There are two sweet cherry trees on 28th Street, and my they have grown. One of them was in the fire we experienced November of 2017, and got pretty charred on one side because the redwood shed burned to the ground, and they were close together. The trees also suffer from ants setting aphids on the leaves. Sometimes the leaves curl beyond recognition, especially on the tips. And man, they really want to grow tall. I keep ’em pretty short with summer pruning. Despite these problems, the cherry trees are fruiting and surviving.

There’s something about cherry trees–I associate them with luck, maybe because of a slot machine toy I had as a child? When I look up into a tree and see those happy red cherries dangling up in the canopy, my heart opens up. Especially when the sky is so blue, and the leaves are so green. What a crazy color combo.

While we were picking cherries, I was thinking about what I had read in an online class that I just signed up for. The class is one of a series of online lady permaculture teachings. This feminine angle is crucial for me–I’ve had a knee-jerk reaction against permaculture because in the aughts when I was learning more about it, it was always taught by some white guy. I’m sure a white guy can teach a permaculture class but why was it always a white guy? It made me feel weird. So the free class I signed up was just what I had been craving, the thing that had been missing from the teachings I had experienced before: it’s called Emotional Permaculture. It’s taught by Heather Jo Flores, of Food Not Lawns fame. What I love about her and this project is they are coming at permaculture from a female perspective, where the emotional landscape is just as important as your garden landscape. Here’s a quote from the course:

In the current culture of political and environmental chaos, it is more important than ever that we cultivate a personal ability to not only endure catastrophic conditions, but also to find joy in the process. 

My kid, Frannie, climbed up into the tree and picked a bunch of cherries. I have a photo of her from six years ago when the trees were first planted.

My friend Jibril, who caretakes the garden now, said he got quite a few cherries too, before the birds did. As we drove off, I thought about Flores’s words again: we are enduring and finding joy, even though there has been–and always will be–pain too.

For me as an urban farmer, it’s been a weird couple years.

But now, with Covid raging, and cracks in our society revealed to show inequities and weaknesses in the system, we have to do something as citizens. A friend told me this is our zero gravity moment. We are all up in the air, struggling to feel grounded. When we do land, how will the circumstances be shifted? Can we make things right, finally, for once? This is what inspires me–we need to demand a new way of living. We need more edible parks like Dover Park in Oakland, we need community orchards, we need to dig up streets and plant vegetables like Starhawk told us. We need to look at models like permaculture, but not the white male interpretation, the emergent strategy version.

I am suddenly called again, back to urban farming. My friends at Sierra magazine asked me to write a little something, here’s a story about gardening with children. Also, I found myself up in Solano county picking up a colony of bees. They are happily buzzing in the backyard. I am reminded, this is how it all started before, with a colony of bees. It’s a first step toward getting grounded into the Earth again.

So there I am watering and I see…blue blobs. Not hanging from the branches but clinging very close, next to the trunk and on the bigger branches. Fruit, baby.

I collected the eggs and plums together. Don’t worry, I’ll wash them. This photo doesn’t do justice to their weird blue color.

So I got a few damsons this summer. I’ve got a good feeling about them. Next year, perhaps I will attempt to make June Taylor’s amazing fruit cheese, which is a non-dairy concentrated fruit paste. It’s so f-ing delicious. Maybe you can find some damsons at the farmers market and try it out. Let me know, too, if you have any favorite recipes for these blue babies.

Look toward Pollinate, the urban farming supply store in East Oakland. They have one of these cherry plum trees in their “back 40”, but they have transformed it. With John Valenzuela, Yolanda at Pollinate transformed that meh tree to a wow tree by grafting all kinds of yum plums and apricots onto the tree. Because the myrobalan was a pretty large tree, the new grafted branches are now huge too, only a few years after being grafted.

Come see it–and me!–in the flesh May 20th as Pollinate celebrates 5 years of business. I will be there at 2pm, hanging out and signing books by the old plum tree. They have a great selection of urban farming supplies, beekeeping stuff, and plants! and of course, trees.

Pollinate is on 2727 Fruitvale Ave; for more info, https://www.pollinatefarm.com/

Chris Lee or Samin Nosrat told me about the power of a fig leaf as a cooking vessel. You just pick large fig leaves, give them a wash, and use them as a wrapper around protein. Here’s some halibut I wrapped in fig leaves, drizzled with olive oil and sprigs of thyme.

