Pilgrimage for Apple Lovers: Salt Spring Island Apple Festival, October 4

From Linda Ziedrich — Blog by Linda Ziedrich

September 3, 2009

Step inside the old wooden Fulford Community Hall on a crisp Sunday morning in early autumn, and startle at your first breath of the apple-scented air. The sweet, clean fragrance sharpens your senses as you gaze at some thousand or more apples arranged on long tables, three to five specimens of each variety on a doily with an identifying sign. “Egremont Russet: Golden brown, high-quality Gravenstein-like flesh. Most delicious of English russets. England 1880.” “Hidden Rose: Beautiful yellow skin flecked with white. Rose flesh, juicy crisp, firm, sweet, richly flavored.” There are apples with skins as purply dark as merlot wine. There are creamy yellow and striped and blushing apples, and apples with skins as rough and brown as those of russet potatoes. There are tall, slender apples, and big, round apples that weigh more than a pound apiece. In all, there are something over three hundred varieties—as many as have fruited this year on Salt Spring Island.

With about ten thousand people and 70 square miles, Salt Spring—or Saltspring, as half the residents prefer—is the largest and most populous of Canada’s Gulf Islands, which aren’t in a gulf at all but in the Strait of Georgia, where they make up the Canadian end of the archipelago known south of the border as the San Juans. Salt Spring and the neighboring islands enjoy such a mild climate that some residents have been planting olive trees, and one “Banana Joe” Clemente is growing palms, eucalyptus, and, yes, bananas.

In the early 1970s Salt Spring Island attracted young wanderers, some of them escaping the military draft. Inspired by isolation and the do-it-yourself spirit of the times, many settled down as farmers, artists, and crafters. In sunny pockets among the island’s wooded hills, they discovered old orchards with an astounding variety of apples. The oldest of these orchards were planted in the 1860s. That was when a German named Theodore Trage came and married a native Samish woman, cleared 830 acres, planted them with apples, and hauled his first fruits to market in Victoria by rowboat. Other settlers, including former African slaves who had bought their freedom, followed Trage’s example. Before long steam ships were carrying Salt Spring apples to market, and by the turn of the century the island had become one of the most important apple-growing regions of Canada.

By the 1970s the local apple business was moribund--and, to the newcomers’ eyes, ripe for revival. Salt Spring residents have since pruned the old trees, planted new orchards, and introduced even more varieties. The varieties grown on the island now total about 350, and all the apples are grown organically.

TAKING THE TOUR. In Fulford Hall, local volunteers have spent hours arranging the apples under the direction of the festival’s main organizer, Harry Burton. (If you have any questions about apples, all of the locals will tell you the same: “Ask Harry.”) There are other attractions here as well. Around the perimeter of the room you’ll find local artisans and their products--jams and chutneys, chocolates, soaps, indoor plants, and maybe, as last year, Amarah Gabriel’s meticulous, oversized portraits of apples. If you’re lucky you’ll also come upon 90-year-old Mary Mollet, better known as Apple Granny.

Mary’s father started growing apples on the island in 1884, and Mary grew up eating dozens of varieties, including King, Cox’s Orange, Twenty-Ounce Pippin, Wolf River, Wealthy, and Northern Spy. Each had favored uses—cider, dessert, drying, cooking, keeping. Most were keepers, in fact, because when Mary was young apples were a staple food all through the winter, especially for island dwellers. She still hasn’t tired of them. “Nothing that you can make isn’t improved with an apple,” says Mary, who with her daughter and granddaughter offers two volumes of family apple recipes for sale.

At a table by the Fulford Hall kitchen are the Salt Spring Island Women’s Institute Pie Ladies. Choose a slice of a pie made from any of a dozen apple varieties, and enjoy it along with the short theatrical presentations. (Last year, Reid Collins’s impersonation of Queen Elizabeth was the hysterically funny favorite.)

