heritage apples: grafting, identification by dna and more, with jamie hanson

WHEN I BOUGHT my place decades ago, it was nestled in a tiny piece of former farmland with a little 1880s house and no garden. There were, however, five giant apple trees, at least a century old even then – all overgrown, but still willing to bear fruit despite their age and years of neglect. I’m very attached to them, even though I still don’t know their names, which was why I wanted to talk to today’s guest, Jamie Hanson, the orchard manager for Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa, who knows a thing or two about heritage apples.

Seed Savers has a major collection, and each year it distributes scion wood and rootstock for grafting new trees from the historic ones in its collection, and teaches a series of virtual courses on every step of how to do that and grow ones of your own and care for them.

We’ll also learn how old apple trees like mine can now be identified through the relatively new process of DNA testing.

In her role as orchard manager for Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, Jamie oversees more than 1,000 apples in the collection there, in two 8-acre orchards. Jamie’s interest in the intersection of history and horticulture began during her studies at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, and she joined Seed Savers in 2022.

Read along as you listen to the Nov. 24, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

heritage apples with seed savers exchange

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Margaret Roach: Hi, Jamie. What a great job you landed in. Sounds very good to me [laughter].

Jamie Hanson: Yes, the perfect job for me, that’s for sure.

Margaret: I haven’t been out to Seed Savers in a very long time, but what a wonderful organization. And people think seeds, but there are these other collections as well that aren’t literally seeds because you don’t grow an apple from a seed if you want it to be true to the variety, right?

Jamie: That’s exactly correct. So an apple from seed will be a brand new variety, the result of not only the fruiting parent, so the apple that you got it from, but also the pollen parent. And so to preserve apples, we have to grow the trees out in an orchard.

Margaret: Yes. So to set the scene, tell us about the breadth of the collection there. How many trees, how many varieties do you think you have? It is vast, right?

Jamie: Yeah, it is a very large collection. So we are kind of in the midst of a big kind of overhaul of our collection, which I can talk about later on. But as it currently stands, we have 913 trees and we’re not quite sure how many varieties, but our estimation is somewhere between 400 and 500. And we’re really just figuring that out through DNA testing, like you’d mentioned in the intro.

Margaret: Because even though of course an institution like Seed Savers does meticulous record keeping and so forth, it’s not always clear when things are passed along, handed down, etc., etc., over so many years. And some of these are very, very old varieties and the provenance and especially the name. Oops, right? [Laughter.] There can be sometimes they can be lost.

Jamie: Exactly. So not only can it get mixed up once it gets to Seed Savers, which is always a possibility in any collection, but even when we bring something in, we’re relying on sometimes 200, 300 years of stewardship of people keeping the right name and being able to differentiate it from other apples, which historically has been incredibly difficult. And the geneticists that we work with at Washington State University has found that an average of 25 percent of apples in historic collections are misidentified.

Margaret: Wow, that’s pretty amazing. How old are the oldest apple varieties in your collection? Do you know what I mean, historically speaking; not the age of the trees, the individual trees, but the varieties.

Jamie: Yeah. So we have an apple called ‘Lady’ or ‘Api,’ and we know that it dates back hundreds of years in France, and there’s rumors that it dates back to Rome. We haven’t been able to confirm that. So whether or not that’s accurate, we don’t know. But generally speaking, we have apples from the 1600s up until the 1960s.

Margaret: What really fascinated me, and as I said in the introduction, I have these old trees and I have no idea what they are. They’re just my friends [laughter]. And the idea that for the past six years or so, we’ve been able to avail ourselves of DNA testing of apples. Is that around the timeframe? I didn’t even know that; I didn’t know it could happen. And you just mentioned Washington State University, and I believe that’s myfruittree.org is the part of it that you can look up and find out about how to send in leaves in a special test kit and so forth. And anyone can do that right now.

Jamie: Yeah. So myfruittree.org, and you can contact them, they’ll send you a test tube in the mail. And then you collect some leaves in this little test tube filled with silica beads, send it back in, and in a few months you’ll have either a response that says it matches something in the dataset so they can tell you what it is, or you could get a result that’s unique unknown. And that’s almost more exciting, because if you have a very old tree, it could be something that is considered extinct, or that we thought we had lost.

So yeah, it’s a really fun kind of program. And like you said, it only really got started in 2019 when the geneticist there, Cameron Peace, met with some people who are working with the Maine Heritage Orchard, and that kind of boosted this apple DNA program. And then really only I think in the last few years, it’s become publicly available, where anybody can submit samples for $50. So it’s very affordable relative to other methods. [Image above from myfruittree.org.]

