by Brian Brett
THE TRICK ABOUT GATHERING apples for juice is never to take windfalls, no matter how good they look, because deer graze the orchards, and they can excrete salmonella onto the grass and infect the crop. You won’t have trouble if you are clean and careful and keep away from the windfalls. Islanders have been happily drinking unpasteurized apple juice for 150 years, but that’s because we’re local and small scale. The chances for contamination of big batches of apple juice grow exponentially with the size of the corporation making it, so it’s hard to sympathize with our ministries, which are regulating small orchardists out of existence by demanding that we pasteurize our juice, which can’t be done economically on such a small scale. Now the good juice is going the way of real milk, underground and through the back door. I buy any extra I need if I can find it. Sudden guerrilla forays of juicers will appear at Fulford Harbour, the word spreads, and everyone rushes down and purchases the juice, usually as a benefit for a local institution. Then everyone disappears before the apple police show up.
When we raised pigs we’d throw the windfalls into their yard, and they’d kick up their heels in delight. Even though their stomachs are similar to ours, they never have trouble eating windfalls. The ancient tradition was to run the pigs in orchards at fall. This is a perfect way of “finishing” the pig and sweetening its flesh, along with cleaning up the orchard. Diet has a terrific effect on meat. “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are,” the gastronomist Brillat-Savarin said. He knew what he was talking about. A neighbour who had a fish farm once tried raising pigs on his “morts,” the dead fish from the aquafarm—killed by seals or otters or whatever—accomplishing two tasks simultaneously, raising the pigs and disposing of the fish waste. Personally, I would have made fish fertilizer. Even though he finished the pigs on a grain and apple diet for their last two months, their meat still tasted so fishy it was inedible. The nature of small farming almost demands brilliant ideas that don’t always work, but every once in a while the Dutch hoe or the Leghorn chicken gets invented.
HOWARD DIED THE YEAR after that autumn of many apples. Besides being a great farmer, he was also the island dog catcher. He could be harsh and accurate with the gun, and he was one of the most tender men with animals I ever met. He raised a blind deer and a crippled crow as pets. At Howard’s funeral half the community showed up, farmers, loggers, the gay crowd, bikers, sculptors, poets, and developers. It was perhaps the most spectacular assortment of islanders from different worlds I’ve seen assembled. His beat-up cap was placed on his coffin and when they lowered the coffin into the ground, Mac, his collie, devoted to the end, tried to leap into the grave. There wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd.
When they covered him with dirt they were burying an enormous knowledge of apples, sheepdogs, gardening skills, and livestock behaviour—a great raft of pages out of the book of local history. Another library gone to the ground.
“ WHEN’S THE BEST TIME to prune your fruit trees?” a man asked Mike Byron, an orchardist equal to his brother in knowledge.
“When you have the time,” he replied.
The orchard needs to live through four seasons and is both stronger and more tender than we expect. In our temperate climate there’s only a couple of months of true dormancy. Pruning is like doing crossword puzzles. It’s an art, a drudgery, and a test of decision-making skills. The reasons why some people can’t prune are simple—they’re either afraid of making decisions or incapable of making them.
Pruning is an easy and meditative art if you have a set of good, sharp tools—a pole pruner with a tip saw, loppers, and a set of bypass hand pruners. A bucket of water mixed with bleach is also good for sterilizing your tools between trees. First, you eliminate the water shoots, those vertical suckers that want to set a new crown; then you remove all your cross-branches and those that rub against each other. On an established tree, this is most of your pruning. If you remove more than a third of the branches, you will inflict excess work on yourself in the following year, since a healthy tree rejects too much pruning and will rebel by shooting up thousands of unruly suckers.
The only time harsh pruning can be justified is if you are dealing with sickness and neglect, such as canker-struck trees or split-limbed, near-fatal damage. Before our apple pressing adventures, I watched Howard Byron spend a couple of years reviving the century-old Brown orchard, which meant, in some cases, chainsawing the trees down to their trunks. I called this the Texas Chainsaw school of tree pruning, which he found amusing. These trees suckered like porcupines and were weak for lack of leaves to feed the roots, but within a few years he recreated the classic fruit tree bowl shape, pruning less each year as the trees renewed.
Well-tended orchards can date back many years. One orchard in England is known to be four centuries old. Most fruit trees will last less than fifty years these days. Modern apples are grafted onto weak, dwarfing rootstock. They fruit sooner and can be planted in less space, and the apples are easy to pick in the industrialized orchards. But they’re cultivated with the knowledge that they’ll lose their vigour in ten to twenty years. Grafting onto this inferior rootstock is the equivalent of putting a permanent tourniquet on a tree trunk. Fruit farming is no longer a tradition passed on to our children.
A few pruning decisions can backfire, as Sharon discovered once in a battle with tent caterpillars. These caterpillars have a seven-year cycle. If you live with them, they will die out naturally. On about the fifth year of the cycle you will begin to see a dot on the foreheads of the caterpillars. That’s the egg of a wasp that lives in a symbiotic relationship with them. As the tent caterpillar population explodes, so does the wasp population—until the wasps kill off almost all the caterpillars and their populations collapse together. This ebb and flood of caterpillars in the orchard is best left alone, though I do tie a propane torch to a stick and burn off the worst masses so they won’t set back the trees too hard, yet healthy trees will survive even a complete defoliation. The caterpillar/wasp dance is a circle, and interfering with it by spraying orchards with toxic pesticides will inevitably cause the pest population to mushroom while killing off its control predator.