Now it’s time to hit the road, because the rest of the apple festival is a self-guided tour. At most of the sites you can buy fresh apples, and at some you can taste cider fresh from the press. You might visit the orchard at the Ruckle Farm, most of which is now a provincial park with camping and 7 kilometers of shoreline. At Charlie Eagle’s Bright Farm, you’ll find a preservation orchard planted with 350 varieties of apples, pears, plums, and cherries. And you won’t want to miss Harry and Debbie Burton’s Apple Luscious orchard, where dozens of varieties are sliced for tasting and you can wander on trails cut through brambles. (“My only rule in this wild orchard,” says Harry, “is that other vegetation cannot shade or touch the apple trees.”) Since the festival lasts only a day, you may not have time to visit all fifteen or so sites on the tour, but unless you’re determined to visit every orchard you’ll want to stop at the two cheese factories, both of which offer tastings. And be sure to visit the Bread Lady, where the smoke from Heather Campbell’s wood-fired oven mingles with the scent of lavender in her garden. There, munching your bread, you can look out at the Strait, its forested islands, and Mt. Baker looming in the background.

You might wind up your tour at the Beddis Castle, where you can wander through manicured gardens along the shore as you sip cider from apples grown on trees that came as scions from Ireland in 1873, each with an end stuck in a potato. Savor the sweet smell of fresh-pressed apples mixed the salt air before you consider what to do for dinner. As Ilyes Bouzziri, a Tunisian native and Salt Spring cheese maker, quotes his mother, “The fragrance of the apple reanimates the soul.”

PARADISE FOR LOCAVORES. Salt Spring Island is “the organic capital of Canada,” residents like to say. Growing apples organically for commercial production isn’t easy, but “who’s gonna put poison on their food and eat it?” asks Harry Burton. Not only the apples are organic. Local food producers include the Moonstruck Organic Cheese company, which makes a variety of blue and cheddar-type cheeses from the milk of its organically raised Jersey cows; the Salt Spring Coffee Company, whose organically grown, fair-trade roasted beans are sold all over Canada; and the Salt Spring Flour Mill, which makes flour and cereals from organically grown grains. The Bread Lady’s loaves are organic, too, and numerous small-scale growers sell organically grown vegetables, berries, herbs, flowers, and eggs on Saturdays at the open-air market in the main town of Ganges, where you can also buy pottery, jewelry, soaps, and other locally handmade goods along with your apples. The islanders’ organic ethos is so strong that the local high school now uses produce from the Salt Spring market for its cooking classes, and the island even has an organically maintained golf course.

Just as important as eating organically, to most of the island’s residents, is eating locally. Despite high prices, Salt Spring residents proudly favor their island-grown lamb, beef, turkey, and chicken; wine from Salt Spring Vineyard (apple wine and blackberry port as well as pinot noir, merlot, and millotage) and its neighbor Garry Oaks Winery; and exquisite, flower-topped rounds of goat cheese from David Wood’s Salt Spring Island Cheese factory (though one resident complained that the goats’ milk comes from Vancouver Island).

Residents’ dogged support for local food production has sometimes brought them into conflict with provincial authorities, as when health inspectors arrived at the Salt Spring Market, in 2005, to stop the sale of uninspected eggs. One musician and part-time farmer took advantage of the exception for “farm gate” sales by bringing along a gate with his eggs to the market, but this didn’t satisfy the inspectors. As Roger Brunt recalls in his Salt Spring Chronicles, the inspectors “were shouted down by angry market-goers, including a contingent of Salt Spring’s Raging Grannies, outfitted with hats made from egg cartons.”

To encourage people to buy locally, the island has its own currency. Salt Spring Dollars are worth the same as Canadian dollars but can be spent only on the island. Available at the Visitor Information Centre in Ganges, the bills are beautifully designed with paintings by local artists.

For more information about the festival and Salt Spring Island, visit the website at www.saltspringmarket.com.