Birds can be the bane of Ken Weston’s life. They peck at his apples and knock his cherries to the ground. Weston is up in the trees one June afternoon, standing gingerly on a mechanical lift, inching his featherweight body to the edge as he fastens an electronic alarm to a branch.
“This one keeps the starlings away,” Weston says. “You want to hear it?” With the flip of a switch, the simulated screech of a distressed starling pierces the air. The shrill calls warn off other starlings and protect the trees.
At 82, it’s something of a battle for the old apple man to tend to every tree in Weston’s Antique Apple Orchard on the north slope of New Berlin’s Prospect Hill. But it’s a labor of love. After nearly a lifetime of walking up and down the steep hill, he moves with a hobble now and relies on a 72-inch tractor/mower to get around. “My glorified wheelchair,” he calls it. “I go everywhere in this thing. It’s got armrests and I can sleep in it when I’m tired.”
When he’s not among the trees, planting, pruning and picking, you can probably find Weston in the barn, where he will hold court on almost any topic. Take birds, for instance. “If I was going to be a bird, I would be a harpy eagle or a robin. Robins have a certain nobility. They’ll flock to the aid of each other. Unlike most humans.”
With a doctorate in mathematics and 40 years experience teaching college students at Notre Dame, Marquette and UW-Parkside, Weston’s views seem to take in a whole world: from Franz Kafka to John Steinbeck, Zen Buddhism to Christian Science, U.S. foreign policy to Stephen Hawking’s theory on black holes. He’s taken courses in Sanskrit, Indian philosophy and “the taxonomy and ecology of green algae.” As a man of science, he tries to base his views on facts. “Unfortunately,” he says, “a fact doesn’t stand a chance against a belief these days.”
His orations on apples stream unendingly; cider seems to run through his veins.
“The first apple originated in the forests of Kazakhstan 5.2 million years ago,” he informs me. “They were not for eating but used for their juices.” America’s first apple orchard was established near Boston in 1625. Today, there are an estimated 7,500 varieties of apples worldwide.
Nearly all of Weston’s varieties are classified as antique or heirloom apples, varieties developed at least a century ago, before refrigeration, before apples were hybridized for shipping and long shelf life. Those were the days when apples were grafted for flavor and sold at roadside stands and farmers markets.
Once a dairy farm, the Weston property was bought by Ken’s maternal grandfather around 1932. Ken’s father, Harvey Weston, worked in Milwaukee while living at the farm with his wife, Alice, and their children, Ken and Genevieve. The family expanded an existing orchard behind the barn, buying seedlings for 25 cents apiece and planting them with the help of Civilian Conservation Corps laborers.
The land had once been a quarry: Pickaxes were used to dislodge the boulders, the earth turned acre by acre with a pitchfork. “Sometimes, I had to get down on my hands and knees with a ball-peen hammer and coal chisel to chip out the rocks and weeds,” Ken recalls.
Eventually, his mother shelled out $800 for a new tractor, a McCormick Farmall Cub. That was 1948. The Cub is still used today.
Ken and his wife, Isabelle, had two children, and he continued to work the orchard during his years as a math professor, eventually taking it over from his parents. His wife died from a brain tumor in 2005. Today, his son lives on the orchard’s northern end and helps out. Sister Genevieve, 81, lives at the farmhouse and sells the fruit, including some from a smattering of cherry, plum and pear trees.
The Westons have been selling apples at farmers markets in West Allis and Madison since the 1940s. Back then, a half-bushel of their Wolf River apples went for $2.50, or 11 cents a pound. Today, they sell for $1.50 a pound, the average price of most Weston apples.
A handful of top restaurants, including L’Etoile in Madison and Sanford in Milwaukee, are also customers. Sandy D’Amato, Sanford’s owner and chef, has been buying Weston apples for 30 years and raves about their quality. “I’ve never seen anything even close at any of the conventional markets,” he says.
Sanford uses Weston antiques to make apple butter, savory jams, chutneys and entrees and salads. “We use the Pink Pearls with mint garlic dressing,” he says. “The acidity of the mint garlic brings out the apple’s sweetness.”
He admires Ken and Genevieve for their dedication. “They grew up with the trees. They haven’t lost any enthusiasm.”
Early on, the orchard grew 30 varieties, including Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and McIntosh, “modern varieties that were in high demand,” says Genevieve. When customers requested new and unusual varieties, her parents would search nursery catalogs and order trees.