Margaret: And you collaborate with other institutions, with other collections, important collections of historic of heritage apples. I think it’s called the Historic Fruit Tree Working Group, is that right; is that the name of the group of other collections?

Jamie: Yeah, so the Historic Fruit Tree Working Group is not only collection managers—so people like me, the folks at the Maine Heritage Orchard, Horne Creek Farm in North Carolina, so the collection managers—but we also have historians. We have people who work in tech. We have geneticists, we have this whole group of people who are working together to, on a national scale, organize ourselves around apple preservation and work on identification and the DNA, and then also filling in the historical context when we do know that we have a specific genetic profile that matches an apple like ‘Baldwin,’ a very common historic variety.

Margaret: The work that the various participants in a group like that are doing, with everything that’s going on with the climate and so many factors changing that are affecting plants of course, is there more of a rush, even more of an issue with preservation and so forth? Or are there any other pressures that are accelerating this kind of work at this time?

Jamie: Yeah, this is a really exciting time in apple preservation, not only because of the DNA and the access that we have to all this information. But also because if we’re talking about an apple tree that can live maybe to 200 years old, we’re getting to the point where at least the Midwest, settled in the mid-1800s, we only have 20 more years, generously, to find these lost apples and identify them. And so we’re really at an exciting time where the next 20 to 40 years really is our last chance to find these extinct or lost varieties before they’re gone forever. And especially in the Midwest where so much farmland is still agricultural land where things are being tilled up, the fields are being extended, old orchards are being bulldozed. That’s even more of a push here in the Midwest that every year we’re losing more and more old trees.

Margaret: I see. I didn’t put together the time. It’s a matter of history as well, of the number of years that have elapsed; I didn’t put that together in my head.

And apples, they don’t grow everywhere really well. I think they’re recommended for what zones 4 to 8, is that correct? We were just talking about the Midwest, for instance. It’s a relatively cold-winter zone, shorter-season zone, like I am in the Northeast, but apples, are they with zone 4 to 8, generally speaking?

Jamie: Generally speaking, yeah. There’s a few outliers there, but for the most part, kind of the farthest south you can go is Georgia. There’s a couple of trees that can be grown in North Florida. But any farther south than that, and it’s just too warm because apples need a certain number of chilling hours, and that depends on the variety, but essentially they need a period of cold to be able to produce fruit.

Margaret: Right, exactly. So to make a new tree from some of this old genetic material that you’re hoping to track down and that exists in so many of these collections and so forth already, I want to hear a little bit about the process. Because obviously even if one finds a nearly 200-year-old tree and it represents something unique, you don’t just let that stand there as the only representative of that genetic material. So the grafting and so forth, and this course that you all teach virtually from Seed Savers, I just want to understand how does it work? How does one make an apple from the genetics, from a piece of one of these old trees, or actually maybe two, maybe rootstock and scion wood from two different trees? [Above, a graft being formed of scion wood and rootstock at Seed Savers.]

Jamie: Right. So it’s really a simple process and we teach the class in about two hours and there’s followup classes to kind of walk through the process. So the process is in the winter when the tree is dormant (so no leaves on the tree, it’s sleeping for the winter). For here it’s about December to March, we’ll go out and collect what’s called scion wood, and that’s the previous year’s growth. So if you look at the ends of your branches, you’ll see this piece of wood that has flat buds, and there’s a little branch collar. If you have looked at a picture, you would know, but you’re taking this little piece of wood from the end of your branches, and you can store it in the fridge. So we wrap ours in some wet newsprint or damp newsprint, put it in a plastic baggie, and we put it in the fridge.

And then we take what’s called rootstock, which is essentially, most of it’s grown out in the West Coast, but it’s all of these genetically identical trees that have little root systems, but they don’t produce great apples. So you don’t really want to grow that. So if I have this old tree and I want to grow it, I need to attach it to my rootstock. And in March, April, we do that process, which essentially looks like cutting these two pieces, so my scion wood from my tree and my rootstock that I’ve bought from a nursery, and attaching them to each other. And we tape it up and grow it outside. And in the next year, our trees this year grew about three feet. So already after one season, we have a three-foot-tall little tree.

Margaret: Wow, O.K. So I’ve grafted the desired variety that I want to have apples from onto the rootstock. And where does it stay right away [laughter]? How long does it… Yeah, I don’t put it out in the yard and say goodbye to it, right then, do I? Or do I?

