“A lot of taste testing comes with the territory of introducing people to lesser known varieties. I share the lore of each variety on the cutting board, offer up a slice, and then watch folks react with pleasure to just how good an apple in its tree-ripened moment will be.”

Up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Michael, Nancy, and Gracie Phillips live a life centered on medicinal herbs and holistically grown apples. They harvested close to 200 bushels in 2007, selling their entire Lost Nation Orchard apple crop right out of their post and beam barn.

Intentions on any small farm often hinge on patient investment. Plans for a small cider mill are on tap next, now that the trees are coming into their own. Real cider vinegar, Lost Nation cider jelly, and Yankee apple butter—renowned products from the days of a previous orchard business—follow from there. The Phillips family will be offering such mail-order apple products in a couple more years to the wider Slow Food community through their farm website.

The grower networking generated by Michael’s book, The Apple Grower: A Guide for the Organic Orchardist, continues to have a profound impact on community-focused orchards across the country. Michael recently started a website, Grow Organic Apples, to share research and sustainable fruit growing techniques, and assist and inspire other community orchard ventures.

“Learning the nuance of an eco-system approach to orcharding can take years. What we do here at Lost Nation Orchard—along with the discoveries of other grower friends—is help new growers accelerate their own learning curve. Understanding that flavor and nutritional worth flows from a living soil inspires fruit growers to emphasize health across the board in their orchards. And that’s good for all of us!”

Q&A with Michael

What did the award mean to you?
I became familiar with Betsy’s work twenty years ago in keeping local orcharding viable. Our fledgling Lost Nation Orchard was a descendant of that movement, so to speak, as we were pursuing what the experts at the time called impossible: successfully growing apples by organic means. I understood that healthy apples resulted from promoting health throughout the orchard ecosystem and that, equally important, this could and should happen in communities everywhere. My book, The Apple Grower (published by Chelsea Green in 1998) in turn gave me a platform to encourage growers to adopt a more holistic approach to orcharding, while at the same time clearly encouraging apple lovers to enjoy the fruits of local farms by supporting local farms. The Betsy Lydon Award in 2004 recognized this decade of apple activism on my part. I was both humbled and inspired. I knew this was about far more than our small mountain farm in northern New Hampshire; that in a sense I was there to represent community-based orchardists in giving voice to both the challenges and pleasures of locally grown apples. Everybody needs a pat on the back sometimes to keep the inner momentum strong. This award motivated me all the more to further connections with other fruit growers while giving me confidence to actively inject holistic notions into university research projects. I’m delighted to have all the good energy of this award as one of the shining threads in the tapestry of my orchard work.

How did it help you increase the impact of your work, or share your work with a wider audience?
The award came midway in the process of my revising The Apple Grower. Six years had passed since the first edition and I had much to expound upon. This national recognition by Slow Food USA and the Lydon family empowered my writing at a critical juncture. The book became stronger, both in terms of practical explanation and life-embracing perspective. This in turn has increased my networking connection to other growers around the globe. Some 25,000 copies of Apple Grower are helping people grow healthy fruit for their communities and rebuild enthusiasm for unique heirloom varieties. And that’s pretty cool for us all!

What are you doing now?
My community food work recently culminated in the launching of GrowOrganicApples.com. I hope people in the Slow Food movement can take a moment to check it out. This mutual grower effort picks up where Mothers & Others left off back in the early 1990s in hopes of growing safe fruit locally. I know Betsy would have been very excited about the full scope—and and evolution!—of what you’ll find on this website: grower-directed research, a community orchard search engine, public radio style support, inspiration, grower networking, and a sensible understanding of what it takes to grow healthy apples and other fruits in widely different locations. Any and all comments are welcome. Both community-based growers and enlightened apple lovers are needed to make this vision fly.

Our orchard here in Lost Nation has gone through its tribulations but is once again coming on strong. Two acres of apple trees have come into full bearing and are once again serving local markets. You can get our full scoop of good intention at HerbsAndApples.com, both as regards our tasty apples and healing medicinal herbs. Our current project is to resurrect a cider works which in turn will lead to being able to offer our Organic Cider Jelly and Yankee Apple Butter to mail-order customers.