North Star Orchard

I really like those in-between times of the year, when spring blossoms into summer, summer fades away into fall, when fall hardens into winter (just kidding on that last one). Seasonality is more tangible; you feel on the cusp of something new, even though you’ve experienced it every year of life so far. Perhaps it’s because my birthday falls during one of those times, but I also like that these passages are rooted in natural phenomena: the shortest day of the year, the longest, and those with equal proportions of day and night. Our cultural ideas of the seasons don’t always match up – we embraced summer weeks ago, pulled out our white linen and headed down the shore, but summer officially begins on Monday, June 21st (at 11:28 am to be precise, if you’re hanging out in Greenwich, England). And I’m always amazed (and thankful) that on the first day of winter (winter solstice, the shortest day of the year), the days actually begin to get longer. Winter’s just begun, but the sun is returning. The flip side, however, is that summer solstice signifies the days getting shorter.

Not to get too scientific or biodynamic-sounding on you (because I’m not qualified in either realm), but this seems fitting in the orchard. Spring is the time of new growth: flowering, fruit set, shoot extension. As the days get longer, the branches also elongate (about 12 to 18 inches, for example, in healthy, productive apple trees each year). Spring is now past; vegetative growth has slowed or stopped, and fruit is enlarging and ripening. As the days shorten once again, the accumulation of all that rampant sunshine, transformed by photosynthesis into carbohydrates, is expressed in the fruit. And in the garden at large, planting is almost over; we’re buckling down to reap the harvest for the next several months. The natural cycle – of growth, fruiting, harvest, storage – is of course in line with the seasons.

You’ve probably seen pictures of the bloom at North Star, and you’ve tasted the results of the harvest, but what’s going on in the orchard in that in-between time, before spring gives way to summer and that glorious six months of the year when there’s fruit to harvest? What have we been up to? Certainly not sitting around twiddling our thumbs and watching the fruit ripen on the trees. Spring is a very busy time of year in an orchard, especially in a young orchard like the three-year old orchard in Cochranville.

Thinning and spreading. These are the key words. What exactly are we thinning and spreading? It sounds like we’re preparing to paint a house, or perhaps deal with an oil spill. Thinning is a literal thinning out of the fruit. As soon as bloom is over and pollination has taken place, you can see the tiny fruitlets forming at the base of each flower. Every flower has an ovary, and if it’s pollinated, it will form a fruit. The trees do some of their own thinning. “June drops” are the fruitlets that fall off the tree of their own accord (yes, right around June). They’re easy to spot – the fruits aren’t sizing up, and they’re a different color, often a not-so-healthy shade of yellow. Even still, the “fruit set” of a tree is, in our opinion, usually overambitious. The tree doesn’t generally thin enough to meet human standards. The fewer fruits on a tree, the bigger and juicier those fruits become. The tree has a certain amount of resources to spend, and if there are “too many” fruits left on the tree, those sugar resources will be spread awfully thin.

So we come in, armed with red clippers if it’s Asian pears, or just fingers if it’s peaches or plums. We remove a lot of fruit, leaving just one every four or six or eight or twelve inches, depending on the variety of tree. As we thin, we’re also selecting for the biggest, nicest, undamaged fruits with the best position on the branch. Catch the Asian pear thinning action on YouTube. Every spring the crew spends weeks and weeks working their way through the orchard, branch by branch, tree by tree.

Spreading, one of the main strategies in tree training, is crucial for the development of young orchard trees. Training and pruning are the two main tools we have for shaping fruit trees, to guide them into the desired form and structure. Well-trained trees will need less corrective pruning later on and will develop a stronger, more fruitful framework, even producing fruit at a younger age. The goal of branch spreading is to “set” the branches at an ideal angle. Branches that grow very upright are vegetative, produce less fruit, and have weak angles. In other words, they form a sharper angle relative to the trunk of the tree, which is more likely to break under the weight of developing fruit. Branches with wider angles (30 to 60 degrees from the trunk is ideal, depending on which tree you’re talking about) are desirable because they will produce more fruit and are stronger, less likely to break. Without getting too technical, this works because there is an inverse relationship between vegetative growth and fruiting growth in trees. The more vegetative growth (i.e. leaves and branches) the tree puts its energy into, the less fruit it produces. Inside the tree, this is all controlled by hormones with fun names like auxins and gibberellins. By simply manipulating the position of a branch (up or down) you can manipulate the expression of these hormones. Pull a branch down, and it will produce more fruit sooner.

