I went to Longwood Gardens for the first time on Saturday. Longwood is a 1,077 acre property that is known as one of the most extensive botanical gardens in the States. It is stunning, from perfectly manicured lawns to the lovely vegetable garden with little fences made of some crazy vine, and flowers in the corners of the veggie beds. Longwood is much like a museum: everything is in place, and it’s definitely an experience.

North Star Orchard is also a beautiful human-cultivated space. I spent today immersed in rows of trees sheltering blushing peaches and dense red nectarines. But there is a crucial difference between Longwood and North Star: the element of imperfection.

Here’s what I like about farms. The environment is controlled, yes– the trees are trained, the grass is mowed, the soil beds are dug, the plants are tenderly nurtured in the greenhouse– but there is also a wild chaos. A storm chases us out of the field, insects invade, a crop looks better than ever before, another struggles to fruit. Weeds sprout from everywhere, and we don’t even pretend to master them all. There is complexity everywhere; each plant variety has its own needs and difficulties, just like each of us on the farm crew have ours. When you throw all of that incredible diversity into one place, what do you have? Semi-organized chaos!

I’d like to go back to Longwood, to walk around, take pictures, and learn more about their plants. But I’m glad that I work at North Star, where every day, anything can happen.

Thanks to my Mom and to the Sheehans for inspiring this post.

I wish you all a delightfully complex weekend!

Laura Beth

Actually, come to think of it, Farmer Ike is not really a music fan at all, so we’ll proceed with this post with the understanding that all of its contents pertain to Farmer Lisa.

Little-known fact: Farmer Lisa rocks out to some pretty heavy tunes while she’s tenderly (or aggresively, depending how you look at it) thinning all of those wee Asian pears. Band names appearing in her android device include: Ayreon, Bauhaus, Bush, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rush, and Them Crooked Vultures. For general listening in public, she might pull up an album by The Beatles, Coldplay, or REM, however.

Although audiobooks and podcasts often help while away the 6 or 8 hours a day spent thinning fruit, most of which time is spent up on the Brownie (a self-propelled hydraulic lift), it’s the rockin’ tunes that keep up the speed for this seemingly never-ending task.

At the beginning of thinning season, Farmer Peter asked at lunch one day what we were all listening to. He commented that both he and Wahi were listening to The Byrds. Melissa mentioned a number of bands, some slower, some downright fast and toe-tapping. John mentioned Bryan Adams, Lindsey had some podcasts on, and Lisa was listening to her newest heavy/prog-rock favorite, Arjen Anthony Lucassen (and if you have any idea who that is, you win major kudos!). We then realized that neither Peter nor Wahi had an mp3 player of any sort with them. So what we thought was “The Byrds” was simply “the birds”, as in those little critters flying around from tree to tree as we worked. Goodness, what a concept!

Farmer Lisa has listened to the birds for many, many hours over the 15 years she’s been thinning Asian pears, and sometimes they (like some bands she could name) get to all sound very repetitive after awhile, which can make it difficult to keep up a mad-dash thinning speed long term. Plus, their songs are hard to really bop to.

For the first couple weeks of thinning season, rock operas were getting her through the day. This has been probably the best confluence of things to keep her occupied and on high-thinning-speed: heavy-rocking tunes, the stories are mostly all based on science fiction, and they’re long (so by the time they’re done, so is the morning and half a row of tree thinning). Perfect!

Farm IT Dude Jay came up with the next rockin’ out project: Rush-a-Day. You know them as that “Tom Sawyer” band, but on June 12th, Rush’s 20th studio album, “Clockwork Angels”, is being released. So Jay and Lisa are listening to each of Rush’s albums, in order, one-a-day, up to the release. The goal? Not only to enjoy the tunes while getting work done (in her case fruit thinning, in his case computer programming), but to also select the one (or two or three) lines from each album which strike a chord, so to speak. Maybe that’s weird, but hey, it gives them something to do besides just listening while they work! They’ll compare notes at some point, but for the moment, Lisa will post “her” lines below as she chooses them over the next, sheesh….almost 3 weeks!

