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’ve gotten a number of questions lately about how to keep various vegetables from wilting in the refrigerator. People are often surprised to find carrots wobbly and soft after several days in the fridge, not to mention the condition of lettuce or chard after the same period of time.

Remember – most vegetables are very high in water content. The chilly air in a refrigerator is very dry, and sucks moisture out of all produce (even beets will get wilted!).

However, since our vegetables are picked so fresh, they should keep a very long time for you in the refrigerator….IF you make sure to keep that moisture contained! For most items, that simply means putting them in a tightly-sealed plastic bag or sealed container and trying to make sure most of the air is removed.

Plastic bags can be used over and over again for various vegetables, and you’ll find that even our fresh lettuces will keep upwards of two weeks in this manner! Carrots stay crispy, chard stays puffy and brilliant, you get the idea!

“Given that there gets to be a point where one can’t even give squash away, why are there not more squash blossoms at the markets?” That was a recent question posed to us by a farmers’ market customer, who went on to say, “They are heavenly in both Italian and Mexican cooking. In the Midwest they’re much more available and the Vietnamese merchants have realized that bunches of them can sell quickly each market morning.”

Good question! For those who are into squash blossoms, there are never enough to be found, unless maybe they grow their own.

Same goes with other ‘odd’ produce. Every year, we get requests for quince, paw paws, currants, gooseberries, and other items. The real problem is we may only get one request a year for said items. Supply and demand are the main tenets of any business, of course, and too much supply with not enough demand equals big losses.

We tried selling squash blossoms years ago, and found it to be a less-than-satisfactory experience. The blossoms have to be picked and packaged very carefully, and make it to the customers home the same day they are picked. Most often, people would either avoid the packages of squash blossoms altogether, although a few of them would query, “What on Earth do you do with those?!”. We’d more often than not bring back home with us just about as many as we took to market. Ugh.

Now, certainly there’s a market for them – and depending on where a farmers’ market is located, the demand for them may be higher. But overall, we and other small farmers have to make decisions annually and even daily whether certain things make sense to plant, grow, harvest, and sell depending on their garden, location, and marketing plan.

Case in point – okra. Or, as in our case, a garden project affectionately called “The Get Rich Quick Scheme”

Who doesn’t think about making lots of money? Come on – you know you do from time to time (or maybe hourly). For many people, coming up with hair-brained schemes to make lots of dough is just about an occupation in itself. They come up with one “Get Rich Quick” scheme after another. Usually this involves some quirky thing such as raising gila monsters or knitting nose-warmers.

I’ve never been one to be lured by a get rich quick scheme. This is quite evident in the fact that when we started farming, we opted for orcharding – a decidedly NOT get rich quick endeavor. Those trees take years to grow before producing any fruit, and even then it takes several more years before we hit a ‘break even’ point. Looking back, I think I may have done better by topping ballpoint pens with pom-poms and marketing them as portable ear-cleaning devices.

Perhaps I exaggerate a bit, but while we waited for those trees to produce and get us to the break-even point, we did do a little bit of scheming. Somewhere along the line we heard about the local big ‘garlic festival’, which is a weekend-long fest of all-things-garlic (even ice cream, so we hear). At that point, we started thinking of other less-than-common crops and how we could make them a ‘big’ thing. Heck, if they can have a whole weekend of garlic festivities, the possibilities for other gastronomic oddities must be endless.

Our epiphany was, of all things, okra. “We’ll get rich growing okra!” we started exclaiming from time to time. Visions of people rushing our stand to get freshly-picked okra ran through our heads. This was, of course, all in jest. Okra is one of the most under-utilized, least understood vegetables of all (at least in our neck of the woods). But we did have a good time dreaming about it.

Yes, we spent several years dreaming and joking about getting rich on okra. We’d visualize okra cook-offs, a person dressed in an okra suit (possibly Farmer Ike) waving to passers-by, okra kabobs at the community barbecue, raw okra-eating contests, and of course, okra ice cream. Any time we heard of new oddball events in the media, we altered them to in some way include okra. Any time someone mentioned their ‘ship coming in’, we visualized ours floating on a sea of okra. It was all very fun.

So, of course, once we started growing veggies on the farm, we just had to include okra in the lineup. And, since we always grow ‘oddball’ varieties of things, we opted to not just grow the typical green okra, but a lovely burgundy-colored variety as well. With those color choices, people were sure to rush our stand, right?

I had never grown okra before, so I didn’t know quite what to expect. The plant is actually quite attractive. It looks rather tropical, and gets to be several feet tall. The burgundy variety had reddish leaves which was quite lovely in contrast to the green leaves of the standard variety. The flowers were quite lovely too – rather hibiscus-like and exotic. Shortly after the flowers came the fruit (ie the okra pods that some few souls actually eat). They grow kinda upside-down from the stalk of the plant; in other words, point-side up. The whole plant, from stalk to leaves to flower to pod is wholly beautiful I think. I was looking forward to the first great harvest.

What I hadn’t counted on, however, was how prickly the plants were. The leaves and stems are covered with little prickly spines. They’re not super-visible though; you feel them more than see them – kind of like Velcro. Velcro that burns, that is. After picking a row of okra, one’s forearms feel like they’ve been sunburned. Ouch. At least that goes away after a quick wash.

Armed with my first lovely basket of green and burgundy pods (all twelve of them, I believe), I was off to market to make my fortune. And came home with ten pods of okra (the other two having fallen out of the basket in the truck).

Rats.

We figured maybe sales of okra would be more brisk when we had more of them to sell. That old adage, “pile ‘em high and watch ‘em fly” is very true at farm markets. And we did sell more okra when we had more okra – maybe a whole handful of them.

Well, getting rich on okra was always a joke here at home. Good thing, too, because not only were we not going to get rich on okra, we were going to lose money on it. Okra growing, picking, and selling turned out to be a rather silly hobby, on the order of collecting Chicken McNuggets which look like American Presidents in profile.

Certainly there are some folks who really love okra, and we met probably all five of them in Southeastern Pennsylvania. For the rest of the folks, however, okra is just an oddity. Kinda cool-looking, but something that turns slimy when you cook it evidently doesn’t have much appeal to the masses. Can’t say that I blame them.

So maybe we won’t get rich on okra (although if we grow it again, I think we should promote okra ice cream). You might think, however, that we’re really into it, should you ever see Ike sporting his lime-green ‘Okra’ t-shirt. That garb makes a statement – although I don’t know quite what it is.

So now we’re considering what our next great get rich scheme will be. We tried okra. We tried squash blossoms. We tried pod radish. We do have some quince and paw paws growing on the property now, but we won’t kid ourselves about them. Purple peacock perhaps will be our ticket to fame and fortune?? We’ll see; so far we haven’t met ANYONE who even knows what that is unless they’ve gotten it from us!