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!

A Field Full for Fall

It is amazing how quickly all the available spaces in the garden are filling up with broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and the like.

Hundreds of seeds sown into soil blocks in the greenhouse looked like trays of chocolates in Willy Wonka’s factory. And now, as they are maturing into young seedlings, they stand proudly in their tidy rows, filling up dozens of beds we haven’t used yet this year – and dozens more that have held lettuces, beets, and carrots. It’s funny to find bits of carrots and parts of dill plants as we make our furrows for planting these fall wonders.

The cruciferous or brassica family includes mustards, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, collards, pac choi, and many others.

I love the little, almost perfectly spherical seeds, especially the color variation from brick red to golden yellow to dusty purple. All these colors can exist within a single species and so as we plant them its like getting to know a class full of children. They are all the same age, around the same size, and love to grow! Each has its own personality though, and will have a few variations – sometimes three “seed leaves” develop and sometimes the edges of the leaves are tinted white. By the time it’s time to go into the field they are all essentially the same, but if you look closely you can see these distinguishing characteristics. Thank goodness we don’t have to remember their names!

In my own garden at home, I usually forget about sowing cruciferous seeds until September and by then it’s too late. Last week, my daughter Jaden and I planted short rows of each type of seed. We will transplant them as soon as they are big enough, probably in around 3 weeks. Today when we were harvesting corn we she said, “Mom! Come see this!” She was delighted to see that our seeds are growing well, each one a little different from the others.

We look forward to watching them grow and harvest them in October and make broccoli soup, cauliflower curry, and sauerkraut!

Got your attention?

Yes kids, today, we’re talking about everyone’s favorite topic….sex. In the orchard.

Seek no further; unlike some people, we do not post nudies of us cavorting about like these two. And quite frankly, you wouldn’t want to see pictures to that effect anyway!

But the topic of sex came up recently when a farmers’ market customer inquired, “In a large orchard what prevents different kinds of apples from cross pollinating?”

So there you have it – sex! Of course, here we’re talking more about the birds and the bees. Or more accurately in this case, the bees and the wind. And cloning.

No worries, we’re not playing God here, but rather just working naturally with the way many plants go about reproducing themselves.

You see, apple, peach, pear, nectarine (and most other fruit blossoms) do indeed cross pollinate. The wind blows, the bees buzz around, and the pollen is spread about from one tree to another. We actually want this to happen in order for those blossoms to become pollinated and produce a nice big juicy fruit. Fruit trees naturally use the rhythm method to get pregnant with fruit. Please – no condoms ’round the orchard in spring time!

So, cross pollination is a good thing.

Of course, just as in human sex, when you cross two parents you’ll get an infinite number of slightly or greatly different offspring. I know my own mother was always astounded by how different my brother and I could be, even though we came from the same parents. I’m sure you know of siblings in your own extended families who make you wonder the same thing!

Fruit works the same way. Take all of the seeds out of a Gold Rush apple, for example, and plant them. Then wait several years and see what you get. You’ll end up with a whole bunch of apple trees, each one of which produces a different (sometimes vastly different) kind of apple. Some may be sweet, some more tart. Some tiny, some huge. Some more yellow, some mostly red. It’s all in the genes that joined up during orchard sex (um, pollination) season at bloom time.

And here you thought a blooming orchard was just pretty – little did you know what kind of orgy was going on out there. Yikes (or ooooh, depending on your point of view).

Which, then, brings up the question some CSA members had just recently. “Is it true that an orchard like this is made up of clones?”

Well, certainly…but not necessarily entirely.

If we want to be SURE to have a Gold Rush tree, we must plant a grafted tree of Gold Rush. Because, as mentioned before, if we just planted Gold Rush seeds, who knows what we’d end up with!

A grafted fruit tree consists of a rootstock, (also clones, by the way) which will convey to the adult tree the final size and strength of the tree and, to a certain degree, the growth habit and size of the fruit. On top of the rootstock is grafted a wee little bud of the tree you’d like to have. So, all of our Gold Rush trees started out life as buds on an adult Gold Rush tree, which were then grafted on to the particular rootstock we wanted for our orchard.

