Jessie Ann’s fame grew. When individual growers were asked to submit exhibits to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in London for the Colonial Fruit Show, Jessie Ann sent a collection of apples and won a silver medal. She began exhibiting both overseas and in the United States and won numerous medals, ribbons, and even cups.
“In 1909,” she wrote, “I sent another exhibit of Grimes Golden and other apples to the show in London by the RHS. King Edward VII visited this exhibition and asked to see Widow Smith’s Grimes Golden apples. At first my apples could not be found. The officials at the show were nearly frantic. They tried to show the King other apples belonging to the Smiths in Devon, others grown by Smiths in Kent, by Smiths from everywhere, but the King was not satisfied. ‘The apples which I have come to see are those of the Widow Smith of Spences Bridge, BC,’ the King persisted. At last, to everyone’s relief, my apples were located.”
This charming piece of BC apple history sets the backdrop to Hoodoo Ranch, which is one of very few orchards growing heritage apples in BC’s interior. Owned by Bev Sidnick and Bob Howard, the ranch is a lush slab of greenery amid a desert-like landscape, stretching alongside the Nicola River and below a towering wall of hoodoo formations. The couple has close to a thousand apple trees, including a collection of more than two dozen heritage varieties. Some are so rare they can’t be found anywhere else in the region. Their more unusual trees include Ananas Reinette (Netherlands, 1821), Ashmead’s Kernel (England, 1700), Egremont Russett (England, 1880), Orenco (USA, 1867), and, of course, Grimes Golden (USA, 1804).
Bev Sidnick believes this old Golden Grimes tree near the highway at Spences Bridge once belonged to pioneer Jessie Ann Smith, who became famous for her apples.
I arrived at Hoodoo Ranch on a sunny fall day in October, basking in the beauty of the landscape around Spences Bridge and thrilled by the scenery on the drive up Fraser Canyon, along the Trans-Canada Highway from the Lower Mainland. My frequent trips through BC and into Alberta have typically occurred via the Coquihalla, a fast-paced highway constructed in the 1980s. While that trip is beautiful too, I realized I hadn’t taken the original route since the Coquihalla was built. I let my mind toy with this as a metaphor for new and heritage apples. The route I usually take is faster and more convenient, but by travelling it, I’d forgotten the intense joy of the original highway.
With this in mind, I toured Hoodoo Ranch, sampling some choice, juicy fruit and admiring the pristine appearance of the trees and their apples. Bev showed me one tree that had been damaged by a bear, a huge limb broken and lying perpendicular to the trunk.
“The bears reach up and pull down a branch. Then they just sit there and strip the apples off it.”
The addition of three big dogs to the ranch helped solve the bear problem.
Bev and Bob purchased the 129-acre Hoodoo Ranch in 2008. Bev is a retired special education teacher and long-time avid organic gardener, while Bob is manager for the area’s highways contractor. Both spent years horse ranching. Before buying the ranch, they purchased and restored the historic James Alexander Teit house in Spences Bridge. Although the ranch was overgrown with cactus and sagebrush when it came on the market, it presented them with a new challenge—one they have embraced with transformative results. In buying Hoodoo, Bev said, they’d met some of their goals, like living a simpler life, growing food organically, becoming more self-sufficient, leaving a smaller environmental footprint and contributing locally, adhering to slow and local food movements.
Crates of apples line the orchard at Heart Achers Farm as the fruit is harvested. Heart Achers has half of its thirty-five acres planted in apple trees, with six hundred trees per acre, producing two hundred thousand pounds of apples.
“After three years of searching for an affordable property, we had almost lost hope when the property came available just five kilometres from where we were living,” Bev said. “As luck would have it, it was a certified organic farm complete with almost a thousand trees—cherries, peaches, plums, apricots, pears, and apples. Included in the orchard were apple trees that I hadn’t heard of since my youth.”
Farming apple trees at Hoodoo is full circle—with a twist—for Bev, who grew up on an apple orchard near Vernon, BC. Coldstream Ranch, a large commercial operation, specialized in Spartan, McIntosh, and Delicious.
