Quick! How many apple varieties can you name off the top of your head? Honeycrisp, Golden Delicious, Gala, Pink Lady, Granny Smith, Red Delicious, Fuji, McIntosh, and…are you running out of names yet?

You’d be forgiven for coming up short on apple names. According to Matt Mohrman, volunteer coordinator for the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, there were once “thousands” of apple varieties being commercially grown right here in northern Michigan.

“Now, we’re down to probably a few dozen commercially-grown apple varieties that you’re going to find at a supermarket,” Mohrman says. “And that's just due to the fact that the public wants – and therefore, the growers want – apples that look nice, taste good, transport, store, all of that.”

One of Mohrman’s big projects in the National Lakeshore is to preserve apple varieties that don’t necessarily meet those consumer preferences. The hills and fields of Port Oneida – among other parts of the park – were once vibrant apple orchards, and in many of those areas, old apple trees are still bearing fruit. Believing those trees and the apples they grow to be an important part of Sleeping Bear’s history, Mohrman and his team are working to propagate and proliferate as many of them as possible – before it’s too late.

2024 marks 10 years since National Lakeshore leaders launched a concerted effort to track down, inventory, and preserve all the “heirloom” apple varieties that grow somewhere within the park’s 71,199 acres. A decade in, their count is up to “about 80 apple varieties,” Mohrman says. “And there’s more out there to find,” he tells the Leelanau Ticker. “I’m sure there are more than 100 varieties here in the park.”

Of course, there are some challenges to tracking down every last apple variety in the park. One is the simple size of the National Lakeshore, which includes not just the contiguous portions, but also both North and South Manitou islands. Another hurdle is the sheer number of apple farms that existed in the region during its agricultural heyday. Some of those areas are large and well-documented – like the apple orchard behind the Kelderhouse Farm in Port Oneida, where Mohrman and volunteers have planted dozens of replacement trees in recent years. Others are smaller and more random.

“Fortuitously, there were aerial photographs taken of this region in the 1930s by the United States Army,” Mohrman notes. “Because of those photos, we know where the orchards were at the time, which means we can inventory the trees there, and also plant new trees and put those orchards right back where they were. But there are also places throughout the park that used to have smaller farms. Sometimes, we’ll be out in the woods walking, and we’ll stumble upon two or three apple trees. We probably haven’t found or visited all of those trees yet.”

What happens when the team finds a new apple variety? According to Mohrman, the next step isn’t quite as simple as one might assume.

“Apples aren’t a fruit you can take the seed from, plant it, and then grow the same fruit,” Mohrman says. “Each apple seed carries so many genetic properties of all of the pollinators that came to that tree. So, if you take, say, a Spy apple, or a Wolf River apple, and you cut it open and take the seeds out and put those in the ground, you’re not going to get a Spy or Wolf River apple tree. You’ll get a crab apple almost all of the time.”

To achieve true propagation of pure apple varieties, volunteers are taking what is called “scion wood” – essentially, a small twig of “last year’s growth” from a living apple tree – and grafting those pieces onto new apple tree rootstocks.

The process is labor-intensive, hence the importance of volunteers. Each March or April, Sleeping Bear hosts a day where college students come out and help gather scion wood and graft trees. This year, Mohrman says, that squad grafted 80 trees in a single day. Those saplings go into a fenced-in nursery on the Kelderhouse property, where each tree then spends the first 5-6 years of its life.

Later, on the first Friday in May, the National Lakeshore hosts a “pruning workshop,” where the general public is invited to Port Oneida to help transplant older trees out of the nursery and into the orchard. That group, which Mohrman says numbers 30-50 people per year, also learns from MSU Extension experts about how to prune trees, combat pests, and more.

Volunteers also take care of all tree care in the summertime, including mowing grass in the orchard, watering the trees, and weeding the nursery.

The goal of all that work is to give each apple variety a fighting chance of existing within the park for the long haul. Slowly, Mohrman says, the park’s legacy apple trees – many of which are 120 years old or older – are dying. “And since a lot of these apple varieties aren’t really being grown elsewhere, once the last tree of that variety falls, that’s it for that variety,” he explains.

If the trees are the top priority, the fruit itself is a “happy byproduct,” Mohrman says. The park doesn’t harvest or sell any of the apples commercially. However, visitors to Sleeping Bear are allowed to pick fruit and take it with them – a rarity for a national park. In fact, one of Mohrman’s favorite things about the preservation project is seeing people sample the increasingly large variety of apples.

“When you get apples at the supermarket, they’ve been grown and harvested and shipped, and then they sit on the shelf, and by the time you get them home and eat them, the flavor has no comparison to one of these heirloom varieties picked fresh off the tree,” Mohrman says. “Some of these apples might not appeal to your palate – they could be way too sweet, or way too sour – but they offer an awesome variety of flavors, and that’s so fun to come out and explore.”