Resilient Orchards
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Brendan Barnard found a love for cider making seven years ago, and bought property to someday open his orchard-based cidery. After he and his wife were both laid off from their tech jobs, that someday came quicker than expected and before the trees were ready to produce. So, he has been sourcing fruit from neglected, forgotten, and sometimes wild apple trees.
Barnard… “And then we get out to some of these properties and you see an apple tree. That's 110, 120 years old. It's 45 feet tall. And the last time somebody lived on the property was 1905 and no one has irrigated it since. And no one has fertilized it since or pruned it or given it any care and there's 400 pounds of fruit on it. So that, that was really like an eye-opening experience. That's what we need to be planting. And so that just totally changed my theory of, of orcharding and what we should start doing.”
Barnard wondered what he can learn from the resiliency of these trees and apply to his own orchard.
Barnard… “This is the vigorous, vigorous stuff that can survive with minimal inputs. And so there's just, there's an immense bounty to draw on both in terms of our cider making and the fruit that goes into it. And then also just, you've got that huge, huge, like survivorship effect of what works and what can we learn from this?”
Learn more about his wild, rural and rare cider at posterityciderworks.com.
