Though I’ve lived on the east coast my whole life and gone apple picking nearly every year with my family, I had never tried a Honeycrisp apple. And after trying a Snapdragon, a Cornell-bred new apple who has Honeycrisp as a parent, I realize I’ve been missing out. I had also never thought about all the work and science that goes into growing and maintaining an orchard. I always assumed that you planted an apple seed and hoped it grew into a tree, but as I learned at the orchards yesterday, that’s not the case. In fact, if you try to grow an apple from an apple seed from a store-bought apple, the tree would most likely produce inedible crabapples. The only way to replicate an apple tree is to graft some of the plant onto roots, and most orchards graft onto dwarf roots to maximize apple production and to keep the trees small enough that sunlight can touch every apple. In addition, no two apples are exactly alike, because every apple has to be cross pollinated and therefore have two parent apples.

Apples can be stored for up to 10 months, which was shocking to me. An apple picked off a tree in October can, if stored correctly, be eaten in August the next year and still be crisp and juicy. The apples, once picked, are stored in either an oxygenless sealed refrigeration room, or in a room that is essentially an enormous refrigerator. The apple breeding research facility places a lot of focus on not only the taste of the apple, but also its storability and its resistance to disease. For example, McIntosh apples are rarely used for breeding in New York because of its susceptibility to apple scab.

My favourite part about the trip, however, was that when I arrived at the orchards I didn’t know anyone in the group, and when I left I had plans to get dinner and go to the homecoming fireworks with other rose scholars.