Museum Apple Tree Bears Fruit for Second Year in a Row

Apple on the tree on the Baranov Museum property. Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

These apples are sweet and tart, most of them are green although some have a patch of red, and they fit in your palm. And according to the Baranov Museum’s Executive Director, Tiffany Brunson, they’re growing on the museum’s property for the second year in a row.

“It’s probably because of the unusually warm springs that we’ve had, as well as not very many storms in the spring, so it might’ve in the past bloomed before, but the blooms were blocked off by a heavy spring storm, by high winds, or by an unseasonable frost, and we had such a nice May this year and last year that we got nice, big blooms on the tree.”

Those blooms eventually led to apples.

It’s an old tree. Brunson says they don’t have any written records relating directly to it, but they can come to conclusions based on historical context. She says the structure that houses the museum was built in 1808 and the businessman WJ Erskine and his family lived there between 1911 and 1948.

“We have pictures from about the 1920s when it was obviously young. The Erskines, especially Nelly Erskine, was a huge gardener and she introduced a lot of things to Kodiak that people didn’t think would take here. Like the mountain ash you see everywhere. A lot of people thought that those would survive in Kodiak, because it’s too wet and too cold. And the Erskines were the first to bring the mountain ash up.”

Brunson says they can assume that the Erskines were also the first to bring apple trees to Kodiak. She says, last year, the city’s park department sent a scissor lift to help them pick the apples, and those are still sitting in her freezer.

She says they haven’t harvested the apples yet this year, but notes that the tree is over a hundred years old. She doesn’t suggest climbing it.

“We haven’t really managed it as far as apple production, so it hasn’t been trimmed the way that it would if you had an orchard. So it probably does have limbs that are a little bit rotten or that are a little bit rotten. But the apples that fall on the ground or are within picking distance of standing on the ground, people are welcome to take a bite.”

Some of those apples are a little spotty or rotting, but if you search the grass for a bit, you may get lucky.