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)

Poor Luther Burbank. The plant-breeding wizard created 113 new varieties of plums, 16 blackberries, 13 raspberries, 10 apples, and 35 fruiting cacti (just to name a few), and what he’s most widely recognized for is McDonald’s french fry potato, the Russet Burbank. This most ubiquitous potato didn’t even come along until after Burbank had sold the rights to his ‘Burbank’ potato (its parent, so to speak), but it proudly carries his name into more than 32,000 McDonald’s restaurants and a few other fast food joints as well, I’m sure.

It’s hard to talk about plums in this country without mentioning Luther Burbank. Around the turn of the last century, he was working with plums newly introduced from Asia, helping to popularize them and using them in his breeding program. The result was a significant shift in plum cultivation; his most famous variety, the ‘Santa Rosa’ plum, named after his adopted hometown, was a great fit for the evolving California plum industry. That said, the modern California plum industry may not have done a lot to warm our hearts toward the “new” Asian and hybrid varieties, which usually reach us in supermarkets back east as something resembling a mealy purple baseball. But I’ll vouch for a Santa Rosa plum, eaten dead-ripe off a tree in the California sunshine. That’s what Luther Burbank was working with, so I suppose we shouldn’t hold him responsible.

So, Poor Luther Burbank, with his unwitting legacy of french fries and mealy baseballs. And poor plums! Of all the fruits, they seem to be the most underappreciated in this country, and not without good reason. They really have suffered at the hand of industrial agriculture. Supermarket plums are just miserable. To boot, the sum total of our cultural knowledge of plums in this country seems to amount to the fabled Christmas plum pudding, dancing sugar plums fairies, and our grandmother’s prune juice.

I’ll leave the latter two alone, but what exactly is plum pudding, anyway? A peek into Escoffier’s seminal tome on “modern cookery” (published in 1921) reveals that plum pudding is a pretty involved affair, one in which you tie up your pudding, boil it for 5-6 hours and then light it on fire. The ingredients? The list includes beef kidney suet, breadcrumbs, apples, raisins, sultanas, currants, stout and brandy. No plums. Turns out, the word “plum” historically covered all dried fruits.

I’ve heard rumors that the Europeans, enlightened in so many ways culinarily (dare I mention the cheese course, a tradition of afternoon cake and coffee, or olive oil?), have a much greater appreciation for the plum. We should take note, because plums can be absolutely amazing. They come in a a staggering variety of flavors – sweet to tart – and colors – red, purple, yellow, green, blue, and every shade in between. There really is a variety out there for everybody, and if you’ve felt wishy-washy about plums up to this point, it’s time to try again. Because we grow so many different varieties of plums at North Star, there often are only one or a few trees of each kind. Since the harvest window of each is brief, most varieties make an appearance for only a week or two. Some have come and gone already for the season, so time is of the essence!

A bit of a plum primer for those looking to make up for lost time…

There are many, often confusing, categories of plums. Here are some highlights with examples of North Star varieties in parentheses. (Some of which have passed already for this year; some you can still keep an eye out for.) For our purposes, there are two main, overarching groups of plums: Asian or “Japanese” plums and European plums. Japanese plums originated in China, but western botanists first caught wind of them in Japan, hence the name.

Asian (or Japanese) plums (Vanier, Purple Heart, Redheart) – The type of plum you’re used to seeing in the supermarket. Often larger and tarter than European plums with a clingstone.

Burbank plums (Burbank, Elephant Heart) – These were bred by Luther Burbank from Asian plums and are usually large, round, and red or purple.

Damson (sometimes used to refer to Italian plums) – Named for Damascus and originating in Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Especially tart and astringent, and so generally cooked with plenty of sugar.

Gage (Greengage, Golden Transparent Gage, Rosy Gage, Oullins) – Gages are round, very sweet European plums.

Italian plums – Refers to egg-shaped plums with a dark purple skin and yellow flesh. One of the most popular plums for baking.

