Every year when October rolls around, we make the trip up across the Notch to Lost Nation Orchard at Heartsong Farm in Northumberland, NH. While there are plenty of apple orchards closer to home, we travel to Heartsong Farm to get the best of the best. It’s a foodie’s journey to pay homage to an orchard where apples and other fruit are grown holistically with a lot of love and a lot of labor.
Lost Nation Orchard is the fruit of Michael Phillips’s vocational calling. Phillips’s orchard is a impressive genetic library of heirloom and specialty breed pome and stone fruits. All trees are grown holistically, reserving synthetic sprays only for last ditch emergencies required to save an heirloom tree.
Phillips is a NH legend. He literally wrote the book on organic apple growing. Actually two books: The Apple Grower and The Holistic Orchard. These books were the inspiration for my own orchard here at Again & Again Farmstead. Once I learned it was possible to grow fruit successfully without synthetic chemicals, I set to work on building my own genetic library of trees.
Sadly Michael Phillips passed away in the winter of 2022. But thankfully, Gracie and Nancy have carried on stewarding the orchard and the farm and are doing a wonderful job of it too!
Not only is Heartsong Farm the perfect reason to visit Northcountry New Hampshire, the fruit reward that awaits you there is well worth it. Apples grown holistically are more dense and flavorful. It’s hard to describe the difference until you experience it.
Many of the heirloom apples have unique flavors you will have never experienced in an apple. Apples are similar to dogs in the way they are heterozygous; meaning they have a great deal of genetic variation. An apple’s seed is the genetic mixing of two different apple tree parents. In this way the only way you can get a new apple tree true to it’s parent is through grafting scions onto rootstock.
But this unique trait about apples and pome fruit in general, allows for infinite possibilities in flavor profiles. Another trait I find interesting about apples is the flavor compounds of different varieties can mimmick other fruit.
There are apples which taste like oranges, pineapples, grapes, cherries, and even bananas! Find yourself a Tolman Sweet close your eyes and bite into it. Then tell me it doesn’t taste like a banana popsicle. I once made a pie from Tolman Sweets I bought at Heartsong Farm and it was the best apple I’ve ever had to this day.
Indeed, many of the heirloom varieties taste like other fruit. I suspect before the British Empire’s East India Company transformed the global fruit trade, apples were bred and selected resemble fruits that were more difficult to come by in the colder Northern regions.
So once again, we are blessed to load up on a peck of delicious heirloom apples that taste like no others. The Phillips ladies have kept the farm in great shape and have made a really nice barn space where you can sip delicious mulled cider and select all the different apples you could want. Gracie is super helpful and full of apple knowledge, if you have a question, she has the answers.
Heartsong Farm offers workshops and apprenticeships for holistic orchard management throughout the year. Now that our trees are getting more mature, I’m probably going to do the apprenticeship myself.
