A-peeling hobby

Apples won’t grow in Alaska.

Someone should tell Dan Elliott that.

In the past 17 years, he has developed a one-acre orchard boasting more than 120 varieties of apples on the five acres he and his wife, Marian, own along Fairview Loop near Wasilla.

For Elliott, growing fruit is both a hobby and a challenge.

It is not easy, and he’s the first to admit he has put a lot of time and money into the project. He started with 16 trees, primarily the Norland variety.

“I got interested in finding different varieties that grow in Alaska,” Elliott said. “It’s kind of an experimental orchard.”

Each year he tries new varieties — new to their orchard perched on a bluff overlooking Knik Bay, not necessarily new to pomology, the science of growing apples.

The list of varieties he’s grafted on his trees include heritage fruits and modern crosses. Each variety has to not only survive the harsh winters of Alaska, they have to mature in time to provide the Elliotts with a sweet, ripe fruit in the fall. That, Elliott said, isn’t an easy task.

“There are some hardy varieties that are hardy here but won’t ripen,” he explained. An exampe is honey crisp.

Some of his most successful varieties are from places like Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta, Canada.

Elliott said the farther north the stock, the more successful it is likely to be. Many of the varieties are considered summer varieties in other regions. The three weeks Alaska loses on each end of the growing season yields about a 30-percent deficit in growing days compared to the northern states in the Lower 48. So the summer apples for tplaces like Elliott’s home state of Michigan, third on the list of apple-growing states, ripen later here.

“For us, that’s fall,” Elliott said.

Every year brings its own challenges, he said. A hard winter in 2008-09 made the 2009 season a poor production year. This past season started fantastic, Elliott said. There was a lot of sun and lots of pollination. Because of the small crop the year before, the trees were bursting with blossoms this spring.

And then it started to rain, and didn’t stop.

“With all of the rain, the apples are undersized, under-colored and under-sugared,” Elliott said.

But even with apples sub-par by the Elliotts’ standards, the colorful orbs still beat supermarket apples, hands down, Marian Elliott said.

“The home-grown apples definitely taste different than store-bought,” she said.

That, Dan Elliott said, is because commercial apples are engineered to be thick-skinned, uniform in size and weight and to handle being shipped across the country or even the world.

“It’s hard to compare the two,” he said.

The Elliotts sell their apples at the Wasilla Farmers Market a few weeks each year. For $10 for a gallon bag, it is more an effort to share their bounty than recoup the cost of operating the small orchard, which requires a tall fence to keep away moose, notorious for taking one bite from every apple they can reach.

Dan Elliott said he cannot envision a large-scale commercial apple orchard in Alaska.

“The price of land and fencing make it too expensive,” he said.

But that doesn’t stop the Elliotts and other members of the Alaska Pioneer Fruit Growers Assocation from enjoying their fruit trees.

On Saturday, the Elliotts hosted the annual apple pressing event at their orchard. Apple growers from around the area who do not have their own means of making cider bring their apples to the Elliotts’ to compress the murky, sweet juice from many different varieties. It is one of several events the association organizes each year, including how-to events for pruning and grafting each spring.

“Their whole objective is to share the information,” Marian Elliott said.

It doesn’t hurt when efforts to produce a topnotch product are rewarded, she said.

“Dan either wins the apple tasting or is in the top five best-tasting apples,” Marian Elliott said. “We think it’s the sun — this wonderful location.”

“I thought it was tender loving care,” protested her husband.

Marian prefers her apples a bit tart; Dan likes his sweet and crisp. “I like a zing to them too, though.”

For him, it is a matter of grafting the right varieties — as many as four on one tree — to a good, hardy root stock.

“The root stock is the important part,” he said.

Pioneer Fruit Growers meet the second Tuesday of the month throughout the winter. For more information on the group, visit apfga.org.