Bill Moretz - Moretz Mountain Apples

Most people couldn’t name 10 or 11 varieties, they just know what the grocery store has. Now there’s one fella named Dan Bussey, and he went through all the old nursery catalogs in the US and he found between twelve and sixteen thousand apple varieties grown in the US, and the reason there was that 4,000 discrepancies was describing the same apple. Once it goes extinct you can’t really compare it and say, well this is that same apple. And some people were really good about giving descriptions when they wrote it down, “this is a sweet-tart apple, with this kind of flavor to it.” Then others are like, “it’s a yellow apple.”

The old varieties will have 20 or 30 names just because back in the horse and buggy days’ people couldn’t go very far. So one apple planted you know 10 miles away, somebody might have forgotten the name of it by the time the apple actually produced on a standard tree, it takes about 10 years for a standard tree to produce anything, and by that time they’d forgotten the name of it so they just gave it their own name.

And a lot of them have different histories, like I’ve got one down there called Vartamin Lightning and the story was on the Vartamin Farm, lightning struck a good tart cooking apple all the way to the ground and back from the root came a sweet eating apple! (laughs)