Foraging is all about following seasons and cycles.
Find the fruit trees and edible colonies in your area and keep an eye on them, so that you will be ready when the fruits are!

Right now it’s feral apple season in Australia, just at the end of summer/early autumn when the renegade trees of regional roads offer bags of fruits.

Feral apples are the wild leftovers of abandoned orchards and self-started trees that grow when they find suitable conditions. The trees in abandoned orchards tend to be old varieties and many gardeners collect cuttings and graft them onto their own trees, to bring some diversity and resilience into their stock.

The apple trees along the roads tend to grow out of discarded apple cores, thrown out of people’s car windows. An old story has been shared around that where the Cobb & Co coach once ran its original line, crab apples and plums grew. The coach drivers scattered the seeds as they did the run so that they had fruit along the trip. Edible highways!

Whether they are from an old orchard or an apple-eating driver, the fruits from these trees tend to be sharper and less sweet. Often enough they have blemishes from pests and they hardly ever fully mature on the trees, as birds love them too.

The best advice for people who would like to bring some wild flavour to their meals is to collect the fruits when they start to change in colour and then let them finish the ripening at home.

They tend to be sour and therefore make for excellent pies and cider. I love to make feral apple cider vinegar each year. This would last me for ages and flavours anything on my table, from salads to pickles. See my simple recipe below.

How to identify apples

I think the best way to identify apple trees is to wait until they are fruiting because then it is obvious what they are.
As a reference, the apple trees we know today are the man-made version of wild apples from Central Asia, that were domesticated thousands of years ago. We now count over 7,500 known cultivars of apples.
The apple trees that produce our modern commercial fruits grow from grafted rootstock. That means that the orchardist grows a selection of apple trees for their strong roots, and then attaches branches from trees chosen for the quality of their fruits.

If you eat an apple and then planted the seed, you would not grow the same apple as it is missing the qualities provided by the rootstock.
Even when they are grafted, modern apple trees need constant human intervention to keep them healthy and productive. If you do not prune the apple trees every year they reverse back to a wilder version of themselves. They go feral.

For years I worked in apple orchards, both here in Australia ( Orange, NSW) and in Italy, France and Austria. The work needed to keep the trees ‘tame’ is immense. We not only pruned the trees in winter, to enforce the shape and allow for ease of harvest, we also pruned the new branches in summer so that more sun could get to the fruit. Then, in springtime, we thinned the stock, sometimes by half. Yes, that’s right, as the fruit developed we picked then let fall to the ground about half of it, so that the apple’s branches would have less fruit on them, preventing them from breaking under the weight and allowing for the apples to grow bigger due to less competition.
And don’t let me start on the abundant use of chemicals…

When you look at a feral apple tree nothing of that happened to it. SO if the apple tree in the orchard looks defined, pleasantly shaped with big and happy apples, the apple tree by the road looks wild, bushy, sparse and unreliable. Their apples are often small, sour and blemished, but full of vitamins and minerals, arguably organic and above all, free.

Description: Apple trees are deciduous, meaning they lose all their leaves once a year and sprout again in the springtime. They generally are 2 to 4.5 m tall in cultivation and up to 9 m in the wild. The leaves are dark green, alternate, oval in shape and with serrated margins. They are also slightly furry in the undersides.

Flowers and fruits: Flower blossoms come out in spring together with the leaf buds. Flowers are 3-4 cm wide, with 5 white to pink petals. The fruit matures in late summer or autumn, and cultivars exist in a wide range of sizes. The skin of ripe apples is generally red, yellow, green or pink. The flesh is generally yellowish-white. If you cut an apple in half you will notice a 5 points star-shaped core (see image).

Where to find feral apples in Australia

This map comes from Atlas of Living Australia and it shows where Malus domestica AKA Malus pumila ( apples) have been recorded in the continent. There is also another great map, with Falling Fruit, see here. Both maps are old and often outdated so that when you get to the spot you might find out that the tree is no longer there.

The best way to find where your local feral apples are is to talk to your locals and they would let you know of some special place where they line the road. I share below information offered by the many foragers of the Edible Weeds, Wild Crafting & Foraging in Australia Facebook group. Check the roads around:
NSW: Lithgow, Oberon, Orange, Mudgee, Cooma, Jindabyne, Kempsey, Armidale, Southern Highlands, Goulburn, Bega Valley Shire.
ACT: anywhere, just get out of town.
Victoria: South Gippsland, La Trobe Valley, Mirboo North, Trafalgar, Ballarat.
SA: South East South Australia.
Tasmania: Everywhere, just get out of town.