Mirabelle plums (Geneva Mirabelle) – Tiny and very flavorful plums (think small cherries) originating in France, usually cooked.

Prune plums – Any dried plum can be called a prune in English, but “prune plum” usually refers to oval, black-skinned, freestone plums with an especially high sugar content, which allows them to dry well.

Plums don’t technically ripen off the tree, so it’s important that we pick them at the right time, once their sugars have developed. Once you get them home, however, they will continue to soften and sweeten up a bit. If you keep them in the refrigerator, you can delay this process, bringing them out at will and they’ll be perfect in a day or two or three (depending on how soft you like your plums!). You might enjoy trying your plums at different stages of ripeness to see how the flavor and texture evolves. As my favorite plum, Purple Heart, ripens, it develops a rich, spicy flavor that tastes like cloves. And I ate a gushy-ripe Oullins plum the other day that reminded me of coconut. Then there are the ripe (some might argue over-ripe) Santa Rosa-type plums that taste just like banana!

One more note: You might notice a white film on your plums that appears to go away when you rub your finger across the skin. This “bloom” is just the naturally-occurring wax on the skin.

If you can’t keep up with your supply of fresh plums and you have a dehydrator, plums are also excellent dried. Relinquish those bad prune associations, I dare you! I dried quite a few last year and enjoyed adding them to hot cereal and muffins all winter long for a dose of tartness, which can be hard to come by in winter. And if you’re into that sort of thing, plums can also be preserved in alcohol. I’m guessing, though, that once you discover or are reacquainted with what real plums taste like, the only plum supply problem will be not enough.

Sources:
The Penguin Companion to Food, Alan Davidson
In the Sweet Kitchen, Regan Daley
“Luther Burbank, Plums, and CA Horticulture” Cynthia Houng

In the film of this name (1966), the basic plot revolves around three gunslingers competing to find a treasure of buried Confederate gold. The film is full of gunfights, hangings, Civil War battles, and prison camps; it’s a real Wild West romp.

Here in the Savage East (2010), we’ve also got our share of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. We grow our fruit on three different properties (two leased, one owned), and they compete (in their own way) to develop a treasure of amazing fruit. Each property has its strengths and weaknesses, and we never know, until the suspenseful ending of harvest season, which one will prevail. Fortunately, there are not often gunfights, hangings, Civil War battles, or prison camps involved in the process.

Perhaps the analogy ends here, but The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly came to mind as Trouble (note the capital ‘T’) appeared in town on Sunday, July 25th around 3:30 PM. We’ll perhaps look at the three in reverse order:

The Ugly: Young fruits practically exploded by golf-ball sized hail. (Ok, so there are explosions in our story, if not actual gunfights). But, some fruits just had flesh wounds, and the majority of by-standing fruit got through the battle completely unscathed.

The Bad: Evil no-good hailstorms (dressed in black with face masks, no doubt) triggered by too-hot weather and the tumultuous weather patterns appeared on the scene. Fortunately, they can only be in one place at one time, so our other two orchard locations saw neither hide nor hair of them.

The Good: The (many) remaining citizen fruits of outstanding character who stood up to the onslaught are still strong and upstanding. We are thankful and awed by their bravery and fortitude. Three cheers to the brave heroes!

Ok, so we’ve seen dry dusty conditions out there this year – even a tumbleweed or two. We’ve just seen some amazing explosions. And earlier in the season, there were plenty of hangings (weighing down tree limbs to train them into the right position). What’s next? Only one thing – the amazing fortune of colors, sugars, and flavors!

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.

It seems like just about everything nowadays is tending towards instant.

Online, of course:
-Connect to the internet, in an instant
-Order a book for your Kindle, in an instant
-Download a song (or a whole album) to your iPod, in an instant

But even in real life:
-Drive-through Starbucks; get your coffee, in an instant
-Order a refill for your prescription at the pharmacy, in an instant
-Know where you’re driving to via your GPS system, in an instant

In this day of ‘instant’, it’s nice to be aware of and appreciate things which do not take an instant:
-A long walk on the beach just prior to sunset
-The growth of your child from babe to functioning adult
-Following the cycles of the farm, from planting, to care, to harvest

I was startled one day in late winter when I received a phone call for someone looking for instant. In this case, an instant orchard. What they were looking for were adult Asian pear trees to put on their property. Not just one or two to fill a spot or two in their landscaping, as I was originally thinking, but an orchard’s worth.

