An apple a day keeps the doctor away. If you ate an apple from a different variety each day, it'd take you a cool 44+ years to make your way through all the varieties listed in Dan Bussey's The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada. That's a lot of different apples to eat.
Of course, the best apple or peach or pear variety for you to eat is the one growing in your backyard. But not all varieties of fruit trees will thrive here. The high elevation and harsh climate along the Wasatch Back limits the fruit tree varieties that can grow in your backyard and reliably bring you delicious, nutritious fruit. The goal of the Wasatch Back Fruit Tree Project is to assemble data on the fruit tree varieties that can reliably produce in our area, and to make that information publicly available so more of us can share in the bounty. To do this, we're enlisting citizen scientists (alternate reading: you) to fill out a few short surveys each year that will document the performance of your fruit trees (starting just with apple and peach right now, more in the future) - one round of surveys at bloom time and one at harvest.
Of special interest are those old trees that have weathered it all, the good years and the bad, yet refuse to be unfruitful. We want to preserve and distribute these pioneers. Some trees' variety names may be unknown. Maybe they were once known but have now been forgotten, or maybe the trees are unnamed seedlings. We've secured funding for DNA-based apple identity testing in 2024. We need your help in knowing where these trees are!