Tasting apples foraged on the Long Island Expressway.

This August, contributing photographer Ada McNulty and I met with longtime friend Benford Lepley to learn about his experiments and adventures in the wilds of Long Island foraging, fermenting and trying to promote general goodwill throughout the community where he grew up. We visited trees in unlikely places, tasted some of the cider he's been brewing up and talked at length about food activism, patience as a virtue and using “bird strategy” to figure out if you're gonna die.

Benford telling us about the different apples he’s collected.

Heather: How did you become confident foraging?

Benford: I feel like I really learned a lot just off the internet, I did have some books . . . Stalking the Wild Asparagus, some wild edible plant id books that I've checked out, so those are helpful. I also don't really do much foraging of stuff that's really obscure, you know what I mean?

Heather: Yeah. I feel like apples are one of the safer . . .

Benford: Yes, not dangerous.

Heather: Like with mushrooms, some can kill you, but I don't think apples will hurt you . . . I mean maybe worst case you'll get a stomach ache.

Benford: And that's not even because they're poisonous, it's usually just that they're underripe. There's also not much out there that, if you have a tiny little taste just to check to see if it's really bitter or something, will truly hurt you. And if it is then you know it's probably not good.

Heather: Yeah, that sucks too because some of the best stuff is very bitter, but you don’t really want to risk . . .

Benford: Yeah.

Heather: It might kill you. (laughs)

Benford: Yeah. Like there are certain kinds of juniper berries that are edible and there are ones that are not. And the ones that are not just don’t taste good, or taste fucked up.

Ada: So you just go by bird strategy.

Benford: (laughs) Yeah. There's also some . . . like there's the yew tree, which is one of the evergreens back here with the red berries.

Heather: Those are poisonous, right?

Benford: Yeah. But the fruit itself isn’t poisonous, it's the seed!

Heather: Oh I didn't know that!

Benford: Yeah. And apparently the fruit tastes really good. I haven’t tried it though because I don’t trust the, you know . . . a lot of time it's just certain parts are poisonous, or at certain times of the year.

Heather: Mmmhmm.

Benford: So I just use the internet, a couple of books and then also just like, sticking to things that are not hyper dangerous.

Heather: Yeah. It’s not like there is one apple that will kill you, all of them are fine enough.

Benford: Yeah and even just stuff like different herbs, I’ve had different plants that I've collected from the wild that I've tried to bring into the backyard or into my nursery to grow. You know, different yarrow, different kinds of wild chamomile, stuff like that. Chamomile smells like chamomile.

Heather: Yeah, it clearly is what it is.

Heather: You said earlier that to find trees, you just drive around and spot flowers and there either are apples or there are not.

Benford: Yeah, you can look for flowers. The best time to look for trees is either when the fruit is fattening up or there are flowers. Although during the in-between stage you can totally id apple trees based on the way the leaves look. I can spot apple trees from that, even when you can't see fruit or flowers, just driving by on the highway.

Heather: Is that more of a practice thing?

Benford: Yeah, just kind of being more tuned into leaf shape, color, the structure of how the tree grows . . . but really it's also just kind of, once you know the way a plant looks, it kind of just pops out. It's like if you're looking for it you just see it.

Heather: Yeah. Growing up I, well even still, although I don't have as much of an opportunity as I used to, but I could always find four leaf clovers.

Benford: Oh nice!

Heather: People thought it was like a weird magic trick, but it's not it's just . . . you know, if you're seeing something you see it. My grandfather could do it too, we weren't actually blood related so it was always very funny because they'd say “You got it from Pop-Pop!”

Benford: Spiritual vibrations.

Heather: Yeah. It was just 'cause he would tell me to look. I would visit him and we would walk around for hours and look for four leaf clovers. So you get really good at it.

Benford: Yeah! So none of the apples I use to make cider are farmed, they're all found. Some might be a kind of classic heirloom type thing, not grocery store apples per se, but more commonly planted than a weird obscure wild apple.

