October is Apple Month, and October 21st is Apple Day.

Apples come in many colors and flavors. Some are red, some are green, some are yellow, and some are combinations of these three. Some apples are sweet tasting, some are sour, and some taste so bad that no one would want to eat them.

A lot of apples are grown in Maine. Millions each year. And there are many different kinds.

An apple farm is called an orchard. Some apple orchards may only have a few dozen trees, while others may have hundreds or thousands.

Many orchards sell their apples at roadside stands or in grocery stores. There are also orchards that allow people to buy apples by picking them right off the trees. This is called pick-your-own.

Apples can be eaten in many ways. Raw, for example. Or sliced up. Some people like raw apple slices added to a salad, or chopped up and mixed with tuna and mayonnaise. There are also many ways to cook apples. In pies and cobblers. Or mixed into pancake batter. They can be made into jams and jellies and apple butter.

Some varieties of  apples have common-sounding names, such as Cortland, Honeycrisp, Empire, Gala, and McIntosh.

Some varieties have unusual names and sound like they could be characters in a fantasy role-playing game. Here are the names of some types of apples grown in Maine: Jonagold, Macoun, Duchess of Oldenburg, Astrachan, Mutsu, and Northern Spy.

No one is sure exactly how many varieties of apples there are in the world. Experts guess that there are at least 7,500 different kinds of apples.

About 100 different kinds are grown in Maine.

Why are there so many? Hold onto your desks, because the answer is kind of a bumpy road.

Let’s say that you have a favorite kind of apple and you come up with a brilliant idea: why not take the seeds from an apple and plant them in your yard? You could grow your own apple trees and have all the apples you want for free.

Great idea, but you had better not be in a hurry. Most apple trees take from four to eight years before they produce apples. Some take as long as ten years.

But you don’t care. You want your own apple trees and are willing to wait. Let’s say you plant your seeds when you are in the fourth grade and are a senior in high school before the first apples appear on your trees.

Filled with excitement, you pick an apple and take a bite. Yuck! It tastes terrible. Not at all like your favorite apple. What went wrong?

Nature played a trick on you. The seeds of an apple don’t match the kind of apple they come from. Plant the seeds from a Macintosh apple and they will not grow a Macintosh tree.

Then how do orchards grow Macintosh apples, or Honeycrisps, or Galas? How come they don’t get some weird-tasting apples like you did? They play a trick on nature. When an apple tree is young, they cut a slit in it, then take a piece of the kind of tree they want, stick it in the slit, and wrap it up.

The bottom part of the little tree, called the rootstock, feeds and takes care of the top part, called the scion (SI-uhn, the c is silent). Magically almost, the tree will grow up to be the kind the tree-farmer put in the slit.

This process is called grafting. There are different methods of doing it, but the idea is to get the roots of one kind of tree to accept and feed the top part of another kind of tree.  The bottom part could be a yucky-tasting kind of apple, and the top part a yummy-tasting kind. The tree will grow up to be the yummy-tasting kind.

But wait. There’s more. When a tree grows up, it will produce lovely flowers. Each flower is where an apple will grow. But for an apple to actually grow, something called cross-pollination has to occur.

In each flower, there is some tiny dust called pollen. for an apple to grow, the pollen from one kind of apple tree must be put into the flower of a different kind of apple tree. And honey bees do the work. A bee will wiggle into a flower to get some sweet juice called nectar. Bees use the nectar to make honey.

When a bee wiggles into a flower, it gets pollen on its legs and body. When it flies to a different kind of apple tree to harvest some nectar, some of the pollen gets left in the flowers of that tree. And so on.

Every flower that gets pollen from a different kind of apple tree will produce an apple. So we see how important bees are to apple orchards. Each year, bee keepers will be hired to brings swarms of bees to an orchard. The trees get cross-pollinated, and the bees get lots of nectar to make honey, so everyone wins.

Sorry that you didn’t know about grafting when you planted your apple seeds eight years ago. Maybe you can find a nice pick-your-own orchard that has your favorite apples.

Fun Facts

•  Apple trees are members of the Rose family, called Rosacea. Plums, pears, cherries, peaches and strawberries are also members of that family.

•  An old-time saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” had some truth to it, as apples are high in fiber, vitamin C, and various antioxidants.

•  Pies have a bottom and a top crust. Cobblers only have a top crust.

•  The first-ever National Apple Day was on October 21st of 1990. The day was founded by the organization, Common Ground.

•  China, the USA, and Poland are the countries that produce the most apples.