So, during that window in spring when the tree is actively growing and the branches are more pliable, we head into the orchard to do what I’ve affectionately referred to as “torturing baby trees.” The angles of very small branches can be affected by tools as small as a toothpick or clothespin. Larger branches are spread with metal spreaders of various lengths with pointy ends. One end sticks into the trunk and the other holds the branch in place at the desired angle. Another more drastic, and effective, approach is to tie branches down. A clip is inserted into the ground that holds a loop of string. Another string is then attached that connects the loop to the branch in question, holding it in place. Some of the trees (plums especially are notoriously vigorous) wind up with so many strings that it looks like some kind of Maypole celebration is happening in the orchard. By the end of the season’s growth, the tree’s new woody tissue will have hardened, and the angle we’ve chosen will become permanent.

I wish I could say that we were done thinning and spreading for the season, just in time to celebrate the solstice. But on a farm, there’s always more to be done, and, inevitably, it should have been done yesterday. I wish we were ready to simply revel in the ripe fruit coming off the trees (the first plums were harvested on Friday!), but there are more apple and peach trees to spread, more peaches and pears to be thinned. I suppose it’s also fitting that on the longest days of the year, there’s the most to be done.

When mid-May hits, a flurry of activity begins in the orchard. It’s fruit thinning season!

Remember all those gorgeous blooms of spring? Well, almost every one of those blooms sets a baby fruit…and there are just too many on each tree. From the tree’s perspective, this is a good thing. Since it’s just aiming to reproduce, the more potential seeds the better. From the perspective of a fruit eater, however, there’s just too many fruits on a tree. The development of excellent flavor is dependent upon the balance of the fruit load and the energy a tree can put into it. For nearly all fruit trees, we have to thin off quite a number of baby fruits, so the tree can put its energies (and sugars!) into the fruits that remain.

Apple, peach, and plum thinning can go relatively quickly (although in the case of plums, it can take an entire day to thin one single tree!). But thinning Asian pears is what takes up most of our time in the orchard during thinning season – both because we have so many trees and they set so many little fruits! One of our helpers a few years ago took it upon herself to count how many pears she cut off a single full-grown Hosui Asian pear tree, and the result was right around 2000! That’s 2000 individual cuts per tree to get the job done. (quite frankly, Mo, I’m not sure I really wanted to know that!)

Time flies by though – most of us listen to ipods or other listening gizmos. Once you know what you’re doing, the task isn’t too hard and it’s nice to listen to music, podcasts, or audiobooks while working. Personally, I get a lot of ‘reading’ done during thinning season – cool!

Fruit thinning season finishes up (hopefully!) by mid- to late July.

“This brings me to a theory I have about the growth of farmers’ markets. The conventional explanation is that people are rediscovering local food. That’s certainly true. But I think people are as hungry for the community experience as they are for the fresh broccoli. Several years ago, a group of sociologists from the University of California-Davis followed people around as they shopped in a supermarket. They found that your chances of having a conversation with another shopper are about 1 in 10. They then tracked people at farmers’ markets and found that your odds of having a conversation in this setting are nearly 70 percent. It’s this social pleasure that I think is driving the very modest, but noteworthy, regeneration of local businesses in some communities.” – Stacy Mitchell in Yes! Magazine

I just read this quote the other day and did a mental cheer.  It’s such a true statement, now. It certainly didn’t used to be this way.

Sixteen years ago, we and a small group of Chester County farmers started the West Chester Growers’ Market.  It was somewhat of a grand experiment, really, as there were literally NO producer-only markets of the kind in the area.  None.  So, the experiment was: will the farmers come? Will consumers come? Will this be a success?

