North Star Orchard

If I had a hammer,
I’d hammer in the mornin’,
I’d hammer in the evenin’,
All over this land!
-American Folk Song

The deep echoes of Bill hammering orchard clips to the new trellises mixed in the air with the tap-tap of John and Melissa removing nails that held insulation board in the barn’s northern addition. These familiar sounds were like the voices of these friends, reminding you that they too were working toward a new year – setting up shop for new trees to be planted and barns to be re-purposed. Meanwhile Brint and I were deconstructing the eastern wing of the old pony shed to make it into a more fitting garden shed. We found bridles and horse mats, Legos and filled half a bucket of nails and screws from years of horse-related additions to this old chicken coop.

The hammer – that one tool which reaches across all boundaries; sneaking into even a grandmother’s house with a purple flower handle and filling the corners of our workshops as sledges and rubber mallets. My earliest memories of working with hand tools were trying to pound old roofing nails into firewood in our living room. My girls love to find the smallest hammers available and “help” me in the shop. They most often find scraps of wood and create high chairs and tables for their baby dolls, with lots of help from Mama of course! Last winter I bought Josh a new hammer and as I opened the gift from him we were both laughing – he bought me one too! We joke that it was the year we got “hammered” at Christmas!

As a farmer, many tools fill our sheds and benches. Over the past few years I’ve found that there are several I can’t live without. I love the scuffle hoe, the hand cultivator, the seeder, and the wheel hoe. But at this time of year all of these have been washed and put away. Out come the hammers and the sanders, the screw guns and the circular saws. During the summer these tools make an occasional appearance, but the work of growing food fills most of the day and they are merely for fixing garden tools or greenhouses. In these winter months there is more time for creative projects and demolition too.

We enjoy working with our hands in a different way, building new structures and as we disassemble others we think of those gone before and the kind of farming they lived by. In a book entitled Winter Poems I came across this one, it paints a perfect picture of what winter looks like for those of us who live in the soil:

Oregon Winter
The rains begin. This is no summer rain.
Dropping the blotches of wet on the dusty road:
This rain is slow, without thunder or hurry:
There is plenty of time – there will be months of raink
Lost in the hills, the old gray farmhouses
Hump their backs against it, and the smoke from their chimneys
Struggles through the weighted air. The sky is sodden with water,
It sags against the hills, and the wild geese,
Wedge flying, brush the heaviest cloud with their wings.
The farmers move unhurried. The wood is in,
The hay has long been in, the barn lofts piled
Up to the high windows, dripping yellow straws.
There will be plenty of time now, time that will smell of fires,
And drying leather, and catalogs, and apple cores.
The farmers clean their boots, and whittle, and drowse.

-Jeanne McGahey

After a long walk on a chilly day, I came inside to visit a friend who responded, “Mmmmm. You smell like cold!” She is an avid skier and loves a good snowy hike. If you know the smell I’m talking about, chances are you too love the outdoors and are as anxious as I am for a good snow. I can’t believe after the unexpected snow in October we haven’t had more than just a few flurries!

Last Thursday I had the privilege to weed the greenhouse. “Privilege?” you say. To which I respond, “YES!” I love weeding and it was truly a joy to work in the soil for a few hours after more than a month without it. No matter if it’s snowy or warm, rainy or dry, this time of year the soil outdoors is always moist. These past few weeks it has a nice frozen crust from the cold nights, but by afternoon it is a living sponge – moist and as soft as a pillow! It is near impossible to weed such wet soil and so we’ve left the garden to do as it will for these next few months. But in the greenhouse I pulled a wheelbarrow of chickweed and ground ivy, grass and yellow rocket, and it was GREAT! The smell of the soil and the earthy winter annuals were enough to make me hungry – yes, I occasionally enjoy “eating my weedies”. Chickweed is my favorite, it has a very earthy and yet fresh crunch. I probably couldn’t eat a whole bowl full, but a few nibbles is always a pleasure.

The greenhouse was cold in the early morning, but as the sun came up I was quickly shedding hats and sweaters. Outside it was still chilly and later that afternoon, when I was in the farmhouse finalizing the garden plan for 2012, Sophie (the dog) came inside, and she smelled like cold. I looked out the window to see flurries! I was elated to watch the sidewalk and then the grass turn white and was hoping it wouldn’t stop. Maybe in the morning I could get out the skis?

