After work on Tuesday, I sat at Ike and Lisa’s wooden kitchen table, pen and notebook in hand. Ike sat across from me, his hair in its usual mad scientist frenzy and a cell phone pressed to his ear. He was saying, “We did better than a lot of areas did, I mean, Michigan is getting virtually no crop at all…” He was referring to the late frost we had in April, which destroyed a lot of the buds on trees throughout the Eastern US region. The frost did some damage to our pears, but everything else seems intact.

Lisa and Ike met in college over twenty-five years ago, and started North Star Orchard not long after they graduated. While Lisa is basically the manager of the entire farm operation, Ike is the brains behind the growing practices. Luckily for me, he’s really interested in sharing his thoughts and experiences from a lifetime of farming. So on Tuesday after work, I got to ask him some questions about growing fruit… I left several hours later, having filled pages and pages of notebook paper with his answers. I plan to share some of the wealth of information in Ike’s invaluable brain in many future blog posts. For now, I want to talk about tree hormones.

Yes, trees have hormones. Generally, they do the same thing in trees as they do in animals– that is, send messages that induce changes. Plants don’t have glands that secrete hormones; the cells themselves are in charge of that. Scientists have identified 5 classes of hormones that occur in plants, which do everything from regulating root growth to telling the buds when to bloom.

For the past month, we’ve been “training trees,” or tying tree branches down– attaching them with string to clips in the ground. If all of the branches were left to their own devices, they would naturally grow upwards, towards the sun. They would keep growing and growing, instead of stopping their growth to produce fruit. By tying the branches down and changing the shape of the tree, the tree’s hormones signal to stop growing and start producing. Cool, right?

For the rest of the summer, we’ll spend tons of time “thinning” the trees, or snipping off the majority of baby fruit on the trees so that enough of the trees’ energy goes to producing incredible fruit on a moderate scale. Most orchards use chemical thinners– sprays that cause the tree’s hormones to basically abort many of its blooms. That saves tons of time and money, as workers aren’t needed to thin if chemicals can do it.

Ike uses the safest, mildest thinners on the apples, but they are ineffective on the pears; so we’ll thin hundreds of trees by hand. I spent 16 hours in the pear trees this week, a pair of clippers in my hand, often balanced on a ladder high up in the trees to reach as many of the buds as I could. The work is meditative and really lovely. I love being on a ladder in a tree while the sun shines through the bright green leaves, and the sounds of the leaves rustling and the birds singing is all around me.

I can’t wait to try this fruit… it sure takes a lot of effort! My mouth is already watering for a crunchy, sweet, juicy Asian pear…….

Laura Beth
(read this and other posts from Laura Beth’s blog here)

The first project he started, while we were still in college, gave us a number of trial apple seedlings which moved around with us as we finished school and moved on to work on farms. At one point, we had the apple seedlings growing in pots in our college apartment (which was certainly a conversation starter at parties). To differentiate the individuals, we gave them working names based on characters from the films 2001 and Alien (hey, why not?). That first apple breeding project resulted in our apple “Monolith”, which is, you must admit, a more interesting apple name than the others had. Apples “Hal”, “Floyd”, “Ripley” and “Bishop” are definitely less-interesting names, but “Monolith” is still a conversation starter.

“Monolith” was a long time coming, what with us graduating and then moving several times over the next 5 years before we started North Star Orchard and could give it a permanent home.

The next fruit breeding projects yielded the new peach varieties “Margaret” and “Erin”, both of which are fairly petite, but very flavorful and juicy. “Erin” was named for Ike’s orchard assistant Erin. And “Margaret”? I have no idea. Ike says he just likes the name. (I notice there is no “Lisa” anywhere abouts….)

The Fruit Breeder is back to apple variety development projects now. One, started a couple years ago, is a cross of Gold Rush and Florina. Those trees, now over 6 feet tall are in later stages of selection.