So anyway, get over the pastoral notion of the straw-hatted, overall-wearing farmer tapping her toes and quietly humming along to a simple singer-songwriter. Nope, this farmer is more likely to be seen bouncing around, swaying her butt, and stomping her feet! All the while maintaining a steady hand armed with a very sharp pair of clippers AND operating a heavy piece of machinery. There’s not been a cut finger or run-over foot on her watch, but don’t get too close unless she’s between albums!

(Thursday, May 24th) Album Rush (released 1974) Note: Although this is the first Rush album, it is not a typical Rush album, as the lyrics were penned by singer Geddy Lee rather than soon-to-be drummer Neil Peart. Geddy was very young and not a great songwriter at the time. Peart, however, gets into some cool lyrics as soon as he starts writing for the band, so stay tuned for better lyrics. For today then, the line that most strikes a chord is “It seems to me I could live my life a lot better than I think I am.” (From “Working Man”)

(Friday, May 25th) Album Fly By Night (released 1975) “From the golden light of coming dawn, Till the twilight where the sun is gone, We treasure every season, And every passing day” (From “Rivendell”)

(Saturday, May 26th) Album Caress of Steel (released 1975) “Life is just a candle and a dream must give it flame” (From “The Fountain of Lamneth”)

(Sunday, May 27th) Album 2112 (released 1976) “In your head is the answer, let it guide you along. Let your heart be the anchor, and the beat of your own song” (From “Something for Nothing”) and “I know that my goal is more than a thought. I’ll be there, when I teach what I’ve been taught” (From “Lessons”)

Sometimes, we meet in the mornings at the Avondale orchard (one of three sites that is part of North Star). We spend those days thinning– snipping off baby fruit so that the trees can devote more energy to producing good fruit. We each take a pear tree, and systematically work branch by branch until every fruit is 8 inches apart from the next. Sometimes we talk while we work– Friday, we played the word game Geography for a while– but usually, we fall into our own rhythms and listen to our ipods.

For me, the day feels like a very long moment, marked by the sun’s position in the sky. The early morning phase: a bit chilly, the sun glimmering behind trees. The late morning phase: I have finished my first tree, and moved on to the next. This American Life is playing on my ipod, which means I have probably shed some tears and also laughed out loud. The sun feels lovely on my back. John calls lunch; we all emerge from our trees, blinking sleepily from hours of quiet work. We eat together, sitting in the grass. The sun is full, and it is warm even within the shady trees. I carry a ladder to another tree. The work of thinning takes little mental effort after so much time for my muscles to learn it, and I am free to enjoy my thoughts.

I am not the only one whose day follows the sun. All around me, millions of fruit are producing ethylene, also known as the ripening hormone. Ethylene is one of the few plant hormones that is gaseous; it actually has a slightly sweet taste and smell. As the day gets hotter, the amount of ethylene in production increases. Cold, on the other hand, slows ethylene production. Aside from its activity in the natural world, ethylene is used medically as an anaesthetic, and in small doses, it appeals to the pleasure centers of the brain. At high doses, it can be fatal.

Not all plants produce much ethylene; but pears and apples produce a lot, which is why it’s important to refrigerate them once they’re ripe. When fruit is bruised or damaged in any way, it produces more ethylene as well– so try to eat bruised fruit first.

Have you ever wondered how it’s possible that bananas shipped from Ecuador get to your grocery store on the East Coast, and they’re still green-yellow? Or that tomatoes from California aren’t mushy and moldy by the time they travel all the way here? Most non-local, non-organic grocery store fruits are picked unripe, treated with ethylene-blocking chemicals, and often, treated with ethylene to ripen them at the right time. At high concentrations, ethylene is extremely flammable, so this process is taken seriously! USDA certified organic growers can use ethylene on tropical fruit and citrus, though not on tomatoes.

Thanks to the lovely Aubergine, who requested a post on ethylene. I wish you all a week with at least one sandwich bursting with veggies!

Laura Beth

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!