Apples and the stories they tell.

Apples are one of the oldest foods. We have been eating them from the wild in our evolutionary journey and started to cultivate them around 10,000 years ago. Apples and humans go back a long way. They have infiltrated all cultures of continental Asia, all the way to North America. It is understood that modern apples are derived mainly from a variety of wild apples originating from the Tian Shan mountains in the Himalayas, crossed with the local varieties of crab apples of eastern and continental Europe.
The fruits have been in the mythology of all those countries since the earliest records. It has appeared as a mystical forbidden fruit, an enticing trap and as the symbol of love.

The Greeks and Romans narrated the delightful gardens of the Hesperides, where grew the famous trees that produced golden apples, the Tree of Life.

The Christian tradition then took the myth further and elaborated the Tree of knowledge.
The Tree of Knowledge, in the opinion of some commentators, was so-called, not because of any supernatural power it possessed of inspiring those who might eat of it with universal knowledge, as the serpent afterwards suggested, but because by Adam and Eve abstaining from or eating of it after it was prohibited, God would see whether they would prove good or evil in their state of probation.

And then there is the saying, “An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away” which unfortunately modern scientific consensus says that it is not really the case. Still, the apple is a delicious fruit and on average it contains 86% water and 14% carbohydrates with negligible content of fat and protein, and supplies about 50 calories of food energy.  It contains a moderate amount of dietary fibre, but otherwise has a low level of micronutrients.

How to make apple cider vinegar from the scraps>

Collect the fruits, peel them and use the flesh for pies or jams.
For the vinegar we will use the scraps and the ration is:

1kg of apple scraps
1 lt of boiled and cooled down water
4 tbsp of sugar

Mix the lot together, cover with a cheesecloth and put aside in a cool place. Check regularly and mix it. It should be ready after 2-4 weeks.
Strain and use in salads, as the base for shrubs or in pickles.

A note on heirloom and heritage apples, and why we should preserve them.

While talking in forums about this article a few fellow seasoned foragers mentioned how in the past decade a whole lot of old feral apple trees have been destroyed by councils and land managers. The reason why land managers destroy feral fruiting trees is that they might harbour diseases and pests that then spread to the commercial orchards. The new Biosecurity Act 2015 gives authority to council workers and contractors to even enter common and private land to fulfil the slaughtering of old varieties of apples in our landscape.

The risk for industrial orchardists is real and quantifiable in economic terms, but often enough there are a number of factors that never get assessed properly when making the decision to eliminate plants. Below is my argument, as informed by talking to fellow nature lovers and my own experience in and with nature.

Genetic resilience: Often enough the old feral apple trees are heritage varieties, cultivars of apples that are no longer used for production. These trees have been bread for resisting pests and diseases at a time when chemical fungicides and insecticides were not advanced or available. They offer an important genetic pool that should be considered in the organic fruits market.

Heritage varieties: The old varieties of apples have incredible cultural value as they speak of place and people. It is estimated that there are about 7500 cultivars of apples in the world and the vast majority of them are endangered to be lost. There are organisations like Slow Food International that keeps records of those traditional varieties and work towards their preservation. From the little part of the world where I’m from, (Piedmont, Italy) I can name at least 5 or 6 local indigenous varieties on the brink of disappearance: the Gamba Fina and the Bugìn are just two examples.

Overzealous and too broad regulations: Too often the feral apple trees are destroyed in places where there are no commercial orchard activities at all. The regulations are applied at State and sometimes Federal level without discretion for local relevance.

Food for the people: Feral fruit populations offer the possibility for locals ( people and animals) to have food sourced in their neighbourhood. In the push that we must have towards edible cities, edible highways and edible landscapes, it is shortsighted to destroy these established populations.

#savetheferals

Links and further research

Slow Food Arc of Taste> International organisation dedicated to preserving heirloom and indigenous foods
Wikepedia> An overview of the apples
Wikepedia> List of apple varieties
Atlas of Living Australia> Distribution of apples in Australia
Falling Fruit> World map of edible plants