“My first paying job was picking apples back in the days when the use of pesticides went unquestioned,” Bev recalled. “Large tractors with huge tanks full of toxic chemicals slowly proceeded up and down the rows of trees, spraying billowing clouds of these chemicals into the air, ensuring it would blanket the entire area. This spraying was done numerous times during the growing season. As children we would run and play in the orchards, eating apples in their every stage from small unripe green apples to fully ripe apples ready for harvest. I spent months every year handling and consuming the apples, not realizing the potential health risks.”
Hoodoo’s operation is tiny in comparison, producing about fifteen thousand pounds of apples, but the couple is able to work the entire farm with a small amount of assistance from friends and family. They sell apples to Discovery Organics in Vancouver, Footprints Harvest CSA in Merritt, at farmers’ markets, via farm gate sales, and through a “pick your own” program. They also give back to the community by donating apples to several organizations, including the Elizabeth Fry Society in Ashcroft, Heskw’En’Scutxe Health Services Society, and Hidden Mountain Drummers (Lytton First Nation).
Bev picked Cox’s Orange Pippin as one of her top eating apples, but said, “I suppose my very favourite is Gravenstein. [It’s] acceptable for eating, but unsurpassed for applesauce and pies. Many of my mature customers request this apple as they also remember it from their childhoods.”
Many of Heart Achers’ heritage apples support cider makers, such as Sea Cider in Victoria, BC, and Rustic Roots Winery in Cawston.
Hoodoo introduces customers to the different flavours of the apples by free taste testing on the farm, at farmers’ markets, and by donation.
“Often our u-pick customers who arrived on the farm for a specific variety end up tasting, preferring, picking, and leaving with a different variety. I always tell my tour guests that we operate an ‘all you can eat’ orchard, encouraging them to try everything.”
Hoodoo’s farm tours teach visitors about organic farming and natural pest control among other things. The ranch also offers riverside camping and other activities, with lots of information on its website.3
After leaving Spences Bridge, I drove east across to Merritt, Kamloops, Revelstoke, and then down through the Okanagan apple-growing regions (past Coldstream), Kelowna, Penticton, and all the way down to Cawston, near Osoyoos on the province’s southern border. Here I stopped at Heart Achers Farm—the only orchard in the province that the British Columbia Fruit Growers Association was actually able to name as specializing in heritage apples. The association knew of Heart Achers’ Ron Schneider and Andrea Turner because the orchard’s Cox’s Orange Pippins won the Canadian National Award for Heritage Varieties at the 2008 Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. The two have been farming their organic heritage apple orchard for more than twenty-five years. They are also part owners of Direct Organics Plus packing house and distribution centre for organic growers in Cawston.
By the time I visited this 35-acre orchard in the heart of BC’s organic-growing country, they had already harvested their Gravenstein, Hyslop, Fameuse, Bulmer, and Porters, most of which (150,000 pounds) went to Sea Cider in Victoria. They were set to pick Cox, Calville Blanc, Winesap, and Newton Pippins. In total, they have 15 varieties of commercial heritage apples, with their Newton Pippins and Winesaps being the most popular on the fresh market. The vast majority goes to cider makers, and some goes to a nearby winery called Rustic Roots. (Run by the Harker family, Rustic Roots Winery makes several fruit wines, including one that uses Fameuse from a 110-year-old tree that still produces apples on their fifth-generation family farm.)
Ron Schneider of Heart Achers Farm in Cawston, BC, another of the few orchards in BC’s interior growing heritage apples instead of more commercially viable types.
Heart Achers took a risk, planting heritage apples rather than commercially proven varieties. However, the risk appears to be paying off, as interest increases, and Heart Achers may turn out to be one of those forward-thinking businesses now on the edge of something that’s about to boom. (Similarly, years ago, they were among the first to jump on the organics train.) Most recent interest in Heart Achers apples, said Ron, has come from cider makers and cider-apple growers, another group of entrepreneurs getting into the basement of a burgeoning business. But he’s also had calls from elsewhere, like a scientist from the University of Saskatchewan’s fruit program, wanting to test heritage apple trees suitable for growing on the prairies.