Weston’s orchard now has more than 700 trees and about 100 varieties of apples, some as large as potatoes or as small as olives. The Kandil Sinap is shaped like a long pepper and has no core. The Cort Pendu Plat looks like a small donut. The Spigold changes flavor as you eat it, the saliva reacting with chemical compounds in the apple.
I ask Ken to sample a Fuji apple I bought at a supermarket. “Of the modern varieties, Fuji is one of my favorites,” he says. This one, though, had been stored too long. “The fruit is flat. It’s sweet, but tasteless,” he says, tossing it half-eaten into the grass.
Some store-bought apples are grown in South America, picked green, coated with a waxy preservative, then shipped to a distribution warehouse in the U.S., where they’re trucked to grocers as they ripen. “Most of the time that satisfies people.”
But not Weston. He has many favorites from his orchard:
– Ashmead’s Kernel, developed in 1790 by a British physician. “It has a very nutty flavor, and the texture is wonderful, the color greenish-yellow covered with a heavy russet.”
– King David, 1893 from Arkansas. “A small apple, maroonish-red. It has pockets of liquid inside, so you get a cider and the apple all in one.”
– Calville Blanc d’Hiver, 1598, France. “Wonderfully spicy. It has more vitamin C than an orange. They use it to brew Calvados.”
– Pitmaston Pineapple, 1780, England. “A tiny apple, very crispy and sweet as hell, with a faint pineapple flavor.”
Weston cites another variety, his one-of-a-kind Old Church apple, for its remarkable endurance. On the night of April 11, 1985, arsonists set fire to the old Freewill Baptist Church at the summit of Prospect Hill, which is on the east border of the orchard. Ken awoke to see orange flames leaping into the black sky. By the time the volunteer fire department arrived, the roof had collapsed and the steeple’s cast-iron bell had crashed through the floor.
Alongside the church was a single apple tree, fire engulfing its leaves and branches.
The church’s owner decided to tear down the building and replace it with a parking lot. Ken resisted, and with the help of a county supervisor and state representative, formed the Prospect Hill Restoration Organization. The church was rebuilt using the original 1936 blueprints, and in 1998, it was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
And the apple tree? It stands where it always has, hugging the west wall of the church, 15 feet tall and still producing fruit, “nice and tart,” says Weston.
Three years ago, Weston got a voice mail from Paul Marinaro, a category manager for Roundy’s Supermarkets. He wanted Ken to set up a stand at a company store. Too busy, Weston didn’t return the call. But Marinaro persisted, and last summer, Weston agreed to present his apples at a Pick ’n Save in Menomonee Falls.
“A lot of consumers just fell in love with Ken’s fruit,” says Marinaro. “People remembered some of these varieties. They’d say, ‘I haven’t had that since my grandfather’s orchard.’ ”
Marinaro now books Weston for special events at four local stores: Pick ’n Save in the Falls and New Berlin, and Metro Market in Brookfield and Milwaukee. “I don’t know if there’s a soul on earth who knows more about apples,” Marinaro says.
Weston’s still-youthful, “just for the heck of it” spirit is irrepressible. Driving his tractor through the orchard, circling tree after tree, he stops to show off a year-old
specimen grafted from rootstock in Kazakhstan. “I have no idea what it’s going to look like,” he says, smiling like a schoolboy. “It’s supposed to be absolutely delicious, bright red.”
He roars up the hill, laughing at the peculiar shapes of some trees. “This one had too much to drink,” he says, pointing to a trunk bent at a drunken angle.
Seven or eight years ago, the caretaker of an elderly woman approached Ken in the orchard. The old woman loved Weston’s Tomato apple, a tangy fruit with reddish-orange skin. She was dying of cancer and had a request: After death, could her ashes be spread under the orchard’s lone Tomato apple tree?
“I obliged,” Weston says. “The orchard becomes kind of a cemetery. That’s the tree right there.” We stand back, careful not to step on the grave.
In 2004, while caring for his dying wife, Weston began thinking about the future of his orchard business. He and his sister formed a nonprofit foundation and, to preserve the orchard against future development, donated the property to the city of New Berlin as part of the Prospect Hill Settlement Historic District. According to Weston, the city is obligated to maintain the property as an orchard indefinitely.
Ken and his sister still work the orchard daily. The new foundation bears most of the operational costs, and volunteers maintain the equipment and pitch in each year to harvest the fruit. The business will not pass down to his children, but Ken has no regrets.
“If you love something,” he says, “you give it away.”
photos by Adam Ryan Morris