Making selections in fruit breeding reminds me of some of those reality TV shows where people get whittled down to where there’s one left in the game. Same things go here. Potential varieties are culled out based on their lack of disease resistance, a poor growth habit, and eventually, by the taste of the fruit they bear. Unlike those TV shows, however, we don’t take great glee in tossing out the ‘losers’. But decisions are made nonetheless, and may the best variety win.

Please take note: The Fruit Breeder makes use of plain old ordinary plant sex to develop new varieties, not modern in-the-lab type genetic engineering or GMOs (genetically modified organisms). For more info about “Sex in the Orchard”, check out our blog post from last year here.

Just last week, The Fruit Breeder made a bunch of selections from new fruit breeding projects he started last year. Although to us, it looked like he was tossing them aside willy nilly, in each case he was making real decisions on these little babies’ first efforts of life. The ‘winners’ were planted out in rows in our front field, right next to the ‘teenagers’ who went through the same selection process last year.

Now that we have space to plant so many babies, we certainly don’t name them all. Back in the college days, we started with only five babies, so naming came naturally. Now, there are hundreds. But someday there may be only one or two “winners” from these crosses and then we’ll have to go about the difficult process of naming them.

We may have to go with names from some shows/movies which are more current. How about “Leela”, “Sheldon”, or “Schrute”? Hmmm….we may need to work on that. But with long-term projects like this, The Fruit Breeder has plenty of time to contemplate names. Although, I’d still like to know where “Margaret” came from!

Mustards! I had never eaten a mustard leaf until I worked on a farm in New Hampshire several years ago, where the farmers, Bob and Jen, grew a whole plot of different mustards greens and sold them in a salad mix. The taste of that Golden Frill variety (spring green, with delicate leaves and a horseradish kick) opened my mind to the world of vegetables beyond the grocery store.

Brassica is the genus name for the mustard family. There are multiple theories about the etymology of the word “Brassica.” The word may come from Latin, meaning “to devour.” A second theory: Celtic for “cabbage.” A third: Greek for “crackle,” referring to the noise that cabbages and their relatives make when leaves are taken from the stem. The many possibilities for the etymology’s origin reflect that Brassicas have been grown all over the world for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Brassica plants include mustard greens, broccoli and cauliflower, kale, rutabaga, turnips, radishes, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi (one variety that we grow is called Kolibri Kohlrabi, which cracks me up). You might think that spinach and chard are in the Brassica family, but they’re in an entirely different family, called Chenopodiaceae (try spelling that backwards).

I harvested kale raab– the flowering stems of kale plants, a bit like broccoli raab, with a sweeter flavor– on Thursday for the CSA. The kale had that familiar broccoli smell about them, which my coworkers from last season and I call “Brassica farts.” All Brassica plants have that farty kind of smell. It got me thinking about Brassica plants, and how crazy they are…..

For example, have you ever seen a Brussels sprouts plant? It looks like this:

(Courtesy of allotment.org.uk)

How ridiculous is that?

Also, the color of baby red cabbage plants is incredible:

(Courtesy of tinyfarmblog.com)

Anyway. The Brassicas at North Star are doing SO well. The seedlings of kale, kohlrabi, and broccoli that we planted in the upper field are perky and their color is strong and healthy, which is really heartening because right next to them, the onions are struggling for reasons unknown. We think it’s because of the Spring’s strange, extreme weather patterns right around the time we planted them. Their tips are light brown instead of green, and some of them look wilted or have died. It’s a good thing we planted so many… we’ll hopefully have plenty of onions, despite those that died.

Over the past several weeks, we pulled up the spicy mustard greens and the rainbow chard in the greenhouse that fed our Winter CSA members throughout the cold months. Some of those plants were taller than me, they had been in the ground for so long! It felt wonderful to do spring cleaning– returning the old plants that sustained us to the earth, making room for the summer bounty. First we harvested as much of the greens as we could and stored them in the cooler, for the farm crew to take home. Then we pulled up each plant until they were piled high, and carried them in heavy armfuls to the tractor, where we dumped them in the front loader. Kelly drove them to the compost pile, and now we have wonderful space in the greenhouse. We already planted our first tomatoes!

