Recorded March 31, 2022.
Help save your grandparent’s apple varieties for today and tomorrow. Create a future with more apple choices. Meet and spend time online with David Maxwell, the experienced apple grower whose passion is teaching and growing, collecting, and saving apple varieties.
Growing apples and other fruit in small backyard orchards, avoiding the use of chemical sprays, motivated by an awe of nature rather than commerce, requires a very different approach from that of the large commercial growers. This Zoom session aims to share some of the insights gained over an almost 50 year experience of growing apples and other fruit in small back yard orchards.
David Maxwell has been growing apples, (and other fruit), in small backyard orchards, as he moved around the country, for almost 50 years. His current incarnation comprises a luxurious 1/6 of an acre with approximately 180 trees of 50+ varieties, mostly apples, in Middle LaHave.) His initial motivation was saving the old varieties which were rapidly disappearing from commerce, but over the years he slipped into collecting lesser known, more modern, cultivars also.
David is now entering his twilight years and feeling an imperative to pass on the insights gained over 50 years of amateur growing, working with nature rather than fighting her, and spreading his (apple) seed as widely as possible.
Additional resources to support this talk can be found here.