Jan 2011: 

It was a snowy year. The snow covered the ground by 1 foot by early January. The pruning was started. It was bitter cold and the snow had formed a crust. There really isn't much to see in an orchard in the winter except branches. Although the place is covered with bugs. The plum curculio over winters in surrounding hedges and stone walls. There are scale, cocoons, and eggs over wintering on the trunk, under the bark and on the smallest branches. The temperature was always in the twenty's or thereabouts. The crisp cool air combined with the blue sky and white snow is open air space to breathe in.

Just some background about the orchard. It is owned by the state and leased to Bird of the Hand farm. There are 550 trees in the orchard. The orchard is about twenty years old. The trees are various ages. One man, Roland Morin was living his dream and cleared 7 acres of forest trees from a n oak and pine woodlot that abutted a commercial orchard of about 300 acres, the Blanchard Orchard. That Blanchard orchard was well know for it's high quality New England variety apples that were shipped all over the county. Over the last twenty years a lot has happened. The Blanchard Orchard is now out of business and totally overgrown for at least 15 years as of this writing. This is a shame as Mr Blanchard had a specialized root stock specifically for the McIntosh apple. And he grew some of the best. But back to Roland, he gave up tending his 4 acres of apple trees and sold the land to the state as the land is in the watershed area of the Boston water supply. So here we have two abandoned orchard properties. The economics of orcharding are not sustainable in Massachusetts at the moment.

Roland devoted all his life's energy into cutting down every tree and clearing this land. Unless some are familiar with the process the removal of the giant weeds, ietrees, in our lush temperate rainforest is one onerous task. Roland with his used tractor made his orchard. The varieties are mainly McIntosh, Cortland, and Red Delicious. These varieties were inter planted to allow the best pollination of the flowers. There are another 15 varieties of apples and pears interspersed throughout the orchard. Due to economic issues Roland sold the orchard to the state. When we came upon the orchard it had been abandoned for about 7 years. In that small amount of time the orchard had been totally overgrown with bittersweet, pine trees, poison ivy, and barberry. The growth of these weeds was amazing. The limbs of the apple trees were bent and twisted according to the vines growth habits. But the apple trees are extremely resilient. The trees want to put out apples even after the vines were cut off and the trees restoratively pruned. Just to point out the vitality of an apple tree. We had to learn how to light a fire to burn the prunings. So much life (water) was held in the aged pruning debris, that it was impossible to light a fire and burn them.

This was in 2008 , enter my sister and I. Armed with uber optimism and the idyllic view of nature we undertook to show the world that organic apple growing is possible in New England. With a background in traditional and organic landscaping and plant propagation it just seemed like there must be a chemically cleaner way to raise apples. The pruning of the trees was our first dose of reality. What started as an idyllic dream is an experience of total devotion and awe at the strength and complexity of nature.

Now armed with a tempered view of apple growing, is it possible to grow organic apples? It is possible to grow organic apples in New England? Is it possible to grow organic in our ecologically damaged world? Well that is what we are about to find out.

Please note this information from two years ago, but with being a busy farmer/landscaper but not a good computer operator, these files had been lost for the two years.   So here's to a New Year's resolution to be more organized on the computer and I hope to update the blog more frequently.   Thanks for taking the time to read this.