The usual cycle of an orchard starts with ordering trees from a nursery. It can take anywhere from one to three years to receive the trees, depending on the nursery’s supply, how rare the variety is, etc. The trees arrive generally looking like long sticks with a few stringy roots attached. Planting, training, and waiting follows, followed by more training and waiting. And more training and waiting. Finally, several years down the road, you are (hopefully) rewarded with a fine crop of fruit to eat, share, and/or sell. Along the way, you, as an orchardist, make mistakes, learn more about how to be a better orchardist, and attempt to fix mistakes you previously made. In the end, if you haven’t made too many mistakes, the trees have grown tall and strong and pay you back in many ways for all earlier troubles.

This sounds oddly similar to parenting, actually, although we don’t get to (usually) pick out the specific variety of baby we want to raise.

So, these folks who want an instant orchard…well, it just makes me kind of cringe. First off, pulling a fully-grown tree from the ground and transplanting it elsewhere is a very delicate (and expensive) operation. The tree will be in shock. It may not survive the process, much less grow and be healthily productive. I suppose if you have enough money to throw at the project, chances of success would be better, but no matter what, it would still be hard on the tree.

And what of the heart of the orchardist? Carefully selecting and nuturing plus years of care and mistakes are all part of what makes a fulfilled orchardist. We feel great pride when our ‘children’ grow and become the best that they can be.

But an ‘instant’ orchardist? I can imagine that the only pride to be had is in the ability to stroke one’s ego. “Look, I spent $X and have an instant orchard”. Indeed; one that has been shocked through transition and struggles to survive with a caregiver who perhaps hasn’t even read a “Dummies Guide to Orcharding”. The heart and soul just wouldn’t be there, much less the knowledge how to help those struggling trees reach their full potential.

Instant is great for lattes, MP3s, and streaming videos, but for growing children, be they human or tree, I’ll take the long road any day.

We all have to make tough decisions from time to time.  Today, we’re witnessing the result of our decision to cut down three large Norway maple trees in the yard. It’s a difficult thing to watch, and it’ll take some time getting used to them being gone. And the timing of this event with Earth Day/Week couldn’t be more at odds. How can I justify our actions?  How can I say goodbye to the trees?

Justification is fairly easy, if I think with my head rather than my heart.  One of the trees has been slowly dying since it was hit by lightning several years ago.  And the other two?  Well, they just make it extraordinarily difficult to see traffic when pulling out of our driveway – so it’s a safety concern – especially when we have CSA members and farm helpers coming and going. Of course, when those trees were first planted, this road wasn’t nearly so busy.  But having a relatively new Walmart and Home Depot up the road brings not only a bunch of trucks but a bunch of shoppers by everyday.

But, it’s still hard to say goodbye to trees.

I can also justify our decision with the fact that since we bought this property, we planted more than 1400 new fruit trees.  Trees which are even now blooming and will soon be loaded with wonderful fruit. I can justify our decision with the fact that we’ve taken a 10-acre piece of monocropped, worn-out cornfield soil and in a few short years have transformed it into a healthy and productive small farm.  I can justify our decision with the fact that we will plant new trees around the house (likely sugar maples), but this time they’ll be placed in better strategic locations.

But, it’s still hard to say goodbye to trees.

And where will they end up?  Well, the larger wood will go to farm helper Josh’s house, where he’ll use it next winter to heat his house.  The smaller branches will be chipped and used as mulch around our fruit trees, providing them some protection from weed competition.

But, it’s still hard to say goodbye to trees.

How can I say goodbye to these trees?

I guess I’ve done so right here. Thanks for listening.