On Monday, we’ll begin spring cleaning in the orchard– “thinning,” or pinching off tiny baby fruits from the branches in order to make room for strong fruit to grow. More on that next week.

As always: ask questions, make comments, and feel free to request a blog topic!

Your so-ready-for-summer-farmer,

Laura Beth

Our customers will eat most of the vegetables that we grow pretty soon after harvest. Greens like lettuce and kale, tomatoes, summer squash, and most of our other veggies will keep for two weeks at most in your fridge. In the winter, we’ll rely on root vegetables for sustenance: carrots, parsnips, garlic, etc. And most importantly: potatoes.

That’s why the spring potato planting is a really, really big deal. If those potatoes do well, we’ll all have plenty to eat in the winter; potatoes can keep for months.

Last week, we put our potatoes in! It took a day and a half, with about 7 of us on the job. First, Rachel prepped about a half of an acre (1/3 of a football field) of empty field with the tractor, smoothing the bumpy soil over to create a flat surface in which to plant. Then she drove over the field again, this time using a tractor implement to draw furrows in the soil. We laid a tape measure next to the furrows, and planted a potato every foot.

That’s right: most farmers plant an actual potato, called a seed tuber, in the ground, rather than a potato seed. Potato seeds are a lot harder to grow; seed tubers are much more dependable. Plus, you can cut a seed tuber into pieces to multiply your number of plants. So long as each piece has an “eye,” or a little sprout, the piece will propagate potatoes when planted. You can plant any potato, so long as it’s sprouting. To sprout, or chit, your potato, just keep it around long enough to see those little eyes grow. Then plant it in the ground about 3 inches deep.

We’ll harvest our potatoes after the green foliage above ground has died– sometime in the early fall. We’ll dig beneath each plant to find a cluster of anywhere from 5 up to around 10 yummy potatoes. The seed tuber will still be there, but it will be mushy and goopy and gross. We’ll leave the seed tuber, and gather up the potatoes, and EAT THEM ALL!!! Just kidding, we’ll sell them. And eat some of them.

Potatoes are in the nightshade family (Solonaceae), which includes tomatoes, tobacco, peppers, and some very toxic plants like belladonna. The Soviet Union consumes the most potatoes per capita (no surprise there!). There used to be thousands of potato varieties; probably, there are around 5,000 out there now. They come in every color, and every shape in size.

One of my favorites is the Adirondack Red potato– rose pink on the inside, and red skinned, it is creamy and rich. I like to skin them, boil them, and mash them with olive oil, garlic salt, and parsley….. pink mashed potatoes!!! Delicious.

Laura Beth
(see the original post here).

Say you want to plant an apple tree. So you bite into a Honeycrisp apple, save the seeds, dig a hole in the yard, and put a seed in. You expect to have Honeycrisps in a couple of years’ time. Right?…

Wrong! The seed that you planted will create an apple tree, but that apple tree may not resemble a Honeycrisp tree at all. Lisa explained it like this: two people get together and have a baby. Can you expect that baby to be exactly like its parents? Not at all! Same with fruit trees. So your “Honeycrisp” tree may bear good apples; but it’s possible it will have yucky apples, or no apples at all, or it may be prone to disease, unlike its parent tree.

So, where do apple trees come from? Most orchards graft their trees, which means attaching the branch of one apple tree to the trunk of another. The result will be apples like those from the branch you’ve attached. There are several kinds of grafting; we used whip grafting.

Ike has a long list of apple varieties he wants to plant– see above. He ordered a few scions, or small, budding branches, of each variety. We grafted them onto the rootstalk, which is a generic apple tree that will provide the root system for the tree once it’s planted.