Wouldn’t you know it, but Friday morning it was warm and sunny again and the distinct smell of earthworms was in the air. It seems so early to smell something I directly link to spring, but of course worms don’t migrate to warmer climates. They are doing their job all through the year – turning a mix of partially decomposed organic matter and all of the bits of soil into a wonderful environment for growing things. Thank you worms (and all soil organisms) for all the hard work! You take last year’s bits and pieces and recycle them into the perfect nursery for the following year’s seeds and transplants.

And finally, the smell of smoke permeates each of my winter days. We heat our home with wood, and sometimes a smoldering log or a drafty day will have us opening doors to vent out the smoke. As I am outside playing with the girls or carrying lumber to the shop, a breeze will blow smoke my way. It is a comforting, warming smell that reminds me that it really is winter – even if it is 50 degrees outside!

But soon enough the smell of smoke and cold will be on the air less frequently, and instead the faint scent of worms will become a regular part of each day. This will give way to the fragrance of apple blossoms and lettuce, which in turn will make room for carrots and cucumbers, and on and on…

When I was young, I viewed Thanksgiving as a pre-Christmas and pre-shopping-season day of gluttony (I remember vividly one day, when I was a young teen, I ate so much I actually felt very ill – yuck!). Pilgrims and Indians were thought of when I was wee young, but as I grew older it just seemed a day to feast with family the same feast we’d be eating a month later at Christmas.

All of that has changed. For the past 10 or 15 years, Thanksgiving has become, for our small family of three, a day of thanks – giving.

Firstly, we are thankful for a day off. It is literally the first day all three of us have had off since, oh, sometime in June or July. That’s a mighty long time to go without a breather, but it is rather the norm for a small farm owner/operator. We enjoy our day off by sleeping in (for me, that means 6 AM – wow!), watching some movies, playing some games, and cooking some food – just for us. We decided long ago that traveling on Thanksgiving or having a house-full of guests just didn’t sound like a good day off.

Secondly, we are thankful to wrap up the harvest season. It seems like every year wraps up fairly nicely. We can look back and remember some of the crazy weather- or pest-related events of the season, but all-in-all we usually have very much to be thankful for each year at this time. We now begin planning for next season.

Thirdly, we are thankful for all the people who we’ve had the pleasure to work with or serve over this season: our intrepid farm helpers, the two couples we lease some of our orchard land from, our CSA members and farmers’ market customers, the farmers’ market managers and CSA pickup site hosts, the local (and not-so-local) suppliers of many of thie items our farm needs to source from year to year: seed companies, nurseries, garden supply companies, repair shops, Google, Constant Contact, Siteground, Credo Mobile, Fulton Bank, our webmaster at Veni Vortex, and (occasionally) Starbucks, just to name a few.

I’m thrilled with our Thanksgiving holiday now. It’s a day we look forward to as a nice little break, a shift to another season’s activities, and a time to be mindful and thankful for all the many, many people we have the pleasure of working with and working for each year.

Thank you, everyone!

One of my favorite things about going to market is answering (or trying to answer) the questions people ask as they walk up to the table. With so many beautiful but uncommon varieties of apples, postures range from hesitant interest, to unbridled curiosity. Common questions include: Which are the sweetest? Which are the most tart? What should I use for baking? What’s with this brown apple? Which is your favorite?

Some questions are easier to answer than others: Usually, the apples are arranged from sweetest to most tart, with a few varieties in the middle, to make things easier for everyone. The best apple for baking depends largely on personal preference. The brown apples are Asian pears…just kidding. Russeted apples like Hudson’s Golden Gem and Razor Russet have great textures that are different from all the others, usually with a less noticeable skin. My favorite apples seem to change each week, with Spitzenburg topping the list currently and Golden Russet following closely behind.

My favorite question at market always starts the same way, “I had this one apple…can you tell me what it is?”, and a wild goose chase of apple identification begins. If North Star had it recently and clues include the flavor, color, or some part of the name, a proper I.D. is fairly easy to come by. If the apple was from last year, or much earlier this season and the details are hazier, it gets a little tough.

Understandably, we have the desire to find out which varieties we enjoy, but talking with people about their recently-discovered-yet-unnamed-favorite apple brings up a deeper topic of what most of us have come to expect with food. Often, we want the same thing again and again throughout the year, and that’s not what you get from locally-grown fruit. There is this tension between seeing the same few varieties of apples in any supermarket no matter what time of year, compared with a wider variety from the orchard that changes weekly. The Summer Blaze apples picked in August won’t be around with the Emperors picked this week – and that’s a good thing.

