It's time to find crab apples a-peel-ing, says Andrew Coppolino

Crab appleshave long beenoverlooked.

But over the last few years, a family company based in Wellesley has been resurrecting the variety and marketing products across southwestern Ontario.

Brothers Glen and Alex Smyth started Apple Flats in 2016with aseven-acre orchard and sales through grocery stores and specialty food shops.

Crab apple products as a commercial enterprise came about accidentally when Glen Smyth's summer job fell through. As they customarily did each year, the family made jelly using his grandmother's recipe and crab apples from a 20-year-old tree beside the family home.

"We made a lot of jelly that year because it was a bumper crop. I called a couple of local restaurants and asked if they were interested in trying it. The first restaurant we talked to said they would buy everything we made," Glen Smyth said.

The early success gave the Smyths the idea that perhaps there was something more to the idea. This summer, they anticipate harvesting up to 45,000 lb. of apples and hope to grow to 500 trees.

Flavour 'entirely unique'

Commerce aside, crab apples are an important, if forgotten, native tree and like the growing interest in heritage vegetables such as tomatoes and livestock breeds, Smyth wants to see them become more popular.

"Historically, there are a lot people who have a connection to crab apples. The flavour itself is entirely unique," Smyth said.

That certainly holds true in Waterloo region, where food historians like Edna Staebler have captured recipes for pickled crab apples made by the region's original Pennsylvania-Dutch settlers.

Today, the trees, once planted by developers for their ornamental shape and beautiful flowers, have gone wild over many years, and the brothers clean them up. They have a kind of urban harvest program with about 25 area families and 250 mature crab apple trees throughout southwestern Ontario which they pick.

"In February, my brother and I go out and prune and maintain the trees. I believe there's a really strong reason to keep heritage types of crab apples alive," he said.

Fell out of favour

Smyth estimated there are 36 types of crab apple trees around the worldand three of them are native to, and grow wild in, this area.

"We use the dolgo crab apple," Smyth said. "They were common as a hobbyist tree until about the 1930s. As farming became mechanized, the crab apple fell out of favour."

When ripe, the dolgo is brilliant, cherry red and quite a bit smaller than a golf ball. The flavour might be described as a stronger, more astringent version of a Granny Smith with a hint of lemon. Unlike traditional apples, they are picked like olives: You shake the tree, the apples drop onto a tarp, and you collect them.

• Read more from CBC K-W food columnist Andrew Coppolino

To the best of their knowledge, since the 1930s, no one in North America has done any sort of commercial volume comparable to the size of the Smyths' production. The crab apples are pressed at a mill in St. Jacobs and processed at facilities in Guelph and Mississauga.

"The pressed pure crab apple juice is put into cool-storageand we make it into products to order throughout the year," Smyth said.

Pollen producer

Along with its status as a heritage species, crab apples have a key agricultural job helping farmers: they produce abundant pollen and are often planted in hedgerows around traditional apple trees, the latter of which require the pollen of a different variety for cross-pollination in order to set a commercial crop of fruit.

And as part of the ecosystem they are building, the Smyths have added about 60 bee stacks, overseen by Nith Valley Apiaries, at the edge of their orchard. It increases crab apple yield and because they don't spray it's good for the bees too.

So with the odd tree you see here and there, it turns out that crab apples didn't disappear, Smyth said.

"They just kind of fell out of favour and stopped being planted," Smyth said."Everything else continued being planted and was really common. Crab apples were just kind of forgotten, but we're really hoping to change that and bring the heritage crop back."