John Bunker’s Favorites

For the past two weeks on the Local Food Report, I’ve been airing pieces from an interview I did this winter with apple expert John Bunker. The Maine gardeners I grew up with spoke of Bunker’s apple knowledge with awe and reverence, and when I finally met him, I understood why. Bunker—founder of the mail order nursery Fedco Trees—grows an estimated 450 varieties of apples on his farm outside Augusta, Maine. When I asked him if he had any favorites, he named two—and added in a little history. Here are Bunker’s favorites, in his own words.

Best for Cooking and Cider

JB: One that I particularly love is an apple called Redfield. And Redfield is a large fruiting red-fleshed apple that was developed at what was then called the New York State Food Testing, which is in Geneva, New York. It doesn't exist anymore, But Geneva, New York is now probably one of the five most important apple collections in the world, but it has a new name. It's not called that anymore, but it was then, and that was in 1938 when Redfield was released. And I love the apple. It's not a fresh eating apple; it's a cooking apple. And it's also used in fermented cider, but I like it for cooking. And it has an interesting parentage, which is this apple from Kazakhstan called Malus niedzwetzkyana, crossed with a American apple called Wolf River, which is pretty—people who would know their sort of American historic apples would have heard of Wolf River. And it has at least one full sibling that was released called Redford, R -E -D -F -O -R -D, and now I'm learning that there may have been others that were from that same breeding program but never got named and all have the same parentage so they're slightly different from each other, but they all have the same, they're siblings, they're full siblings. So that's one apple that I'm particularly interested in.

Weird, and Good for Eating

JB: Another relatively modern apple is one called Frostbite, which is an apple from the University of Minnesota. and it was not named until just 20 years ago or so. And it has very unusual parentage and is the crispness in Honeycrisp. So it is one of the grandparents, I think I have that correct, of Honeycrisp. And it is a really unusual-tasting apple that is a dessert apple, in other words, fresh eating. And people eat it and some people really dislike it and a lot of people love it. And it was never gonna get released because they said it was too weird-tasting. And I loved it and poked them and prided them and eventually they released it. And it's gaining a big following. And it makes interesting children. We have several of its children here on our farm because we start apples from seed also, which is really fun to do—it's like having kids! And so it produces really interesting children and it's also a very interesting apple itself.

On Super Parents, and Apple Ancestry

JB: Through collaborations with arboreta in Europe and around the U .S. we now have a pretty good idea of the most important apple genetics that contributed to the historic American varieties. [We asked]: Who were their ancestors? Some of those ancestors have names. We've figured out who they are. Others are just called […] unknown founders; they're unknown parentage. And they have different numbers, Unknown Founder 1, 2, 3, and there's dozens of these. So occasionally one gets identified, which is really incredible because these are apples that are in the ancestry, in some cases, of hundreds of different varieties. And the ones that have so far been identified, these sort of like mega -parents, are old, old varieties, most of which, until within the last few years, I never even heard of them. You know, they're not like Northern Spy or Westfield Seek-no-Further or Hubbardston Nonesuch. I mean, they're not any of those. They're the ancestors of those. So learning about these sort of super parents and their history has become a passion. Also because there's many of these ones that are unknown founders, I have focused on certain ones that are exciting to me because of the role historically that they played in essentially the sort of family tree of apples. So that's been really fun and really interesting and I think very important.