Editorial - How'd you like them apples?

Apple press and two potential deliquents

Today's Southland Times editorial featured/favoured our Harvest Festival and the apple project that underpinned it and made reference to past comments made by the editor. It's a great editorial and we are very grateful to have attracted the benevolent attention of its author.
 Here it is in full, along with the link to the electronic version from the Southland Times website.

OPINION: A few years back, negative media types that we are, we managed to identify a downside of Riverton's Heritage Harvest Festival.

Yessir, ma'am, we predicted that it would wind up contributing to juvenile delinquency.

Specifically, the return of young apple thieves. Some of those long-ago fruit that our forebears grew hither and yon were tempting for taste reasons that still stack up in these days of salty snacks and sugary confections. They were bred for reasons markedly different from the colour, storage ability and commercial scale management that modern supermarket apples were.

As the trees growing in oftentimes spot-on microclimates start returning to the landscape through the splendid work of Robyn and Robert Guyton and their team, we stand by our dark prediction.

It was such apples that back in the day provided the Eden-like temptation that led prize-winning bible student Peter Arnett from Bluff to become an ardent thief, the better to prove his manhood to Johnnie Jamieson and Owen McQuarrie. And look where he ended up. A no-goodnik journalist hanging around the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

The fifth annual harvest festival at the weekend featured the now-familiar mix of workshops and family fun themed on heritage fruit and vegetables: How to choose, harvest, grow and preserve them. Cider making, preserving fruit, propagating berries . . . just about the whole package, to be rounded out next year by the return of pagan fertility rituals.

Probably.

This was, of course, but one of three Western Southland events held as part of Southland Heritage Month, dovetailing with demonstrations at the Templeton Flaxmill Heritage Museum and the Thornbury Vintage Machinery Museum open days, with displays of haymaking history tossed in.

Much of this is to be enjoyed in the full knowledge that it is bygone stuff, to be appreciated by looking backwards at it.

But not the open orchard project. The increased propagation of old-style fruit trees - not just apple but potentially pears, quince, berries and possibly even apricots - in Southland is an entirely pleasing prospect.

The project, which went public in 2007, has received emphatically supportive responses as people have made available crucial cuttings from the remnants of the hundreds of orchards that once grew throughout the province, introduced by our colonial ancestors who brought the best from their homelands, then paid close attention to what grew best where.

This they did well enough that given even less than half a chance, often receiving little or no care, heritage trees have survived heroically in pockets around the place.
Life has even been found on trees of great age that appeared all but dead. Small cuttings of still-vibrant scion wood, carrying the genetic history of that tree, have been saved and grafted on to new, young rootstock.

This is the sort of heritage we would do well to make a larger part of our future than it is of our present. Our kids would thank us for it.



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