Ada: What makes something a crab apple?

Benford: It's really almost a little subjective. Part of it has to do with the size, sometimes it's just that . . . sometimes people will call things crab apples when they just don't know what they are. I think it just kind of has to do with size and how sour something is.

Heather: You found all of the apples we're tasting today on the Long Island Expressway?

Benford: Yeah!

(all laugh)

Heather: These are really pretty apples, I love when they have the little freckles.

Benford: Yeah, those are, I believe, called lenticels. So I know these trees have not been pruned. Also, you know, the tree that's fending off pests, hasn't been irrigated, is theoretically going to be more . . . as long as the leaves stay on, the tree can feed the fruit and actually get it ripe. Irrigation, fertilizing with nitrogen based fertilizers, all that stuff basically waters fruit down so when you have apples that aren't watered, aren't sprayed and are just naturally healthy, from healthy trees, that's gonna make the best apples. Theoretically.

Ada: I mean every one of these apples taste like no apple I've ever bought in a store, they're so different. And it's kind of insane that people are like “Oh yeah that's a crab apple, you don't want to eat that.”

Benford: Yeah! Or better, they're like “You can't eat that! It's poison!”

(all laugh)

Heather: Well you found it on the side of the street, so it's obviously
trash . . . We have a really fucked up relationship with native fruits and vegetables, you know?

Benford: Yeah.

Heather: It's like currants and that kind of stuff, people used to just go out and pick food and would be like “Why would I pay for this if I can get this other thing myself for free?” It's like how grandmas will still gather dandelion greens off the side of the road.

Benford: Yeah I've seen people on the Jackie Robinson, you know, there's some grandmother on the side of the parkway in the most lush dandelion patch.

Heather: Do pears grow wild around here? Or not really.

Benford: Yeah they, the pears in the cider I make, they're Callery Pears that are like, it's actually hard to . . . Are you familiar with Bradford Pears?

Heather: Yeah.

Benford: That's an ornamental pear tree. So the offspring hybridized and started new trees and those do really well here because they're usually resistant to a certain type of blight. But pears are much more elusive than apples . . .

Heather: Hmm I wonder why . . .

Benford: Pears are just like . . . so weird. (all laugh) They take forever to crop.

Benford’s most recent cider release, Trees Are Filters. — Benford’s most recent cider release, *Trees Are Filters*.

Heather: Oh look at the labels!

Benford: Yeah! This is for sale, or it will be. This is kind of my cider baby. (all laugh) It's four years worth of juice.

Heather: Wow!

Benford: It's primarily crab apples, mostly fruit that's kind of this big (nickel to dollar coin-sized). It's like 9.5% alcohol and a lot of it sat in a barrel for two years before it got bottled. (cork pops) Let's give it a shake. This other one is from 2016 and it's a mix of wild pears, crab apples and regular apples. It probably needs a little air. So I have this little device that's called a refractometer. It's a way you can measure the sugar in an apple. Basically you put a little bit of juice on the lens and then you close the cover and point it towards the sun or any light source. It essentially just measures dissolved solids, I suppose, which in this case would primarily be sugar, but it can also be . . . crab apples can throw off the readings because they can have really high amounts of acid, like malic acid but also maybe citric or tartaric. So as sweet at this apple I'm measuring tastes, it only has ten bricks of sugar, which would ferment out to like . . . 5.5%, but when we go to this crusty Meadowbrook Bitter, if I can even get juice out of it . . . would be higher even though it tastes less sweet.

Heather: Does the sweetness of the apple itself have anything to do with the flavor of the cider? Like, will it cause a sweeter flavor?

Benford: It more has to do with the potential alcohol because a cider mostly will just ferment dry, so that you don't taste the sweetness. But it does give the yeast more food to do things with.

Heather: How do you choose which, I mean do you just try fermenting different apples and see how they turn out?

Benford: Yeah, I mean usually I just, like, throw everything in. (laughs) I don't do really careful blending.