Jamie: You’re exactly right. Yeah. So there’s usually a storage period. So right after I make my graft union, I’m going to wrap up the roots of that tree back in some wet newsprint. Then here we put it in a root cellar for two weeks. For a lot of home growers, they don’t have a root cellar. A chilly garage, your basement, really anywhere that’s a little bit cold and where your tree won’t be disturbed, it can just sit there for a few weeks. And that’s kind of giving your tree the first chance to try to heal that union that we made where we’ve cut into these two pieces of wood. [Below, a healed graft union at Seed Savers.]

Margaret: So it does sort of rest and hopefully begin to heal, as you say, heal itself together wrapped in the wet newspaper in a cool place in the dark, I guess as well. It’s not sitting out in the sun somewhere or whatever.

Jamie: Right, exactly. And then at that point, after the two weeks, we would plant it out in something like a little nursery bed. If you have a garden, a garden is a great place.

Margaret: What’s the success rate? Do you know what I mean? So you have a rootstock and you have a piece of scion wood; if you want to make sure you get an apple or you hope to make sure you get, what’s the odds? How many does one need to try to achieve it? Or is there a high success rate?

Jamie: Yeah, generally it’s pretty high. In our grafting class where we’re teaching people over zoom, their very first time grafting, the average person gets three out of their five trees to take, so 60 percent. Here on the farm, we generally will graft two if we want to make sure that we have one, but really our success rate is closer to 80 to 90 percent.

Margaret: Wow. And would those be semi-hardwood cuttings, what you were describing?

Jamie: Right. So yeah, it’s hardwood; it’s not green or anything. About August, your kind of fresh wood from this year will start to harden.

Margaret: O.K. And they grew that much in the first season, as you said. That’s amazing. And then the aftercare: I think the thing that mystifies people, especially when they purchase young fruit trees, is then what, because they grow gangbusters, as you were saying. And it is sort of like to have the eventual architecture of a tree that’s going to be both sound structurally but also productive and so forth. Is there a lot of then pruning in the next early stages of its life? When do you begin pruning it again?

Jamie: So in that first season when you make your graft union, we do something called disbudding, which is you have this tree that between the rootstock and the scion wood, you might have 15 buds. But you don’t want all the 15 buds to grow; then you’re going to have a really bushy tree.

Margaret: That’s what I was wondering.

Jamie: So in our first year, we just go in with our thumb and we just push those off, and we do that once or twice a week until it really starts to slow down. But I’d say July is on the really late end of things. And at that point you’ll select one bud from your scion wood, so the top of that tree, and that’ll grow up. So that’s how we have our three-foot-tall tree the first year. And in terms of pruning, there’s really, I like to say there’s a lot of ways to do it right, and not so many ways to do it wrong.

Margaret: [Laughter.] You’re such an optimist.

Jamie: For sure. Yes. So our trees, we won’t cut them usually for the first two to three years, and then I might make what’s called a heading cut. So I’d cut off the central leader to encourage lateral branching.

Margaret: So it’s not a right-away thing. The disbudding is what we need to really keep after sort of saying to it, “No, no, no, not yet. Not yet.” That’s really important. Otherwise you’ll just have a completely crazy thing.

Jamie: Exactly.

Margaret: That’s what I wondered because I was visualizing, I mean, the way young fruit trees grow, I am familiar with, and it’d be like, wow. So it’s the disbudding, that’s the key thing. And then the identifying a leader comes a little bit later, a little after that.

Jamie: Yeah. And like I said, there’s lots of ways to do it. I know a lot of people do like to cut their central leader after their first year. It’s really dependent on how big your tree is, what kind of shape you’re going for. But personally, like I said, I like to wait till the second or third year.

Margaret: So I want to just shift gears a little bit from the process. About the virtual grafting course you offer: So when it’s time for registration, people can sign up for it. And you sell, very inexpensively, the scion wood on The Exchange, the sort of oldest part of Seed Savers Exchange; not in the seed catalog, the retail seed catalog, but on The Exchange. Various varieties will be listed each year on The Exchange. And I saw some that were like $5 for a piece of scion wood, or $8; I mean, it’s nominal really, I think. And those are delivered when? If I didn’t have my own tree that I wanted to reproduce, to clone, I could order something, and when are those delivered?

Jamie: So ordering starts as soon as it’s published. So I think it just in the next few weeks. And then we start shipping about the 15th of January, and our last cuttings will go out about the 15th of March.

