Heirloom Apples or Antique Apples from Kilcherman s Christmas Cove Farm explores an orchard amidst the rolling hills of northern Michigan s Leelanau County. The farm grows heirloom apples, two hundred and-fifty varieties of them that are rapidly disappearing from our modern food supply. Run by two octogenarians, Phyllis and John Kilcherman maintain a showroom/tasting room in a huge barn that also displays John s pop bottle collection, one of the largest in the country. On any given day you can see John buttoned into an apple collecting apron bringing more apples into the barn and Phyllis standing on the cold cement floor sharing one of her recipes with customers from near and far who visit this unique place in the Fall. The book features the family and the farm s history beginning with its public offering by the U.S. Government in 1851. Color photos of the orchard in three seasons, photographed by Dianne Carroll Burdick, capture the living apple community from the bee s pollination to apple harvest and all points of apple growing in-between. Phyllis shares recipes both traditional and creative uses of apples in meatloaf, coleslaw, baked beans as well as her most prized and sought after recipe from her grandmother, The Apple Pie. The book is laced with folklore, poems, and the apple histories some of which go back to the Crimea peninsula of Russia. In fact, apples first got to the U.S. from their native Kazakhstan via Western Europe in the 17th century.