This is not genetic modification or playing God by any means. Many plants reproduce in manners similar to this, and many plants naturally graft themselves to others, given the right growing conditions.

So, basically all orchard trees are clones of varieties which came before. And all orchard trees have sex (or rather, cross-pollinate). It’s all cool.

Farmer Ike has always dabbled in fruit and vegetable breeding projects (yep, more plant sex!). In these cases, he decides which varieties he’d like to have cross pollinate with each other (kind of like an arranged marriage??). Then he’ll choose, over time and with further selections, the best brand-new varieties which present themselves from that cross. Our apple variety, Monolith, is one such baby of ours. Current breeding projects include potatoes (we’ve got over 80 new kinds to try!), and an apple breeding project crossing Gold Rush with Florina (several hundred of those babies are growing here now).

Sex behind closed doors in many cases is a good idea. But out in the orchard, the trees merrily let it all hang out…and we all happily benefit from the delights of sex in the orchard!

I probably wouldn’t be working at North Star Orchard if it weren’t for the Asian pears. It’s true – they’re what drew my attention to this farm years ago at Philadelphia farmers’ markets. I’m not the only one; they truly have a cult following. I’ll often open my mouth to answer a question about them at a market, only to have another customer standing nearby answer enthusiastically for me. I’ve heard about Asian pears shipped away to kids at college who are yearning for a taste of home, and about some that are shipped each year to relatives in Europe. I know my parents won’t let me in the door at Christmas-time if I don’t bring pears along.

So many people love them, but they’re still a bit of a mystery to most. What are these things? These “apple pears,” “Korean pears,” “sand pears,” “salad pears,” nashi? Well, “apple pear” is misleading; they really have nothing to do with apples, except that they share a plant family (Rosaceae). What they actually are is another species of pear, Pyrus pyrifolia, that has been traditionally grown in Japan, China, and Korea. You’ve been eating them for weeks (if not years) now, so I don’t have to tell you what they taste like, or about their characteristic crunch. Unlike “European” pears, Asian pears are picked ripe and ready to eat – none of that guesswork about when it’s reached its moments-long window of peak ripeness before turning to unpleasant mush in the center. Keep them in your fridge loosely in a plastic bag and they’ll keep for weeks. (Especially good to know this time of year when the CSA’s ending!)

Perhaps the Asian pear fervor is only unusual in this country where fruit generally serves as a sort of placeholder. We’re not accustomed to great flavor, but rather a healthy something to tide us over or fill a lunch bag. Most of us grew up on inoffensive-at-best apples and identical-looking bananas, definitely nothing to get excited about. In Asia, however, where these pears come from, they’re served as a special treat or gift or shared around the table after a meal. Here, as well, I sense that Asian pears are treated as something special. If nothing else, the price inspires a bit more awe than we’re used to affording a piece of fruit, and reflects the hours spent hand-thinning the crop as well as their fragile nature.

All season long I’ve been looking forward to learning more about these pears and their traditional uses, and I have to confess, I haven’t been too successful. There still isn’t that much information out there, readily available on the information superhighway (in English anyway). I was, however, able to find a bit on their usage in traditional Chinese medicine. From Kitchen Medicine Cooking Medicine, a blog about Food, Herbs, and Philosophy from Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine:

“The most common Kitchen Medicine in the East for the lungs are Pears. Pears are cooling and moistening which in moderation is how the lungs like to be. Not only do pear’s cool energy counteract the heat building in your lungs with infection, but their viscous moist quality is a natural lubricant for the mucous membranes of the lungs, with expectorant qualities, too.

Bite into a ripe pear. Compare with a ripe Apple. Pears have a viscous quality. This is a moistening characteristic that targets the lungs and nasal passages, and makes them excellent food this time of year, raw or cooked.”

Appropriately enough, I was fighting off a cough as I did my research, and it took longer than it should have for me to realize that I should get up off the couch and go steam some Asian pears. I highly recommend this recipe (adapted from Nina Simonds’ A Spoonful of Ginger), even if you’re feeling 100% healthy. Once cooked, the texture of Asian pear is remarkably similar to cooked European pears.

For anyone who’d like to dabble in the world of pickle making, Asian pears can also be used in kimchi. I’d recommend using Olympic, a Korean variety with a little more crunch and tart flavor. Another Korean cooking technique I learned: use Asian pear to marinate and tenderize beef in recipes such as bulgogi and galbi.

