planting crab apple seeds Pacific Crabapple Seeds - Malus fusca

planting crab apple seeds Pacific Crabapple Seeds - Malus fuscaPacific Crabapple is a wild species of apple native to the pacific northwest. It makes small but abundant tart fruits that can be canned whole, or made into jelly or cider. It has showy pink white flowers in the spring that pollinators love, and has ornamental value in the bronze fruit clusters in late summer and colourful foliage in fall. The bark becomes rough and ridged with age. Because this species is both drought and wet tolerant, it's becoming

Pacific Crabapple is a wild species of apple native to the pacific northwest. It makes small but abundant tart fruits that can be canned whole, or made into jelly or cider. It has showy pink/white flowers in the spring that pollinators love, and has ornamental value in the bronze fruit clusters in late summer and colourful foliage in fall. The bark becomes rough and ridged with age.

Because this species is both drought and wet tolerant, it's becoming a popular rootstock for challenging sites. It will even grow in standing water! It's also disease-resistant. 

Birds love the fruit, and because the trees often have pointy spines, they make a safe roosting spot for birds at night.

This is an important tree for Indigenous peoples on the west coast. One way people stored them for winter is to store the unripe green apples in bentwood cedar boxes filled with water in a cool place. Over time the fruits soften and develop and aroma like cotton candy. They are still widely used today.

I believe the trees I harvested from were planted and stewarded by the Indigenous groups of the area (K'ómoks, Kwalikum, and/or Snaw-naw-as peoples). The beautiful old trees grow along a river, and in one stretch they are in a perfectly straight line. There are many other Indigenous food plants in the area, such as silverweed, rose, and black hawthorn, which seems to me like an intentional food forest. 

50% of sales from this variety go to Sovereign Seeds, an Indigenous-led initiative dedicated to the revitalization of Indigenous seed and food sovereignty in so-called Canada.