Heather: You're not choosing specific apples based on flavor profiles.

Benford: Yeah I'm mostly just, my thing is more “I want one-third crab apples.” or “How many crab apples do I have? What's the ratio I can build around that?”

Heather: What do the crab apples do to the flavor? What would you would balance them with? You said you might just get super fresh cider from a farm . . .

Benford: Yeah I'll get some decently grown apple cider that's a cool variety, there's a farm that sells Black Twig apples, which are on the rarer side of heirloom.

(glasses clink)

Heather: Oh wow this is good! It's really funky.

Ada: It reminds me way more of wine than I expected.

Benford: Yeah, these are all in the vein of wines, and this has such structure and acidity that I usually leave it open for like an hour as you could with wine and then it changes a bit. It becomes this truly acidic . . . it's really cutting and it clears the palate. I like acidic and kind of bitter things. I'm releasing this cider, but I almost don't want to sell it! I just want to drink it all!

Heather: It's really good, yeah.

Benford: I'd really love to, I make so little of it that the kind of anti-cap in me is just like “Don't sell anything and just share it.”

Heather: This other one is very summery.

Benford: Yeah, that's the pear.

Ada: Is it difficult at all with distributors when they ask “What is this made of?” and you're like “Oh it's stuff I picked up in the wild.”

Benford: They kind of like it!

Heather: “Yeah it's these apples I found on the ground!”

(all laugh)

Benford: I think the only time there is any sort of an issue . . . I don't know if it's federal or state, but you have to have the right label language . . . I settled on Benford Lepley x Floral Terranes, I called the one I'm going to release Trees Are Filters, because whenever I see, like Jerusalem Goody, I think about how it's a sort of filter on the highway.

Ada: Yeah, cleansing all that pollution.

Benford: Yeah, it's cleansing and also one of the really interesting things about apples is that any heavy metal compound that's picked up through the soil, say like lead, all of the toxins picked up from the soil are deposited in the wood and aren't passed onto the fruit. The only toxins on fruit are on the outside, so if you wash it off, even if you have a tree growing on the most polluted and highly traveled highway, as long as you wash it off the fruit should be clean and safe to eat.

Heather: Oh! That's really cool.

Benford: Yeah so Trees Are Filters, to me, is like . . . I also think there are some opportunities, bigger picture things like rehabilitating polluted sites and maybe even ideas of like, I'm not sure the science has been completely proven on this stuff, but planting billions of trees to help offset climate change. There was this really large assessment done of open space and how it could be treated by growing trees. If I was a little better off financially I would want to . . . and I guess I partially am already because I am grafting these trees, but I want to actually be putting trees out into the community. And not just apples.

Heather: What's the process for literally making the cider? Like first you collect the apples, then . . .

Benford: As far as the cider goes, I pretty much just do an all wild yeast fermentation. My friend Eric, who makes cider under the label Floral Terranes, has the equipment, which is a grinder and a bladder press. It's like a big rubber tube that fills up with water that is in the middle and then on the outside there is a sort of cylinder that's stainless steel that just, you put the crushed apples in between the two and the bladder fills and presses the juice out. But then usually it's just put into a glass demijohn or we have some oak barrels and then, yeah! If it needs it I'll maybe just do a little check of, you can measure the PH and the sugar and depending on the levels I'll maybe add a small amount of sulphur, not enough to kill anything, just enough so it can stave off things from turning to vinegar before it becomes alcohol. Or even becoming alcohol but being a little vinegary. I want to avoid things that are too . . .

Heather: Too much?

Benford: Yeah. Too funky? In general I like stuff to be pretty clean and I want you to be able to, I want the fruit to drive the . . . whatever is going on.

Heather: I feel like the ciders you're producing are pretty funky compared to commercial drinks, do you know what I mean?

Benford: Yeah, agreed.

Heather: It's good.

Benford: There's also been a lot of bottle variation. I bottle this with some wild yeast and a bit of sugar left, because I want it to have just like, not sparking, but just a little, the lightest carbonation, to prickle your tongue.