Also, one of the nicknames for Asian pears, “salad pears” makes a great suggestion – they go fabulously in salads, providing a sweet and crunchy counterpoint especially to bitter or spicy greens. Finally, online success – a search easily turns up a number of Asian pear salad recipes…

from New York chic (good luck sourcing the mâche outside of Union Square!): Morimoto’s Asian Pear Salad … to a tasty way to balance out bitter endive or escarole: Endive and Asian Pear Salad … to something like this, which comes pretty near my idea of food perfection: Asian Pear and Arugula Salad with Goat Cheese.

All of these suggestions, however, are contingent on any Asian pears lingering beyond the moment you take them out of their bag. The traditional way to eat a North Star Asian pear is, after all, to simply eat it, as soon as possible, caution to the wind with juice flying, a bit of the mystery still intact.

This is the time of year when everyone seems to be fighting off a little something, be it a cold or flu, and I’m grateful that I work outside and am not trapped inside with all those germs. However, we’re all literally “under the weather,” affected by what the sky throws at us, even though we sometimes as a culture pretend not to be. Case in point: Just over a week ago in our area, the Brandywine Creek rose to flood levels and many major state routes as well as smaller roads were closed in places due to high water. But the world carried on, everyone attempting to drive to work as usual. And, surprise! Some were met with confused traffic jams on detour that lasted for hours.

As farmers, we’re one of the few remaining professions in this country that seriously takes the weather into account to plan our day. Often, we North Star employees wake up to phone messages from Ike or Lisa, with the morning’s weather-dependent plan of action for the day. People are often curious how a certain weather event affects what we do at work. If we can, we avoid or plan around working in the rain. Some things can’t happen; peach picking, for example, needs to wait until the peach fuzz has dried off a bit. Tomatoes and peppers shouldn’t be disturbed while their foliage is wet, for fear of spreading fungal diseases. There are inside tasks that can be done, like packing CSA shares, washing vegetables, or planting seeds in the greenhouse. But some days, we have to persevere. Last Monday, with a steady rain and the temperature flirting with fifty degrees, we needed to pick vegetables for the CSA. The week before, with the Olympic pears needing to come off the trees and intermittent rain showers for days, we spent the day out in the orchard, hiding out in the box truck at intervals to avoid the worst of it.

We’re a motley crew on days like this – hats, brightly colored and mismatched rain suits, rubber boots, and – if we’re really desperate – neoprene gloves that act like a wetsuit to keep your hands “warm” in cold water. This is often the limiting factor in rain – nothing will slow you down like cold, numb hands. Wet feet are a close second, and rain seeping down the inside of your sleeves is a major annoyance, but not good enough reason to stop. Spirits are varied on a rainy day. Most of us find our minds wandering to daydreams of a hot cup of tea and a warm blanket; some of us find it “refreshing” and enjoy the challenge.

And what about the trees? How do they feel about the weather? Well, this season I’m sure they’re wishing that the rain could have been spaced out a bit more evenly. All of this rain came as Chester County had entered a drought watch, the lowest of the state’s three official classifications of drought conditions. Some of the trees were affected, their fruit ripening even earlier than expected (in a year when the season’s already ahead of schedule) and dropping fruit prematurely due to drought stress, which complicated our efforts to pick the fruit at the optimum moment. Rainstorms can also be detrimental, with high winds flinging fruit from trees. Full-size Olympic pears flying around; now that’s no joke! For this reason, we take special care to remove the fruit from the tips of branches when we’re thinning the Asian pear crop. And you can imagine the impact of even a brief hail storm on an orchard. A whole season’s harvest can be ruined in a matter of minutes. We had a not-so-severe hailstorm this summer; perhaps you’ve even seen a piece of fruit or two that was “kissed by the hail” with a tiny, cosmetic blemish. Other weather events can have a lasting impact on the trees. While an annual crop can be wiped out and tilled in, perennial crops like fruit trees are an investment. When disaster strikes, you try to pick up the pieces as best you can. Last winter’s blizzard left us scrambling to devise the best way to deal with split peach trees and to correct broken scaffold branches in the young apples.