There is something about stepping away from the regular handful of apples that you can find anywhere at any time, and enjoying new flavors from a freshly picked apple that you’ve never tried before, even if it means waiting a whole year to taste it again. There are so many incredible varieties to try in the meantime, that even if you forget the name, you can grab someone at the farm or market and explain, “I had this one apple…can you tell me what it is?”

Tiny onion plants, their first leaves just beginning to unfold, are arriving to nursery school. Meanwhile the matronly short stake tomatoes, sitting around a card table playing bridge, talk about their grandchildren and watch over the sprouting kale and spinach. The beets make eyes at each other, thinking of marriage and starting their families.

Yesterday, we were discussing the barely unfolding Winter Garden when farm helper Laura began this comparison of the veggies in the garden to the stages of life. It began an illustration in my mind of all of my beloved friends, some homo sapien and some plantae. This is truly the beauty of gardening, to watch the unfolding of life in a day by day experience. Surely we all enjoy the beauty of spring flowers with their promise of new life. We gardeners have the honor to watch every day as the seeds we sow push their primary leaves through the soil and begin the process of becoming mature plants. It is almost like having a family of thousands!

Sometimes, as in human interaction, the seeds we sow do not do as well as we had expected. The spinach I planted two weeks ago only came up half as well as I felt it should have. And I know how many hungry people LOVE spinach! Just like in my family life, when things don’t come to fruition it’s time to take a step back and think of a new plan to try for next time. So yesterday as we prepared to seed spinach again, we tried three different types of sowing methods in order to determine which would be most effective for successive plantings.

Strangely similar, after months of being frustrated with trying to teach toddlers to pick up their toys, I have recently found that the incentive of a penny for each area tidied is proving effective in our house. Hurray! I’m sure that, like everything with children, this will not be effective forever, but it works for now and that is enough. Just like those stubborn little spinach seeds, providing the right frequency and methods will prove to yield more desirable results – I hope!

What to do when the plants that you have been tending all summer with regulated water and pest control begin to curl up and die despite your best efforts? I fear it may be time to say goodbye to some of our brassica crops. Surely we will have plenty of cabbage and broccoli, but after weeks of brutally hot temperatures followed by weeks of downpours, some of the cauliflower and brussel sprouts are simply collapsing. It makes me frustrated and sad to see some of these friends melt away before their time, but I can’t help but think that these are lessons for life.

Sometimes letting go is all there is to do. It’s been years since I’ve lost a loved one, but watching my Big Granny fade was just that way. I spent time with her every week watching strong, stubborn coal miner’s wife slowly fade into nothing but a memory. In the end there was nothing to do except to let Mother Nature take her back. So as we lose crops due to disease or weather-related issues, I try to take my grains of salt and remember that we come from the earth and will return to it. It is my life to enjoy this brief moment; to plant seeds and harvest their crops and in the process grow a little myself.

I came to work last Monday morning unsure of what to expect in the wake of Hurricane Irene. I didn’t bother asking the obvious questions about the state of the orchard – Is there any fruit left on the trees? How many trees blew over? Can we straighten them back into place?

As the morning unfolded, we tackled one task at a time, feeling the pressure of a full schedule and growing to-do list. Stepping away from the normal work of picking and sorting, we added work we had to allot time for: Clearing downed trees from the driveway and the orchard – 12 hours; hammering stakes and pulling fruit trees back into position – 15 hours; straightening hundreds of blown-over young trees in the nursery – 5 hours; and still so much more to do.

Rows of Asian pears became most noticeable by the fruit covering the ground, rather than hanging from the trees. A stretch of large plum trees looks pretty good, until you begin asking if they were all leaning slightly before the storm. Toppled-over peaches and apples are much more obviously affected; lying down with roots straining in the soil or snapped beyond survival.

Yet, in the midst of visible signs of the weather’s unpredictability and the time spent repairing what was damaged, the regular work moves forward. Crimson Crisp and huge Royalty apples turn glowing reds and deep purples that signal they are ready to be picked. Fantasia nectarines ripen and get picked for their third time. Hosui Asian pears move from green to tan as the flavor goes from good to exceptional, and the trees yield dozens of bushels of ripe fruit.

