The trees
The old trees on the plot, and the two nobody can name
January is the month I walk the plot with a notebook and nothing to carry, because the trees are bare and it is the only time I can see their shape properly. This entry is the tree list I should have written in 2020, with what each one does to a pressing.
- Written
- 19 January 2025
- Re-read and corrected
- 28 September 2025
- Reading
- 7 minutes
- Orchard
- north of Vilnius
i.
A plot planted by people who wanted apples in March
My grandparents did not plant for cider. They planted for a cellar that had to feed a family through the winter, which is why the plot is dominated by Antonovka and why almost every tree on it produces an apple that is sour off the branch and sweeter after a month in a cold room. There are five Antonovkas, all grafted by my grandfather from the same old tree that stood on the plot before theirs, and they vary more than you would expect from a single source. The one nearest the gate crops every year and gives a sharp, lemony fruit. The two behind the house crop heavily one year and barely at all the next, which the log now tracks as if it were weather.
The rest were chosen for spreading the season. A Popierinis, the white summer apple everybody here grew up eating, ripens in early August and goes soft and mealy within a fortnight. Two Lithuanian Pepins come in at the end of September and keep until February if they are not bruised. One striped autumn apple, which my grandmother called by a name I have never found in a book, sits between the two and is the sweetest thing on the plot. Then there are the two trees that nobody in the family can name, which I will come back to.
ii.
What each variety puts in the jug
Since 2022 I have pressed a small test batch of each variety on its own before the main weekend, just a few kilos through a hand mill and a kitchen press, and taken a gravity reading and a taste. The numbers move with the summer, so they are a range rather than a fact, but after four years the pattern holds well enough to plan around. Antonovka is the backbone: high acid, a strong green-apple smell that fills the shed, and middling sugar. Left alone it makes a cider that is bracing in November and much kinder by April, once the sharpness has settled.
The Pepins give sugar and body and not much else, which is exactly what the Antonovka needs. The striped apple gives sugar and a faint perfume that is lost in the blend but noticeable when it is pressed alone. Popierinis gives very little of use for cider, because by the time there is enough of it the fruit has gone soft, and soft fruit clogs the cloths and gives a cloudy juice that is hard to clear. We eat it, give it away, or press it into a jug of juice for the grandchildren of whoever is visiting that week.
iii.
The two trees without names
At the bottom of the plot, where the ground is wetter, there are two trees that were already old when my grandparents took the strip over. One gives a small, hard, russeted apple that looks unpromising in September and turns into something remarkable after six weeks in a crate. The other gives a large green apple with a red flush that bruises if you look at it and tastes of very little. I have asked older neighbours, compared photographs with the lists put out by people who study old Baltic varieties, and shown both apples to anyone who seemed to know. The honest position is that I do not know what either of them is, and I have stopped pretending in the log that I might.
What I do know is what they do in a blend. The russet brings tannin, which almost nothing else on the plot has, and a little of it makes the finished cider taste drier and longer than the gravity would suggest. The big green one contributes volume and nothing more, and in a year when the other trees crop well I leave its fruit for the neighbour two plots down, who feeds it to a goat. Each has a line in the log under a working name: the russet is the Bottom Russet, the other is simply the Big Green. They do not mind.
iv.
Pruning in January and what the log changed
The reason this entry is written in January is that January is when I prune, and pruning is where the log has changed my habits most. For the first two winters I cut what looked untidy, which meant taking a lot of wood off the biennial trees in their off winter and then wondering why they sulked. The log showed that the heavy years followed the light prunes and the light years followed the heavy ones, which could have been coincidence and probably was not. Now I prune the biennial trees hard after a heavy crop and hardly at all after a light one, and the swing between years has narrowed, though it has not gone.
The other change is smaller and more practical. Every tree now has a numbered aluminium tag on a low branch, one to eleven, so that crates in the shed can be marked with the tree they came from. That sounds fussy for a plot this size. It is the only reason I know that the gate Antonovka and the behind-the-house Antonovka are different enough to matter, and the only reason the Bottom Russet has a page of its own. A tree you cannot tell apart from its neighbours in the crate is a tree you will never learn anything about.
Figures on this page were copied out of the paper log, where they were written with the hydrometer still floating in the jar. Nothing here is advice for anyone else's cellar. Last amended 28 Sept 2025.