Obviously (I hope), the weather plays a huge role in agriculture. In an orchard, weather patterns determine which varieties you can plant – different varieties have different levels of cold hardiness and chill requirement; each type of fruit requires certain conditions to reach peak flavor. An apple that loves upstate New York won’t fair as well in southeastern Pennsylvania and vice versa. Weather patterns also make some areas more ideal for growing beautiful fruit. The major fruit producing areas of Washington and California, for example, have a summer dry season without rain, which makes a world of difference for the control of fungal diseases that thrive in wet, humid conditions. Furthermore, in a world where climate change is already manifesting itself in eccentric weather conditions that affect agriculture, a commitment to eating locally means that everyone, not just those of us who spend our days out in the elements, should pay a bit more attention to just how “under the weather” we really are.

Could someone please tell me where the expression “easy as pie” came from? Pies are not easy. Like all skilled tasks, pie baking takes practice and repetition, usually a mentor of some sort, and a magic touch doesn’t hurt either. We’re talking about a very temperamental process that can be thwarted by humidity.

A life goal of mine is to make a good pie. Consistently. I’m getting there, but usually people of my generation are impressed with a pie of any caliber, so long as it’s made from scratch. Bumbling along on this assumption, I made a peach pie last season to take to a Backyard Fruit Growers’ meeting and potluck. Upon arriving, I discovered that there was some stiff competition in the pie department. I also learned a thing or two about the demographics of your average Backyard Fruit Growers attendee. Let’s just say there were some ladies present who had many long decades of pie-baking experience on me. They’d presumably had a lifetime of access to fruit fresh from their very own back yard, and they knew what to do with it. Humbled, I returned to my cookbooks and began my study of pie crust anew.

Now that fall is in the air, it’s time to bake. If you’ve got a solid pie crust up your sleeve, now’s the time to flaunt it. If not, don’t despair. There’s a whole world of baked goods out there waiting to be explored, and anything that involves fruit, a bit of sugar and butter, and arrives warm out of the oven will be more than appreciated. In fact, all those other baked fruit creations in the cobbler family are just as authentic to the heritage of our mid-Atlantic region. Pie, whether of the fruit, vegetable, or meat variety, is a solidly European creation, predating the cobbler by a few hundred years. It was when pie reached the far side of the Atlantic Ocean that it underwent transformation. According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, “without the resources of brick ovens… colonial cooks often made cobblers – also called slumps or grunts – and their cousins, pandowdies, in pots over an open fire. In these types of pies, a filling made of fruit, meat or vegetable goes into a pot first; then a skin of dough is placed over the filling, followed by the pot’s lid. As cobblers cook, the filling stews and creates its own sauce and gravy, while the pastry puffs up and dries.”

It also seems that pies and their kinfolk, before the late 19th century, were served with all meals and at all times of day. I point proudly to tales of pie breakfasts in my own family history and take this as an invitation to shed any last shred of guilt about eating peach cobbler for breakfast. I invite you to do the same.

So, here’s an incomplete inventory of all the things you might do with fruit, flour, sugar and butter. (I’ll leave the gluten-free, vegan, or any other finagling up to you.) I’ve included a sample recipe for each, some of which, for fun, are quite old. Luckily, while recipes and techniques may fade from style, the ingredients remain the same, so revive away…

Brown Betty
From The Joy of Cooking: “Nobody remembers who Betty was, but a brown betty is both layered and topped with sweet buttered crumbs. The crumbs should be dry, so that they will absorb the juices in the middle and bottom layers and remain crunchy on the top. (For homemade breadcrumbs, dry sliced bread in a 225°F oven until firm to the touch and crisp, about 1 hour. Let cool, then break up the dried bread with your hands or chop with a knife into about 1-inch square pieces. Crush with a rolling pin to produce a fine meal or process in a food processor.)”
Apple Brown Betty

Buckle
From The Joy of Cooking: “A buckle is another type of cake with fruit folded into the batter before baking and a generous crumbly streusel topping. The cake buckles, or crumples, in spots from the weight of the topping before the batter sets, creating pockets of caramelized sugar and butter.”
Almond-Plum Buckle