Here’s the fun part. Using a knife, the grafter makes a cut that exposes the inner wood on one end of the scion, and the same cut on one end of the rootstalk.

The grafter makes a slit in each cut so that the scion and rootstock will fit together.

The two pieces have to fit together as exactly as possible. They will heal into one piece, so the more exactly they fit, the easier it is for them to heal neatly.

Here’s the connected wood, all wrapped up to heal. That rubber band covers special grafting tape, both biodegradable. Once the tree has healed and grows, the bandages will snap off.

Each tree is labelled and put in a bucket of water, roots down.

Are you all ready to plant your own orchard now? Grafting is actually the easy part. What comes next is more challenging– keeping the tree healthy once it’s planted in the ground. Disease, pests like insects and rodents, and weather can be harsh enemies to young trees.

Claudia (on the far right above) was a rock star, grafting with Ike for hours and hours. The rest of us bandaged up the trees and labelled them. We listened to the Beatles, thanks to Karen’s Ipod, and Ike told stories of his various adventures. After such meticulous work for so long, we got pretty silly towards the end of the day. There were lots of giggles.

Speaking of giggles: there are some goofy apple variety names out there, like James Kirk, which Ike ordered because he likes Star Trek. We already grow Enterprise apples, so all Trekkies will feel welcome at our orchard. Here are some other funny ones, from hundreds of tree varieties that have been grafted at North Star:

Bloody Ploughman (yum…?)

Freiherr von Berlepsch (try pronouncing that, let alone saying it three times fast)

Lord Hindlip (sounds like a Princess Bride character)

Green Cheese (again. yum…?)

As always, feel free to comment and ask questions!

Laura Beth

Dear Readers………

MONDAY:

Today was gusty! The wind almost knocked me over a couple of times in the field. In the afternoon, the North Star crew planted onion seedlings (baby onion plants that we grew from seed and nurtured in the greenhouse). We loaded a truck with Transylvanian Red onions and drove them over to the other side of the orchard, where Ike used a tractor to mark parallel rows in which to plant the seedlings.

We planted hundreds and hundreds of the seedlings today, and we have many yet to go… it’s fun work though. We crouched over the beds toting piles of onion seedlings, quickly pressing their fragile roots into the ground. We stayed close enough to talk while our hands were busy; the conversation ranged from the sacred atmosphere of the greenhouse to the perfect doughnut (Bavarian creme, I learned, is a controversial one).

Tomorrow, we will break into a Tree Planting Team and an Onion Planting Team (“and go to battle,” John suggested when he heard this plan). I foresee some tractor action in my future…

TUESDAY:

Just kidding! Everybody worked on the onions again all day. We laid irrigation hoses as we planted, so the onion babies could stay hydrated in their fragile state right after they went in the ground. We just barely finished by the end of the day, but MAN did it feel good to see Claudia plant that last little onion seedling.

We’ve got five varieties planted, and a little bit of a sixth planted as a test run; we’ve never tried growing it before. If it grows well and we like the flavor, we’ll keep it in future years; if not, we’ll keep experimenting with new onion varieties.

In the evening, we had the farm crew over at our house for a popcorn fest (homemade honey cinnamon popcorn!), and watched an amazing documentary about how corn has taken over the food industry in America; it’s called King Corn, and I highly recommend it!

WEDNESDAY:

Planted trees all day, fell into bed immediately after work and pretty much stayed there until 8:30 pm, when I fell asleep. Don’t judge.

THURSDAY:

We planted 8 baby walnut trees this morning. They won’t bear nuts for years, but it’ll be worth it when they do. In the afternoon, Ike taught us to graft! Grafting means attaching one tree species to another, resulting in delicious varieties. I’ll do a whole post on that soon. It’s incredible that so many of the small muscles in our hands go unused until we do some specialized skill, like grafting, that requires very particular hand motions in repetition. My hands will be sore tomorrow…

FRIDAY:

Grafting all day long. It’s a good thing that Ike tells excellent stories; he kept us well entertained.