As Ron pointed out, most orchards go with “safe” apples because sales have to be high to make land prices (between seventy-five thousand and one hundred thousand dollars for a bare acre in Cawston in 2010) worthwhile. Irrigation, labour, and equipment are added costs, and for Ron, whose family has farmed the land in Cawston for several generations, farming may be in his blood, but he’s not getting rich from it. (“Why do you call it Heart Achers?” I asked. Said Ron, “If you’ve been farming long enough, you find out.”)
Today, Heart Achers has half of its thirty-five acres planted in apples, with six hundred trees per acre, producing two hundred thousand pounds of apples. At age sixty, Ron said he’s “winding down” but his sons are gearing up and taking on more and more of the work. After a tour of the orchard and the packing-and-distribution house, I got back on the highway, a sample of Ron’s generosity packed into the back of the car. It included some of the best-tasting apples, pears, and plums I have ever experienced, a bottle of Sea Cider’s cider, and an absolutely divine-tasting sparkling apple wine from Rustic Roots Winery.
Back on the coast I found yet another piece of living apple history, this one at Brae Island Heritage Apple Orchard (located on Allard Crescent in Langley), where a group of volunteers rescued heritage apples trees planted in 1858 by the Royal Engineers of Fort Langley.
Arborist Bill Wilde, a member of the Derby Reach/Brae Island Park Association, which took on the project in 2008, said several years ago they realized “there were a number of quite old apple trees [in the park]—between eighty and one hundred years old—along the river bank for several acres. We took it upon ourselves to clean it up, which meant taking out a lot of blackberry bushes. We also worked on remediation and abatement of the old trees, cleaning up and pruning.”
The trees included Northern Spy, Baldwin, Winter Banana, Wolf River, and Blue Pearmain, as well as several that remain unidentified.
“We got some oral history from one of the families that used to farm in the area. [One older gentleman] could remember living on the farm as a little boy with a black man living in a shack on the land. He could remember playing in the orchard. This gave us a real timeline.”
They decided to take cuttings from the identified apple trees as well as one unidentified pear tree, and graft them onto medium-sized rootstock. From there it seemed a good idea to create a heritage orchard; however, the park is on a culturally sensitive Kwantlen First Nation archeological site.
Apples and other organic fruit—some from Heart Achers—are on sale at a funky roadside stand in Cawston, BC.
“The cost and details of having an archeologist on site for the digging and planting of the trees proved prohibitive,” Bill said, so he went “back to the drawing board” and resurrected a tree-planting method (called the low profile pot system), which he’d used previously in New Westminster and requires no digging at all. After a presenting the plan to the Kwantlen First Nation and their advisors, he received approval to go ahead with it.
Basically, small trees are placed on heavy black plastic sheets filled with soil and then surrounded by sheet metal, a metre in diameter. The trees’ roots spread outwards in the soil within the metre-wide cylinder, and the trees themselves are kept vertical on wire lines like grapes.
“Then you tease the root mass up and out, and pull out the plastic. Now all the roots are exposed to the soil underneath. It’s nice to have them in the location where they will reside, but we had to move them to a lawn area.”
The trees were placed on mounds of soil and then back-filled with additional soil—no digging required. Planted in 2011, the trees will take three to four years to grow and then the wire will be removed.
“The plan is to continue to propagate the trees on a scaled-back basis,” Bill said. “There’s lots of enthusiasm for the project.”
The park association is all volunteers, who work in conjunction with Greater Vancouver Regional Parks and take on projects such as the removal of invasive species, replanting trees, and the preservation of a bog in the park.
