Apples prove rich in history, and flavor

Calvin Bratt
Tribune editor

Cloud Mountain Farm co-owner Tom Thornton helps a family sample apple varieties at the Fruit Festival held Saturday and Sunday.

EVERSON – A little bit of apple sampling leads to a lot of history.
  Beautiful weather favored Cloud Mountain Farm on the second day of its annual Fruit Festival last weekend, bringing out crowds of eager connoisseurs of the apples, pears and grapes grown on the Goodwin Road farm.
  The tasting area featured over 100 varieties of apples, said Tom Thornton, co-owner with wife Cheryl. Spread on tables along with the plates of labeled fruit were notes about their origin and arrival in the Pacific Northwest.
  For instance, the Tompkins King (or just King) apple originated in New Jersey before 1800 and was widely planted in the Pacific Northwest from 1900 into the 1960s. The Alexander variety traces back to the 1700s in the Ukraine, was introduced to England in 1805 and came to Washington over a century ago.
  Sisters Sonia and Alisa Alexis and friend Kris Martini, all of Bellingham, stood tasting and debating about the Queen Cox, a strain from England in 1982, and the Roxbury Russet, a cider variety going back to the early 1600s in Massachusetts.
  “There’s so many (varieties),” said Alisa Alexis.
  Thornton was joined by several of his friends and fellow fruit experts at the busy sampling tables, where they carved off wedges of apples that had caught the curiosity of visitors for some reason or other.
  Dennis Lenssen of Sumas was attracted to a type of crabapple because “my mother had that from the Dakotas – the only type that would grow there,” he said.
  Table helper Jack Weyh, knowledgeable about apples, agreed. “Usually a crabapple is a little more cold-resistant,” he said. “Any of the regular apples here would not survive a winter there.”
  Somebody asked about the Spitzenberg apple, and colleague Rod MacKenzie – who grew up on an apple farm in northern California and now grows several varieties at his home in Fairhaven – explained that the Spitzenberg fares well in the Hood River valley in Oregon, not in northwest Washington.
  “It was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite apple. It’s planted in his orchard at Monticello,” Mac-Kenzie said.
  All of the varieties on display at the festival are either grown at Cloud Mountain or at the WSU Northwest Washington Research and Extension Center in Mount Vernon. The center has been a resource for the Thorntons over their 30 years of experimenting and evolution in the fruit and tree nursery business.
  Many of the festival visitors, in addition to choosing fruit, were considering a type of tree to buy for their own yields at home.
  It has been a cool season and so some late varieties, such as Ashmead’s Kernel, are really not ripe yet, said table helper Dave Maczuga, whose wife Terry manages the nursery at Cloud Mountain. They keep about 70 fruit and nut trees in Bellingham.
  Ashmead’s Kernel, with “a good strong apple flavor, a mix of sweet and tart,” was already winning tasting competitions in the 1700s, Maczuga said.
  Jonagold and Honeycrisp are two apple varieties that have thrived in the climate of western Washington and become commercially successful. Jonagold is one of several developed as a cross with Golden Delicious. Another is Elstar, a cross with Ingrid Marie in Holland about 1955.
  Gary Moulton, fruit horticulturist at the Mount Vernon WSU station, was hosting a wine tasting station at the festival. He said that the Cloud Mountain location gets more heat units for fruit growth than either Bellingham or Mount Vernon.
  E-mail Calvin Bratt at editor@lyndentribune.com.