While a lot of work still remains to clean up after the storm, I’m seeing the practical merit of growing such a wide variety of trees on different training systems in the orchard. When you see how the damage from last weekend affected those varieties closest to being picked, but didn’t devastate the orchard entirely, growing dozens of varieties that ripen at different times not only keeps the orchard exciting, but makes sense in a business so deeply affected by the weather. So as we keep working to straighten trees back into position and get the orchard back into order, there is more than enough fruit to keep busy picking as we continue moving forward through the season.

There’s something about working in the tree nursery that’s really exciting.

Witnessing trees in their earliest stages and growing so quickly provides a perfect complement for the more consistent work of picking.

Earlier this spring, we grafted hundreds of pieces of scion wood from desirable varieties to rootstocks that determine tree size, and since then I’ve been intrigued by the whole process of raising young fruit trees.

Maybe it’s the rows of fluttering nametags for all of the pears, peaches and apples that I’ve never heard of before, but which have stories behind them. (The picture here shows apple trees on the right and peaches on the left in the nursery)

Or, it could be the different types of grafting, like T-Bud grafting, where next year’s flower buds are placed under the bark of peach rootstocks which were previously planted and already looked like small trees.

Even weeding seems so rewarding when you expose the contrast between rows of young vigorous trees stretching toward the sky and the dark and crumbly soil in which they are anchored.

As we dealt with weeks of hot and dry weather earlier this summer, a lot of the newly grafted trees did not make the sensitive union to begin growing together, and several withered.

However, some of the grafts which looked snapped or bent way beyond hope have taken hold and are growing to heights over my head, even with a 90-degree bend where they were grafted! The 5-foot tall bamboo stakes that support the trees seemed like overkill at first, when the trees were a knee-high, but are now steadily being outgrown.

While it takes a lot of time to work with so many tiny trees, grafting is often the only means for accessing a lot of different varieties.

Many of the varieties of scion wood selected come from smaller orchards and nurseries during the spring, so when they don’t graft successfully, it can be a frustrating wait until new wood can be ordered for another try the following year. Still, for every tree that didn’t make it, a bunch did, which means we are well on our way in an exciting several-year journey to taste even more untried (for us) fruit varieties and flavors.

You know the story; Shakespeare lines up yet another mixed up tale of love and judgment, in which somehow in the middle of the confusion all ends up “right”, or at least dead.

For the first few weeks of growth, I thought that our delicious yellow beans were called Merchant of Venice and thought, “Hmm. Interesting. I wonder why they chose that for the name.” But I was wrong, instead we have Marvel of Venice beans. A name much more fitting because although they do not contain a secret potion for wooing a lover, they are lovely and abundant!

Venice is a city known for its amazing water navigation systems, for its beauty, for its extravagance. You might expect a bean named to be it’s marvel would have gothic scroll work on the leaves or tiny cathedrals on its flowers. But alas, no. But if you’ve eaten these beans you know why they are named such. Such flavor, such freshness!

I’m proud to say that we picked last Monday nine baskets of beans! I think that’s a record, at least for this year, from these bean vines. We are also trying a new trellising system in that looked like a giant harp before the beans covered it. Rather than the plastic netting we usually have, we put up a tight zig zag of sisal twine for the beans to grow up. The hope is that when they beans are done we can cut loose the twine and put the whole “wall” of beans into the compost. Anyone who has grown pole beans (or any vine) knows how tightly they can coil themselves around whatever they grow up. It can take hours to unwrap their tiny curls!

I loved watching them grow up and up the twine. As the wind blew across, it made a sort of slow moving wave, like someone slowly playing the harp. We could almost hear music! Just kidding! Wouldn’t it be great though if vegetables were also musical? Carrot clarinets anyone?

I hope you have gotten to enjoy some Marvel of Venice beans. If so, I think you’ll agree that even Portia, Shylock, and Antonio would have enjoyed these buttery, prolific legumes!

Really…just look at them. With nifty patterns of variegated brown symmetrically arranged on its back, it could be the model for a new variation on hunters’ camouflage gear or other apparel dye patterns. It’s really pretty neat….beautiful in fact, if you don’t think too much about what the patterns and colors are attached to.

And the smell of the stinkbugs? Well, scratch and sniff. For some folks, the smell is downright revolting. For others (like me) it smells kind of like paper. Some people smell cilantro. So it’s weird, but not always completely offensive (unless you think about it).

