When you think of apples you probably don’t think of the South Carolina mountains, and there is no reason you should, at least not anymore. What was once a thriving if small industry has been reduced to a few family farms that operate on the U-pick or roadside stand model.
Growing apples is labor intensive: the ladders, the buckets, the early fall mornings. This was once the work of migrant workers in South Carolina. But now those men and women from Mexico and Central America are building McMansions an hour east in Greenville. Apple orchards are something of a niche business. Folks looking to escape the southern heat can spend a day winding through the cool mountains picking their Ginger Gold and Granny Smith and Red Delicious. It doesn’t hurt that the remaining orchards here are gorgeous: mountains so green they seem covered in felt, ridge after ridge in the clear light of autumn. For years, my wife and I lived in a small cabin on the edge of Sumter National Forest. Every fall we’d see cars with their Georgia and Florida plates loaded with cider and bags of Mutsu.
But not that many.
While apple trees can grow all over the state, you need the cooler temperatures of the mountains to yield edible fruit. Until the 1980s, Oconee County was about as perfect a climate as the South offered and the orchards were once abundant enough to form a co-op.
But by the mid-eighties, the seasons had begun to shift, the flowers blooming earlier so that a late frost would wipe them out. The cost of pesticide had gone up, too. The crab is the only wild apple native to North America, and as Wayne Cox points out in his excellent article for Edible Upcountry, you can’t grow much else without a heavy reliance on pesticides. Further, orchard apples are grown from grafts, not seeds. All that, Cox writes, is “why the large, sweet, showroom apples we’ve learned to love are impossible to grow without the use of pesticides, requiring more than any other food crop.” And then, of course, there is the labor situation.