Clafouti
From In The Sweet Kitchen: “Easy, fresh, light, very country, but also very elegant, clafouti is a traditional rustic Provençal dessert somewhere between a baked custard, a light pancake and a cakey soufflé. Traditionally made with cherries, clafouti is also wonderful made with apricots, berries, fresh figs, pears or even peaches or apricots…”
Black Plum Clafoutis

Cobbler
From The Joy of Cooking: “Cobblers are simply deep-dish single-crusted fruit pies; the crust is usually on the top, though occasionally it is on the bottom. Cobblers used to be made with pie dough, but a sweet, rich biscuit dough is more common today. For a tender crust, do not overmix the dough; stir in the liquid quickly and knead gently a few times to form the dough.”
Apple Cobbler

Crisps, Crunches, & Crumbles
From The Joy of Cooking: “These simple and popular desserts consist of sweetened fruit – usually lightly thickened to produce syrupy juices – baked with crumbly toppings of flour, butter, and sugar and sometimes oats, cookie or cake crumbs, nuts, and spices. For a crisp, the flour, butter, and sugar are mixed together like pie dough before the liquid is added, and the mixture scattered over the top like a streusel or crumb topping. An approximate ratio of three parts fruit to one part topping makes a perfect crisp. A crunch is fruit sandwiched between two layers of sweetened, buttered crumbs; it is served cut into squares, like bar cookies, but is a bit more fragile. Keep the butter cold for crisps and crunches and handle lightly to assure that the toppings will be both crisp and tender… Crumble is the British name for a crisp or crunch with oatmeal in the topping.”
Harvest Pear Crisp with Candied Ginger
Plum Crumble

Dumplings
From The Joy of Cooking: “Any pie dough, puff pastry, or biscuit dough can be used to make fruit dumplings or turnovers. Dumplings are formed by gathering the edges of the dough up around the filling like a purse or pouch; the resulting packets may be baked or boiled. (The texture of baked pastry contrasts particularly nicely with the filling.) Turnovers are made by folding the dough over the filling and can be formed in any size from miniature to large. The dough can be made well ahead and kept chilled until ready to use. These little ‘pies’ are best eaten the day they are baked.”
Apple Dumplings

Galette
From The Penguin Companion to Food: “… a flat, round cake; the word being derived from galet, a pebble weatherworn to the shape that is perfect for skipping…”
From The Joy of Cooking: “A galette – or in Italian, a crostata – consists of a flat crust of pastry or bread dough covered with sugar, pastry cream, or a thin layer of fruit… They are, in effect, dessert pizzas. Since galettes are baked on a flat sheet rather than in a pie or tart mold, they may be made in any shape that appeals to you. If the filling is juicy, bring the edge of the crust over the filling to catch drips; otherwise, simply double up the crust edge, then crimp or flute if you wish.”
Apple Galette

Grunts & Slumps
From The Joy of Cooking: “Grunts and slumps, both descended from puddings cooked in pots over the fire, are steamed fruit topped with dumplings. Grunts are steamed in a mold inside a kettle full of water and inverted when served; the result is something like a warm fruit shortcake. Slumps are cooked in a covered pan and served dumpling side up in bowls – more like a hot, sweet soup or stew under a dumpling… Grunts are best steamed in a soufflé dish, but pudding molds or heatproof bowls work as well; metal molds are not recommended, as they may overcook the fruit and impart a metallic taste. Cook slumps in stainless-steel, enamel cast-iron, or glass saucepans, but make sure the vessel has a tight-fitting lid to contain the steam. If the pan is uncovered before the dumplings are done, they will collapse into toughness.”
Apple Slump

Pandowdy
From The Penguin Companion to Food: “An old-fashioned deep-dish New England fruit dessert related to cobbler, grunt, and slump. Sliced or cut apples or other fruits are tossed with spices and butter, sweetened with molasses, maple syrup, or brown sugar, topped with a biscuit-like dough, and baked. Partway through the baking time, the crust is broken up and pressed down into the fruit so it can absorb the juices. This technique is called ‘dowdying’. After the crust is baked, it becomes crispy. Pandowdies are served warm with heavy cream, hard sauce, or a cream sauce flavoured with nutmeg.”
Apple Pandowdy

And if that isn’t enough to inspire you, take heed:

“It is utterly insufficient (to eat pie only twice a week), as anyone who knows the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy must admit. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, and its varying contents the calendar of the changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished.”

from The New York Times, 1902

(In response to an Englishman’s suggestion that Americans should reduce their daily pie eating to two days per week.)

