Heritage Apple Box
Ten pounds of eight heritage apple varieties.
How this fruit is made — and by whom.
A cooperative of six family farms in the Driftless Area growing storage crops — potatoes, winter squash, cabbages, heritage apples — on ridge-top soils that never saw the last glacier.
Viroqua, Wisconsin — the country around Viroqua, where the soil, weather, and water shape what comes out of the ground. This product can only taste the way it does because it's from here, and nowhere else.
Picked at ripeness by the family and their crew, sorted on the packing bench the same morning, and packed into the basket in the order things came in from the field — no cold storage, no gas ripening, no supermarket middle.
The farm basket rotates with the fields — spring greens and asparagus, high-summer tomatoes and stone fruit, autumn roots and squash, winter citrus and hardy brassicas.
Cox's Orange Pippin, Ashmead's Kernel, Northern Spy, Newtown Pippin, and more — russeted, aromatic, and nothing like the supermarket six.