After tightly wrapping the fish, throw them in the oven at 400 or on the bbq, even better.

As the fish cooks, the fig leaf gives off a subtle flavor of coconut which infuses into the fish! This halibut was so good, we ate it before I could take a photo. But it’s also good with salmon.

Happy spring!

My theory is that the heat of the fire reset this limbs sense of chill hours. So most fruit trees like apples, cherries, pears, etc need exposure to cold temperatures–that is, they need to know that winter happened. A chill hour is an hour of temperatures below 45 degrees. So when you buy a fruit tree, you need to look at the tag and make sure your area has the same number of chill hours recommended on that tree’s tag. In the East Bay, we get between 600-800 chill hours, depending on where exactly you live. (If you live in California, you can look up your chill hours here.) There are varieties of apples that need, for example, 1000 chill hours in order to stimulate blooming and to set fruit, so it would be a poor fruit producer here, but in Minnesota, look out!

But what about my slow-to-bloom cherry limb? It got the same number of chilling hours as the other branches. I’m wondering if the idea that extra warm temperatures can cancel out some chill hours is at work. There is a different model that UC Davis uses, called the Dynamic Model, which uses something called Chill Portions instead of hours. Here’s what they say: “The model calculates chilling accumulation as ‘chill portions’ (CP), using a range of temperatures from ~35-55°F (some temperatures are more effective than others), and also accounts for chill cancellation by fluctuating warm temperatures.”

Maybe my conflagration was like a super warm temperature that reset the tree’s chill hours? Send any theories my way….

P.S. Note that my cherry tree is pruned in an open center pruning style. Not ideal for cherry trees–that’s more of a peach thing. According to Stella Otto’s the Backyard Orchardist, cherries should be on a modified central leader. I wish someone told me that 7 years ago!

Let me explain. On November 17, 2017, I awoke to a strange popping noise. I figured it was gunfire, a sometimes occurrence in our neighborhood. But then it went on and on. Then I thought it was someone popping some of that bubble wrap. Then the front door went, Whoosh! And I got up quickly. Whole garden engulfed in flames. Yup. It was bone dry in November, lots of dead leaves everywhere, maybe lit up by an errant cigarette? Anyway, I lost a beautiful shed that held all my beekeeping equipment, a car parked in the driveway, and worst of all…my mulberry tree.

I bought the tree from Daniel at Spiral Gardens probably 10 years ago. It had grown into a beautiful tree, sending out verdant shoots early in the spring, followed by hairy white flowers, followed by the most delicious, juicy blackberry-like fruit. Punk rockers down the street would stand outside the gates, where the tree peeked its branches over and feast on the fruit. Kids would climb the tree and get covered in purple juice, head to toe. It washed out. One kid even “painted” our car with her mulberry handprints. Now it was a smoldering stump.

I gave it up for dead. I bought another tree from Daniel. Planted it on the corner of 28th and MLK with the help of some glorious volunteers. The idea being, even more people will get to enjoy the mulberries, once it grows over the fence in the next 5 years or so. The scorched earth area, I decided to plant some pear trees that I could espalier against the fence. But then the other day I went outside and a wink of green stopped me dead in my tracks. Underneath the blackened remains of the mulberry tree was a new shoot of life, with the unmistakable shape of a mulberry leaf.

Remember that book, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein? The little boy takes everything from that apple tree–her apples, her branches, even her trunk. By the end of the book she’s only a stump, the boy is an old man, and now he can sit on her. But if that story kept going, I like to think, and this mulberry proves–the trunk isn’t dead. It can regrow into a tree. All we have to do is give it a little time. Astounding.

Unlike Ghosttown Farm blog, this one is going to focus on fruit trees, urban orchards, and what fruit trees mean to my life, to Oakland, CA, to people all around the world. Urban orchards are a connection to the past, a place to gather, a place to commemorate the dead. Fruit trees span the generations. Fruit trees make us think about our own short lives. There will be interviews with folks starting urban orchards or tending existing orchards. Travel profiles of urban orchards I encounter, or rural fruit orchards that can inform even the small-time grower. Book reviews, tool reviews. Recipes. Orcharding tips. Oh yeah.

I’m just learning about fruit trees and what people are up to in terms of fruit trees in urban areas. Please do send me links and info about your favorite urban orchard projects, fruit tree books, and resources.