Sources:

Regan Daley, In the Sweet Kitchen
Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food
Kim O’Donnel, “American as Cobbler,” (A Mighty Appetite: August 11, 2006), The Washington Post
Irma S. Rombauer et al., The All New All Purpose Joy of Cooking
Linda Stradley, What’s Cooking America.
Vintage Recipes

When I gave one good friend the news that I was going to be working at an orchard, he laughed at me. Not to disparage my choice of career in agriculture, but because I’m short. I told him: that’s what ladders are for! And it’s true – there’s nothing I can’t reach with the use of a ladder or the Brownie (the hydraulic lift built for orchard use). Sometimes, I think it’s even helpful to be small – I can squeeze between crowded branches or the the wires in the trellis system, climb under limbs and find all of the lowest fruit. But, yes, usually, it would be to my advantage to have several more inches to work with or the coveted long fingers and wide handspan of the natural-born apple picker.

Today I felt especially diminutive in the orchard. To be honest, I felt like I was in a cartoon – a small character in a world of magical, supersized fruit. I was picking the Royalty apples in the young orchard. The advice I got before I headed out to pick: Use two hands for the big ones! The Royalty apples are freakishly large, some weighing in right around 2 lbs. They’re more than a meal; they’re an entire pie. Royalty is a large apple to begin with, but the trees in the first few years of production give especially large fruit. Last year, we dubbed them “SuperRoys” and separated out the largest to appeal to customers who go for that sort of thing.

Notwithstanding my 5’3″ reach, even the Royalty trees – topping out as some of the tallest apples after three seasons in the ground – can be mostly harvested from the ground. This might defy your image of an apple orchard, but commercial apple trees these days tend to be shrinking. The trend toward dwarfing rootstock means that apple trees might top out at 10 or even 6 feet. Every grafted apple tree has two components: the rootstock and the scion. The rootstock controls the size of the tree (as well as many other qualities), and the scion contributes the variety (eg Royalty, Gold Rush, etc.). A smaller tree means that it’s easier to reach (less ladder work), but also, as with most agricultural research of late, the development of these dwarfing rootstocks is an attempt to increase productivity. To produce apples, you need sunlight. The most sunlight reaches the outside edges of the tree, and there’s less and less light as you travel toward the inside of the tree. This shaded interior is what one of my teachers fondly referred to as the “zone of firewood production” (as opposed to fruit production). Smaller trees have less “inside,” with more outer edge relative to interior than larger trees, thus they can produce more apples per acre. (This is an oversimplification of some pretty complex interactions, but you get the general idea.)

At North Star, the youngest orchard is at the home farm near Cochranville. The apple trees are noticeably more dwarfed than the apple trees at the two other leased properties the farm grows trees on; in fact, their size and resultant weaker root system means that they require a trellis to withstand the strongest winds. Most of these trees are on “Bud 9″ rootstock, which means that they’re 30% the size of a standard tree and will offer a crop only two to three years after being in the ground. (Officially, that’s Budagovsky 9 in the tradition of naming rootstocks after the research station where they originated, and then shortening them to a confusion of M’s, MM’s, Bud’s, and random numbers.) At North Star, the apple trees in this orchard are in their third year and producing a surprisingly large crop for such young trees. At maturity, we’ll keep them at about 12 feet tall and continue to see a lot of apples in the first tier of branches that’s easily reached from the ground.

Maybe the orchard is a cartoon world after all – shrinking trees, gigantic apples… An orchard is not a wild place; it’s very much shaped by the human touch. From breeding to grafting to pruning, the trees themselves are human (co)creations. The orchard at large is also engineered, the tree spacing carefully considered for optimum production, the rows and alleyways designed around the tractor the way Los Angeles was designed around the automobile. It’s a planned endeavor every step of the way, a conversation with Mother Nature, but one where she always gets the last word.

(Rootstock info from The Apple Grower by Michael Phillips)