Heather: Yeah.

Benford: But it's not, you know, it's not vinegary . . . it's not too yeasty. I'm also smelling the barrel more than I have in the past. Every bottle is a little bit different. So at that point stuff will usually just ferment and age for anywhere from six months to (laughs) four years for this one. Then when it's ready to get bottled if I want some bubbles I'll either try to catch it at the tail end of the fermentation or I'll wait till the following season and add a little bit of fresh juice. That will give it a little wild yeast, if it's freshly fermenting juice. Just some sugars and some yeast to kick the fermentation back up. Which was kind of the case for Trees are Filters. I've added commercial yeast in the past, but not for the last couple of years. And even when I did add it, I used some wild and some bought. I was just kind of experimenting.

Heather: Mmmhmm. So it's basically just apples.

(all laugh)

Benford: Yeah. Yeah and just a small amount of sulphur, occasionally.

Heather: Can you, like, smell if it needs sulphur?

Benford: You can smell if it has it in there! (laughs) There's ways to measure it, but I've never measured it scientifically. I'm not doing, like, a bunch of chemistry testing type stuff. It's just primarily kind of intuition based. There's times when I think, I agree with you, this cider, is a little more funky and ferment-y than . . .

Heather: Yeah I like it though, it's fun!

Benford: I like it too . . .

Ada: That was also my first instinct, because I've only ever really had commercial ciders where I'm like “This tastes like a fake apple.”

Heather: What causes more commercial ciders to be so sweet?

Benford: Usually they add a really gnarly preservative and/or sorbate and sterile filtering, and back-sweeten it to freeze the fermentation. A lot of those commercial ciders are like 5, 4.5 percent alcohol and that's because the apples would have fermented on their own to, say 6.5, 7 percent, but they stop it.

Heather: Do you think it's a palate thing or do they want it to be more comparable to beer than wine? Like a lower alcohol thing, they don't want it to be up at like 9 or 10 percent because people think of ciders as a . . .

Benford: Yeah, I think it's that. I think it's partly just like a . . . I think there's just an assumption in the US that cider is sweet, I think it's part of soda culture . . . marketing? I don't know. I also think that part of it is that if you stop the fermentation quickly and keep it sweet, the sweetness will cover up how bad the cider actually tastes. So if they . . . a lot of those places the turnaround time is like a month.

Heather: Wow really?

Benford: Yeah really quick!

Heather: You can't do that with beer, can you?

Benford: I mean certain beers you can, some beers they have out the door in like, two weeks.

Heather: That's really crazy.

Benford: So some cider makers function like a brewery, you know, Woodchuck or Angry Orchard . . . there's a release every month or less, I don't really know. Whereas if you're picking fruit when it's ripe and in season . . . They're also using apple concentrate from overseas.

Heather: Yeah.

Benford: But if you're trying to get fruit from your local and doing all this other stuff, it's gonna take longer. But I also think that cider after a month doesn't taste good, like if you filter it of all the yeast and then keep it with like one third of the sugar not fermented it kind of just tastes like juice.

Heather: Hmm. Yeah I always thought I didn't like cider, or was pretty whatever about it, you know? And then I had nicer ones.

Benford: Yeah.

Heather: And even the nicer ones are usually not as complicated as this, but . . .

Benford: Yeah it's different. I mean I, you know, I . . .

Heather: This is a little more like wine.

Benford: Yeah. I feel like even most nicer ciders people drink out of the bottle, maybe . . .

Heather: Yeah absolutely.

Benford: Whereas this needs to be consumed out of a glass.

Heather: It needs space.

Benford: Yeah it needs the air.

Heather: How did you get space in a nursery? Do you pay for it or did you just ask?

After you splice the cutting together with an existing tree, you wrap them together with paramedic film.