For the last hour of the day, I got to prune “suckers”– low branches that suck the energy from the main trunk– on the pear trees. When I lifted one of the severed branches to my nose, I caught the scent of perfectly ripe, sweet pear. It never occurred to me before that a fruit tree holds the essence of its fruit inside. And it makes perfect sense.

I hope your weekends, dear Readers, are as satisfying as the smell of fresh pear and spring grass.

PS. These are the trees I’ve been writing about lately in the posts “141” from last spring and in “20 Years of…” which celebrates the first orchard we planted as well as this new one. New Farm Helper Laura Beth also wrote about her planting adventures here.

If you’d like to share in this new adventure, you can sponsor one of these babies, for yourself, a special someone, as a memorial or as a gift to grow up with (for a baby). Click here to sponsor a tree and help to flavor the future!

Welcome to my first post of the 2012 season!

It is the season for planting, and we at North Star Orchard are busy tucking apple, peach, Asian pear trees, and grape vines firmly into the ground. They arrive from our suppliers in 10 foot long, heavy boxes, their roots kept moist inside plastic wrap. Each morning, we load a truck with the boxes and drive less than a mile through rows of blooming apple trees to the next field. One person drills holes in the ground with the tractor, and everyone else plants the baby trees, using hoes to surround each tree with a small mound of dirt.

I have some exciting news… that tractor driver is ME!!!

On my second day at work, Ike (the farmer and co-owner of North Star Orchard with his partner and wife, Lisa) taught me how to drive a tractor on the quirky Kubota L210. I learned to drive stick at Drumlin last season, so I had some elementary knowledge of how to drive a tractor. In the past week, I have spent almost 20 hours driving the L210. My job is to back carefully up to equadistant marks along the rows, and drill a hole with the drill attached to the back of the L210.

Lisa and Ike are trying something new with these baby trees: they are asking people to sponsor a tree. Sponsors get a tag on their tree, free gifts from North Star, and information about how their tree is doing over the years to come. Some people give the gift of a sponsorship as a memorial; others do it to have a baby tree in their life. If you’d like to sponsor a tree, don’t be shy! Click here for more info.

At North Star Orchard, we grow literally hundreds of varieties of fruit. In the past week, I have had a couple of Goldrush apples left over from the 2011 season; every bite contains a shock of rich apple-cider flavor that develops with each second. As Ike said to me at my interview in the fall, “We are big fans of crisp.” That’s when I knew I had to work here; there is nothing better than a perfectly crisp apple, straight from the orchard. Over the season, I hope to open my imagination to a world of fruit that I couldn’t have dreamt of; and I will be sure to share it with you.

As always, please ask questions, and comment! If I don’t know the answers, I’ll ask the farm crew, and pass along the info. Enormous thanks to Lisa, who took the pictures of my first time on a tractor.

Love,
Laura Beth

P.S. And Lisa put together this lovely video of pictures, detailing our work this week… to some VERY enthusiastic music. This is how excited we are ….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGGmbewWSB4

That’s what first came to mind when I shot this picture back on February 7th. The angle of the sun was just so, and the timing was just so. I’ve walked past that particular location every morning and have never seen it the same way since.

I know that sunbeam didn’t mark a map or indicate any particular treasure except this: I had the privilege of seeing that particular treasure. Maybe I’ll see it again next year on February 7th, if the conditions are just so. Maybe I’ll never see it again, in which case it really was a treasure of the moment.

It occured to me this morning that we come across treasures every day if we take the time to notice. Rarely is the treasure we find as amazing as buried gold coins or a 20-dollar bill all by its lonesome on the sidewalk. But there is treasure to be found every day. A simple dew drop on a blade of grass can be gorgeous. And the wonder we have at a spiderweb which spans a room can be a treasure for our brains (how did she do that?).

Look for and enjoy everyday treasures. No headpieces or dramatic music required.