SALT SPRING ISLAND, B.C. – Harry Burton’s Apple Lucious Organic Orchard on Salt Spring Island is a jungle of fruit trees, evergreens and vegetable patches.He has crammed 350 trees onto his five-acre farm, growing 200 apple varieties, 11 Asian pear varieties and seven kinds of plumcots, which are a cross between plums and apricots. All of this takes place amidst walls of blueberries, blackberries and grape vines.“Most appleholics don’t have space for anything. They fill every possible space,” he said of the farm where he started planting fruit trees in 1986.A retired environmental technology instructor from a northern Ontario college, he and his wife, Debbie, bought the land in 1980 for $50,000. It was virgin forest of Douglas fir, cedars and alder trees. The original asking price was $35,000.“That was a hell of a lot of money in those days, but when they got the paperwork done six months later, they told me, now it’s $50,000, take it or leave it,” he said.The land is worth at least three times that much today.“As a young farmer, you wouldn’t be buying on Salt Spring and have the farm profits pay for your land. This is some of the most pricey real estate around.”Burton’s vision for his farm was to combine organic growing principles with an interest in heritage fruit trees from around the world.“This was virgin soil. It was a very sandy base, which was a good start,” he said.He has planted clover for nitrogen and adds horse and chicken manure. He also scatters seaweed and oyster shells collected from the nearby ocean shore. He allows stinging nettles to grow on the farm, which he turns into natural mulch or adds to a compost tea.Birds sing and insects hum throughout the orchard. Black bees pollinate the trees. Burton does not mind if the birds eat a few apples.“Having the birds here is one of the rewards,” he said.“It just means this is a healthy system and the fact they are living here and being well is what keeps me going.”Burton doesn’t breed new varieties. Instead, he takes cuttings from his trees that do well in this growing zone and sells the saplings across Canada.“I have a pretty strict health policy: if it is not healthy it goes,” he said. “I put it on parole for a year and if it doesn’t make it, it goes.”Red-fleshed apples are among his favourites. The inside colour ranges from beet red to pink and the apples have a tart, stronger flavour. The wood is also red and the inside flower petals are bright pink.“All the red fleshes apparently came out of Russia. They are finding out most of our apples came from the Russia-China border,” he said.Burton also grows colonnades, a MacIntosh mutation from the Okanagan Valley. Instead of branches, these trees have spurs on which the apples attach themselves close to the trunk.The mutation has been developed into a number of varieties that grow tall and straight like spires.“Nature is constantly mutating and some of the old varieties seem over the years to have had slight variations that Mother Nature just creates,” he said.Burton sells 10 percent of his production at the farmgate and is also part of a large local food consortium on the island. Each fall, he joins 17 island growers to host an apple festival that lures thousands of guests. The festival also sells local wine, cheese and baked goods.He is always looking for new markets for his apples and sells to farmers’ markets, small grocery stores and restaurants such as those at the Empress Hotel in Victoria.He said marketing and forming connections is ongoing, and he has many repeat customers.“Once they get connected, they want more,” he said.Supplying larger grocery stores is difficult because they want greater volumes than a small, specialty grower can provide.“I might have one tree with that variety, and I can only provide 100 pounds of apples,” he said.His total harvest last year was 8,000 lb.“The other thing that doesn’t work in supermarkets is that some of this fruit is ugly and the supermarket crowd wants pretty,” he said.Burton said farmers’ market customers are more interested in taste so he offers samples from a wide variety of apples at his booth.“It is like grazing, and they can pick the ones they like best.”He takes care of most of the orchard work while his wife is more interested in cultivating flowers. He doesn’t want more than 200 varieties because the workload is too much to handle. Fruit harvest starts at the end of July and continues until November.While Salt Spring Island looks like a rainforest, Burton said his growing area is dry with hot summers, so water may be his future challenge.There is a well for household use and if necessary it can be used to supplement the rain barrels scattered around the orchard that collect precipitation for the garden and new trees.
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