The brown marmorated stinkbug (BMSB), as you may have heard, is wreaking havoc all over the midAtlantic states, and is spreading further. Florida is very worried about its arrival.

BMSBs are an invasive pest which are native to the Japan and China. They were first discovered in Pennsylvania in the late 90s, and have multiplied in such numbers that they’re invading homes and destroying crops. Their native predators, alas, did not travel with them, so they are pretty much on their own here and having a grand feasting party.

BMSBs love all kinds of fruits and veggies. Fruits like peaches, nectarines, apples, and Asian pears are very tasty to them (and hey, why not?). Their favorite vegetable around here seems to be edamame soybeans and sweet corn, but they’ll dabble in other veggies as well. They literally suck on the fruit in question, and leave a dimpled area. Sometimes (like if their dinner was interrupted), that’s all you’ll see is a dimple. Other times (when they can feast uninterrupted) the interior flesh may be discolored a bit or even a little ‘corky’. It’s not harmful to eat it or eat around it, thankfully.

For large commercial farms which sell to wholesale markets, any amount of BMSB damage on the crop makes it completely unsaleable. Some reports show that $37 million in crop sales were lost last year due to BMSB nibbling. Ouch. And it’s only going to be worse this year. Since the wholesale (ie. grocery store) market demands perfect, farms which rely on wholesaling are getting hammered.

Meanwhile, lots of studies are being conducted looking for ways to control the problem. Importing the BMSB’s natural predator is being considered, new chemical sprays are being studied and developed, and other less invasive means are being considered. Here at the farm, we are currently talking with a company which is trying to develop a solar-powered BMSB trapping system for commercial application. We’ll keep you posted on developments!

In the meantime….what is the beauty of stinkbugs?
1. They do look kind of neat (if you don’t mind antennae and creepy-crawly legs)
2. We’re all in the same boat here: you’ve got them in your houses and I have them on my farm. So, we can commiserate together (the ties that bind and all).
3. A little dimpling is just that….a little dimpling. Adds character perhaps?? We’ll keep the fruits the BMSBs really feasted on (like those pictured here) at home, but we trust that the occasional dimple in your fruit will be tolerated.

We’re all in the same boat on this one, and until a (hopefully non-toxic) solution is found, the BMSB will just bring us closer together. Complaints about them can continue now!

When introduced to a guest at a party recently, I shared that I work in an orchard. He seemed surprised and responded, “You mean, like, picking fruit?” We chatted briefly and since that conversation I’ve been thinking about everything that leads up to the iconic, but brief, moment of picking fruit within the context of the entire growing season.

Looking back nearly 6 months to frozen ground and blankets of snow, it’s strange to think of the trees as leafless holdouts waiting for their time to shine. With comfy boots and layers of warm clothing, I embraced winter as the time for pruning and learning about all of the different growth habits and training systems for the trees. It was hard to imagine these naked branches being weighed down with clusters of fruit and trying to prune accordingly – they didn’t even have leaves yet!

But before long, the trees burst into bloom and the orchard transformed from bare-boned rows of trees into stunning blocks of pink and white flowers. With spring under way, we focused on tying and training the trees to desired shapes and growing habits: “V’s” for peaches and nectarines; central leaders and open centers for apples, pears, Asian pears, and plums.

With the time for tying and training passed, thinning continues to be the main task, especially among the Asian pears. At first, it seems terrible to snip off so many tiny fruits, but after seeing (and tasting!) the size and quality that the remaining fruit achieves, the hours devoted to thinning are definitely worthwhile.

In the middle of everything, we found time to graft dozens of different apple, pear and peach varieties, notching together rootstocks that control the size of a tree, with scion-wood of the desired tree varieties. The grafts and hundreds of apple trees grown from seed were planted in two new on-farm nurseries.

Watching them bolt into waist-high trees has been exciting sign that there are still so many new and antique varieties of fruit to grow and try – it just takes a few years. I’ve already been so impressed by the Purple Heart and Early Golden plums, Pristine and Redfree apples, Eastern Glo nectarines, and GaLa peaches that were new to me this season!

So in response to my fellow party guest’s earlier question about working in an orchard, in addition to pruning, tying, grafting, planting, weeding, thinning, tasting, and all of the surrounding tasks, my condensed answer is “Yes! – Picking fruit!”