“In the context of the Slow Food Movement, this is locally produced food. We know where it comes from. It is so much better than eating these hyper-hybridized varieties made because they last longer and look good,” said Bill. “I’ve always thought of trees as pieces of living heritage. Unlike other things, like monuments or buildings, this is something that was here, for example, when the railway went through. These trees were extremely important to those people who planted them.”
This is a sentiment, I’m sure, with which all the Royal Engineers of Fort Langley, as well as Jessie Ann Smith of Spences Bridge, would undoubtedly agree.
PHOTO COURTESY ORANGE PIPPIN LTD.
Taste and appearance: Medium-sized, conical, bright deep red over a yellow background with yellowish, crisp juicy flesh. Taste is sweet, sprightly, and aromatic.
Use: Eating fresh, cooking, juice, and cider. Primarily a culinary apple.
History: Was a major commercial variety in Virginia during the nineteenth century. Its origins are unknown but it probably dates back to the eighteenth century.
Growing and harvesting: The trees are vigorous but tender in the cold and are unusual in that they have pink blossoms instead of white. Ripens in late October and keeps until April.
Other: It was considered to be a good dual-purpose keeper until the 1950s, when better-flavoured, longer-keeping apples were developed.
PHOTO: SIERRA LUNDY
Taste and appearance: Medium-sized, oblong, and often flattened at the ends. The skin is somewhat rough, clear yellow with a slight red blush and fine russet dots. It has a rich, distinctive aromatic flavour, and bruises easily.
Use: Eating fresh, cooking, juice, and cider.
History: Originated as a chance seedling in West Virginia in the 1830s, and was widely planted during the early twentieth century. Its high sugar content was put to good use in brewing hard cider.
Growing and harvesting: It ripens in early October and keeps until February.
Other: Grimes is possibly a parent of the Golden Delicious. It is one of a relatively select group of apple varieties that are self-fertile.
PHOTO COURTESY ORANGE PIPPIN LTD.
Taste and appearance: Large, red and green. The flavour is described as “sweet and unpretentious, crisp and pleasant.”
Use: Eating fresh, cooking, and juice. Retains its shape when cooked and lends a rich, sweet flavour to apple pies.
History: Originated as a chance seedling in the mid-1700s. Initially called Woodpecker or Pecker, it was very popular in the US in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Growing and harvesting: Picked in late October or early November and keeps until February.
Other: Baldwin was one of the most important American commercial apples in the nineteenth century, being an excellent keeping apple with a fairly thick skin, and therefore able to withstand long-distance transportation.
PHOTO: DERRICK LUNDY
Taste and appearance: Medium-sized, flat-round with golden skin, and orange flush and ochre russeting. The flesh is cream-coloured with an aromatic, nutty flavour.
Uses: Eating fresh and cooking.
History: First recorded in Somerset, England, in 1872.
Growing and harvesting: Picked in late September, it stores until December.
Spiced Crabapples
4 lb crabapples
2½ cups apple cider vinegar
2 cups water
4 cups sugar
1 Tbsp whole cloves
3 cinnamon sticks
1 tsp fresh ginger
Wash apples and leave stems on. Prick each apple in several places with a needle. Bring vinegar, water, and sugar to a boil. Add spices tied in a bag. Cook half of the crabapples in the syrup at a time, 2 minutes each. Pour syrup over apples and let stand overnight with spice bag. Pack apples into pint jars. Bring syrup to boil and pour over apples. Adjust lids and process in boiling water bath (212 degrees) for 30 minutes. These are great with roasted or grilled meats.
Apple-Banana Bread
½ cup butter
2 eggs
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
3 bananas, mashed
1 medium apple, grated
1⁄8 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 cups flour
Glaze:
½ cup brown sugar
¼ cup butter
1½ tsp cinnamon
Blend butter, eggs, sugars, and fruit. Mix dry ingredients and add to wet. Bake for 45 minutes at 350 degrees in a greased and floured tin. For the glaze, combine sugar, butter, and cinnamon in a pot, heat slowly until sugar dissolves. Spread on top of bread at 45-minute mark, and cook 5 to 10 minutes more.