Benford: It's like a barter situation, it's umm . . . so Planting Fields Arboretum is like a state park. It's an old . . . it's been around for a long time. There's basically a non-profit farm that functions there that is called Orkestai Farm, with a small CSA and the organization is based around working with people of all abilities, so they work with people with autism, differently-abled people who go there for a program, like a three days a week. A friend of mine works there and asked if I needed a job, I was employed full-time but had been looking for a place to put my grafts, so we kind of just bartered. I do some workshops with them and they keep some trees. I'll do a workshop there in the Spring. Orkestai are good people.

Heather: So how do you graft?

Benford: With grafting, you're literally just splicing shit together. So I can take a cutting and, usually in late summer you do what is called bud grafting, because you're literally taking the bud and splicing it into another tree so you can see what will grow next year. You cut the dormant bud out. You pretty much can only do this kind of grafting while there is sap flowing through the tree because you have to gently separate as little wood as possible, but you want mostly just bark. This stem is like a nice little handle. So you have the bottom of the bud.

Heather: Oh yeahhh . . .

Benford: And this is just like actively growing tree, wood is essentially stored carbon. It's not necessarily, as far as I know, I mean it has capillaries I suppose . . . but like the bud is actively living and growing. And then after, you make a t-shaped slit in the bark of the seedling tree, it's called t-budding, that's the part that goes in.

Heather: And then you wrap it?

Benford: And then yeah, you wrap it with paramedic film, because it's stretchy and will disintegrate, or it decomposes really easily. [He shows us a tree he has grafted onto.] So you can see here, I took a bud from wild Jerusalem Goody and slid it in and you can actually see where the cut came down. It's almost fully healed and the bud is still alive and then there's this one that's still tucked in under the tape. I'm gonna leave this one tucked in, I just took this one off to look at it as an experiment, we'll see, but the idea is that this is all the seedling tree, I mean the entire thing is except these two buds and then next spring as soon as the tree comes back to life after the winter, I'll cut it off right here above the grafts and all the energy will go to one or two buds and it will grow up to be the new tree. But what's also great about this is that one foot worth of cutting is . . . one, two, three, four, five, six . . . seven new trees. Which is really cool! (laughs) Usually it will take a seedling anywhere from six to twelve years to make its first apple, it just depends on the circumstances. But you can buy certain root stocks, where the root stock will control how tall a tree grows, how quickly it fruits. So with grafting I can take a bud from a seedling apple and I can graft it onto one of my root stocks which will fruit in two to three years and I can see what this apple will be.

Heather: Wow!

Benford: So in apple breeding programs they literally take the pollen from one parent apple that has good characteristics and they'll pollinate the flower from another one that has another good characteristic and then grow the seeds out from those apples and then graft it onto root stock that gives you the fruit in one to two years.

Benford: Here are some of the trees I started from seed. You can see that their leaves are super healthy and they also have, this one particular has a really great form.

Heather: How do you start them from seed? Every year I save seeds and then I realize I don't actually know what to do with them.

Benford: I started these by pressing the apples, but you could just scoop the seeds out . . .

Heather: Yeah that's what I do.

Benford: Yeah so you can do that. There are different ways to store them, but the most low impact way is if after pressing the apples for juice and they're all ground up, just mix them with wood chips and just, like, put them on the ground and they'll just sprout up. I grew mine for a year on this little path, my dad even drove his motorcycle over them! (all laugh) And they were fine. Then a year later I moved them to more of the actual garden space.

Heather: So you don't have to do anything to them?

Benford: No. I mean you put them out in the fall and then they need to . . . if you save the seeds and they're in your apartment, you would need to put them onto a paper towel and just barely wet it and then roll the seeds up in it, or you could take some slightly damp sand and put that in a ziplock bag and put the seeds in the fridge. They need like three to four months of cold treatment, so it's like a false winter that you do through the actual winter.

Heather: So in the spring you just drop them in soil?

Benford: You could drop them in soil, or usually what I do is, to kind of force them to germinate I take them out of the fridge, replace the paper towel and leave them in, not direct sunlight, but in a sunny spot so they get some light and it's humid in the bag and they'll sprout. Usually within a week they will all sprout and their roots will come out. Then I just plop them in the soil. But you could do that just as well in a pot as a garden.