Margaret: Interesting. Yeah, I mean that’s not a part of The Exchange that I knew about, so that was really kind of fun to just click around and look. So now I just want to shift to just ask you about apples. You must have seen every extreme of fruit and probably of tree, the character of the trees as well, but the fruit: The range is so wide. I mean, an apple is not an apple is not an apple [laughter]; it’s not one thing. They’re not all one color, they’re not all one size, they’re not all one flavor by any means. Are there some that you, from this collection, that you just always want to point out to people, especially when they visit in the harvest season, in the fruiting season?

Jamie: Yeah. There are a couple that are my personal favorites that I like to point people towards. One is called ‘Rushock Pearmain’ [above], and that’s a historic apple from England in the 1800s. And we don’t know anything about it, except that it was first grown by a blacksmith. But that’s made its way to our collection and it’s just this amazingly sour rusted apple.

And another that I really love is called ‘Quaker Beauty,’ and it’s this kind of ping pong ball-sized yellow apple. It’s a crabapple, it’s a large crab. And it’s amazingly sweet. It’s like candy. It’s two bites, and then you’re done with it, which I tend to prefer since I’m sometimes taking bites out of 15 apples in a day.

Margaret: [Laughter.] That’s enough; that’s big enough for you. In terms of apples, you just had large crabapple, and I was always fascinated by, and I can’t remember the exact dimension, but there’s a diameter dimension at which point below it you’re crab apple and above it you’re an apple or something. It’s an inch and a half or whatever it is, but it’s some diameter, I think that there’s a cutoff point, roughly speaking. And yeah, the large crabapples are kind of beautiful, too, by the way. I think in the landscape when they’re in fruit, it’s kind of unexpected, all those smaller fruits.

Jamie: Yes. Generally two inches is our cutoff. And yeah, I think that there’s this big misconception that crabapples are unpalatable. And really there’s such a range in all apples, but in crabapples especially, I mean, beautiful kind of ornamentals. And then also something like ‘Quaker Beauty,’ that’s just a small kind of snacking apple. Yeah, I love crabs. I think they’re wonderful.

Margaret: Yeah, they are. And any others that you especially like very much?

Jamie: Yeah, I mean, out of the 400 to 500 [laughter], there’s plenty of apples that I could say, but one that I noticed this year tasted amazing and was completely pest and disease free is called ‘Rusty Coat,’ and it’s a russeted apple. And we don’t know a lot about the history. ‘Rusty Coat’ is kind of a general term that was used for a number of apples historically.

But our orchard is completely no-spray, so no sprays, organic or non-organic. And that really gives us the opportunity to see how these trees behave and how resilient they are. And we do sometimes have pest damage to fruit or some fungal diseases that don’t damage the health of the tree, but maybe somebody coming from a traditional sense of buying apples in the grocery store might look at it and wonder they’re still completely safe to eat. But ‘Rusty Coat,’ like I said, is one that was just exceptionally free of any blemishes with no spraying at all.

Margaret: And that is really the test, I think, because, I mean, my trees aren’t sprayed and I want to make applesauce; I want to leave the skins on so that when I blend it, it’s pink applesauce, and I want to know that they were cared for that way, like you’re saying, sort of a no-spray method.

Just in general, here you are caring for all of these trees and that’s an enormous responsibility, but are there some sort of key points to caring for apple trees? I mean, I feel like the pruning, like lightening their load and not having them bear all those water sprouts and suckers. They tend to get a little bit full of excess wood that’s not really very productive sometimes. That’s one thing that I spend time on. I don’t know about what you think are the most important things in their care.

Jamie: So in terms of a no-spray orchard, pruning is a huge one, not only to allow airflow and light into the tree, but also like you’re saying, to reduce fungal problems to reduce any breaking of limbs, especially on these really old trees. Pruning is a huge thing.

And then generally, orchard sanitation. We’re cleaning our tools between every tree. We’re picking up apples as they fall to the ground to disrupt the pest and disease cycles. And here we send all of our drops to a local pig farmer. You can also compost them. But yeah, picking up all the apples. And then also late in the season, either gathering up the leaves and composting them, sending them to a yard-waste site. We know that a lot of fungal diseases are perpetuated by leaves sticking around on the ground into the new year.

Margaret: Yes, yes. This is an exception where “leave the leaves” is not a good idea. I totally agree with you.

Jamie: Right.

Margaret: Well, Jamie Hanson from Seed Savers, as you can tell I have a personal interest, so I’ll be ordering the test tubes to send my leaves off to see if I can find out what my old friends’ names are. But thank you so much for making time today and for the work that you do there. It was great to meet you, to talk to you.

Jamie: Yeah, it was great to meet you, too. Thank you so much for having me.

(Photos from Jamie Hanson and Seed Savers, except as noted.)

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Nov. 24, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).