Having worked at a farm in New York in the late ’80s, I was familiar with the successful Greenmarkets of New York City, but in Pennsylvania there existed no such thing, so we were really breaking new ground.

And here we are, 16 years later, with producer-only markets popping up in towns and cities all over the place.  And….new small farms are popping up all over the place. It took awhile for the concept to catch on, though. I remember the early years when we farmers at the West Chester Growers’ Market had plenty of time to chat with each other during market time. And the buzzwords of ‘organic’, ‘local’, ‘sustainable’, and ‘grass fed’ were not in general use.

My, have times changed! People are indeed hungry for not only good food, but connections with other people and the farmers who grow their food. CSAs and farmers’ markets provide good food and great community connections; to the point where some people can’t imagine life without them.  Great changes, indeed.

Now’s the time of year when farmers’ markets and CSAs are getting started for the year – and we are so looking forward to seeing our good friends again after a long winter.

If you or someone you know is in need of help finding some local markets or a CSA this year, please look at Local Harvest.  Simply by plugging in your zip code, you’ll get a list of all the markets, farms, and CSAs in your area. Tell your friends about the markets/farms/CSAs you love. Tweet and Facebook about them. Get the word out. You’ll love the connections as well as the food!

This year, it seems, is one that will be filled with education.  So many people are getting interested in where their food comes from and how it is grown.  Films like “Food, Inc.” and books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” have got people thinking, talking, and asking questions about their food.  Blogs, Facebook Fan Pages, and a legion of Twitterers (or is that Tweeters?) are talking about the issues.

At the farm last week, we were host to two groups of high school horticulture students from the Chester County Technical College High School (TCHS).  We discussed what it means to be a small, diversified, sustainable farm.  We looked at grafted trees, our intensive gardening system, and our methods of farming in an ecological manner (birdhouses, solar, reusing irrigation tape, soil blocks instead of plastic seedling cells, etc.)

One of the highlights of the day was when the manure hauling tractors went by to spray liquid manure onto our neighbors 80-acre corn field.  “There’s ‘big Ag’ for you!” I said.  Some of the students were stunned at the sight (and smell) of the operation.  Having recently watched “Food, Inc.” in class, one young woman earnestly asked, “So…what we saw in that movie is really for real?”

“Yes, indeed” I replied. “No movie special effects there!”

So, while the TCHS students got a bit of a taste of small scale farming which focuses on safe, ecologically-grown food (literally, too as we had a few Gold Rush apples left from last year to munch on), they were also reminded about the current state of most of our food industry.  What a difference!

Many folks are asking for more information – more this year than ever.  Next week, I’ll be talking to a class at the Delaware County Night School.  The folks there are worried about GMOs, factory-farmed food, and what questions to ask farmers at a farmers’ market.

We’ve also worked with a local MOMs club on these issues, and corporate entities such as ING have worked with us to get information about buying local foods to their employees.

There are fantastic things going on in the world of education.  The more we can all get info out there to consumers and potential small farmers, the more people will be able to make informed decisions about the food they eat.

Remember Wendell Berry’s quote:  “Eating is an agricultural act.”  Indeed.  Every time you choose something to eat, you are making a vote for the type of food you want and the type of community you want to live in.

“One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.” -Joel Salatin

Indeed.  And spring is when we are so reminded of this.  The greening of the grass and weeds, the pink and white blossoms popping out from the trees, the buzzing of bees and other insects as they busily work pollinating said blossoms, the return of bluebirds and tree swallows (our favorite insect-eaters) to the 90+ birdhouses around the farm’s perimeter.  Everyone working on the farm has an extra bounce in their step (whether this be due to the lovely warm and sunny weather or the freedom from bulky winter gear is not known).  Even the dog, who almost seemed depressed during the deep snows of winter, is happily chasing trucks, mice, and the aforementioned birds and insects (luckily, not catching either flyers or trucks).

While life is on-going at the farm all year long, it is this time of year that really grabs our attention….when we are so, happily, aware of the ‘sheer ecstasy of life’.

Happy spring!