Heather: You'd need to that in like May or something?

Benford: Yeah. I've really waited so long to do these and it worked out. You should definitely do it. And then you know, the thing is you can buy a cutting off the internet . . . or if you have a community, one of the things I would love to figure out how to do is, I really like the idea of there being different kind of educational community orchards, even if it's just places like backyard gardens . . .

Heather: Yeah like a community garden or co-op but with trees.

Benford: Where it also acts as, like, a repository of . . . take a cutting of the elderberry and root it at your house. You could just propagate stuff and for little to no money. So if you had a community garden . . .

Heather: Or like an empty lot.

Benford: Yeah. You start your tree from seed and there's a community place where there are a variety of trees, then the following year you could graft something onto it. And then that would be a way to start propagating things without exchange of cash.

Benford measures the sugars of two apples.

Ada: Do you feel a lot of connection between your art making and making cider at all?

Benford: Yeah totally. I mean I really haven't been shooting many pictures recently, but I'll, you know I don't want to draw too many direct comparisons, but I feel more invested in this than I did in photography. It's just kind of more purpose-driven than I felt with photography. But I do think it's like, I think some of the things I like about Jerusalem Goody are similar to the things that I liked and looked for when taking pictures.

Ada: I also think of, like, social sculpture. When you're going around grafting things and finding food out in the wild.

Heather: Well that's like . . . what's his name who planted all those trees and . . .?

Benford: Joseph Beuys.

Heather: Yeah.

Ada: It's interesting because, I feel like, there were a bunch of people we knew who made a similar turn from art school to farming and doing things like that.

Benford: Yeah totally. I got into farming, but pretty quickly I realized the kind of farming that I was initially interested in I'm less so right now. Like as a day job. I totally would have an orchard of some sort, but I don't yearn to move away from society and just like, toil all day in a totally rural area. But I'm also just kind of trying to embrace being where I am right now, living here and thinking about how this stuff can be here.

Ada: Like reintegrating people and nature and their food supply.

Benford: Yeah and in a way that's just really extra accessible.

Heather: Mmmhmmm . . .

Ada: Well I like it, because I've been spending a long time personally trying to resolve art making and attempting to have some positive material impact on the world and wondering whether those are the same things or just two different parts of life . . .

Benford: Yeah.

Ada: It's a very interesting way of combining creative influence and instincts, and like you said, making stuff where you are.

Benford: Yeah totally. And I think that part of my hesitation of drawing too much of a line is I wouldn't call this art making per say, but I definitely think it's creative, intuitive, and I can access that portion of my brain and think in similar ways.

Ada: Yeah I don't mean to say “Oh this is my art practice.”

Benford: Yeah, I didn't think you were insinuating that, but it's something I've thought about because it's like, I've heard some people who went to art school and then graduated and worked on a farm being like “Now my canvas is this acre field!” and I'm like “No that's a field.”

Heather: So pretentious.

(all laugh)

Benford: Yeah I don't think about this in terms of art, but I do take cuttings and they're like, maybe I've said this before, but there are a lot of places where like, teenagers go to drink beer (all laugh) and like preserves where they're drinking in the middle of like crab apples I'll find like, you know forty bud light cans and a bra in a crab apple tree. And that's something I might have gravitated toward taking pictures of this like crusty teen drinking spot.

Ada: That's funny . . . now you go there for the apples.

Benford: Yeah.

Heather: I definitely like ate crab apples as a kid, like it was a goofy thing that you would do.

Benford: It is a kid thing!

Heather: Yeah like “Oh try one! It's so sour!”

You can follow Benford on instagram at @benfordlepley and label Floral Terranes @floralterranes. His cider, Trees Are Filters, is available at select stores in New York State, and distributed by vom Boden. All photos by Ada McNulty.

FORAGING AND FERMENTING ON LONG ISLAND