There was a peak year in the caterpillar cycle that arrived when I was too busy to deal with the critters and they were massacring the orchard. Sharon, worried about the damage, went through the orchard with the loppers, whacking off the limbs bearing the worst of the webbed nests, piling them up, and burning them. A healthy, well-built young pippin had all of its caterpillar nests on one side, so she amputated those branches. The next year the tree suckered excessively on the unpruned side. I spent years attempting to rebalance the lopsided tree—but then the winter snows and windstorms got into the act, breaking the roots on the over-pruned, short side, and it began leaning. I stuck a forked branch under a limb to prop it up, and that’s how it remains to this day, ten years later. While the pruning saved the tree from the infestation, it eventually mutilated it. Sharon just frowns during our orchard tours if I dare to compliment her pruning technique on that tree. However, since I’ve also had a few pruning mishaps I can’t tease her too much.
We have several varieties of heritage apples. My favourite is the king apple—a big, sweet fruit. It used to be supreme among market apples before the Macintosh, the Delicious, and the Granny Smith appeared, but since it’s susceptible to a condition called water core—its sugar reaches a level that makes the flesh translucent—it has been dropped by the orchard industry.
People are such faddish creatures. The evidence is in the thousands of heirloom fruit trees discarded during the last hundred years. Apples thrived at first in the new colonies of the eastern seaboard, cider apples especially, because the fruit was not eaten so much then. They quickly spread across North America, and the crops reached their peak in the west, where each orchard region planted the currently popular varieties. After Salt Spring’s flurry of orchards following colonization, new orchards appeared in Saanich, on Vancouver Island, and they too enjoyed a brief mon
opoly. As each region and its varieties took over the market, great numbers of the older orchards were uprooted and lost, the varieties made endangered or extinct. When Saanich faded and the subdivisions arrived, the famous orchards of the Canadian Okanagan greened the desert valleys before being overwhelmed by vineyards and more subdivisions. Then Yakima Valley and the surrounding region of Washington State became the apple capital of North America. This is where dwarf fruit trees and enormous orchards first appeared on a scale almost beyond comprehension. Storage and artificial ripening facilities became monopolistic corporations, and the massive chemical spraying of fruit trees began in earnest, wiping out millions of beneficial insects along with pests. These new, industrial-scale orchards also damaged songbird migrations.
Not too long ago you could walk the paved lanes of a Washington cherry orchard and view large cages filled with beautiful birds trapped during their migrations. Every so often a truck would come by, gas them all, collect the dead birds, and carry on. This carnage was merely “good management” for the industry. When the public outcry grew too loud the orchardists converted to the ubiquitous, irritating bird cannons, which randomly explode from dawn to dusk. Now the great orchards of Washington are fighting for their lives as China overwhelms the fruit market with a cheap labour force and few, seldom enforced environmental regulations. In twenty years China has become the world’s largest supplier of apples and many other fruits. At present, it enjoys 40 percent of world sales.
THE APPLE GROWS WILD, but because our species considers the natural world too inefficient, we insist on breeding it better, curing its flaws. Generally this works—expert breeders have created impressive hybrids—though great varieties have also been found in “sports”—natural deviations that appear often in the ditches alongside orchards. We once had a Gravenstein cross surface among the thick branches of a Magnolia grandiflora. It’s delicious.
While the industrial orchardists are lining up their super-sweet dwarf varieties, a few rural people retain the old ways—the science of tradition—which can be breathtakingly intelligent and, alas, sometimes superstitious and goofy. You always take your chances when you walk in the waters of tradition, but they are usually warm waters, and that’s why they are tradition.
Harry Burton and his wife, Debbie, are south islanders who grow apples in an orchard that’s neither traditional nor rigorously scientific, yet their orchard makes a marvellous, intuitive sense, so maybe that means they’re traditionalists. I’m a big admirer of Harry and Debbie’s technique. Since Harry is the more public figure of the couple I’ll describe “his” approach.
First he plants his trees. Then he lets whatever weed or shrub naturally appears there grow around them. This includes thistles, which attract aphids, and nettles. These attract beneficial ladybugs that eat the aphids. There are salmonberries and mostly blackberries. He keeps manure tea barrels for irrigation and scatters oyster shells for calcium and phosphorus and other minerals. West Coast farmers spend their lives failing to eradicate the pernicious Himalayan blackberries that invaded the region after they were introduced in 1885. Harry lets them do his work for him. They shade the ground, their winter droppings of leaves feed the soil, and they retain moisture. This is a cultivation methodology that comes out of long experience. The richest earth I ever encountered was the soil under a blackberry bramble.
Add some manure and seaweed and the trees are fat with apples. He mows once a year, and occasionally clears a space around the trees and pathways with his machete. Otherwise, he lets the ecosystem manage his orchard. He’s rewarded with healthy, semi-unpruned trees, leaning and propped up in all directions, and an awesome blackberry harvest. He is also trying out different varieties, as he studies what apples thrive best in our environment. Lately, a winery in the valley has discovered that blackberries make an impressive port. So now this invasive berry is in high demand. A farmer’s world is always full of surprises.
A century ago there was 180,000 acres of orchard in England. Today, there’s less than 47,000. Preservationists estimate eight hundred varieties have gone extinct since the days of America’s Johnny Appleseed, who planted apple seeds rather than grafting proven tree scions onto rootstock, because of his Swedenborgian religious belief that grafting was a form of wounding a natural creation. He knew the apple doesn’t seed true, and planting seeds created greater diversity in nature. Legend claims that he planted the seed that became the Grimes golden, discovered by Thomas Grimes in 1832 in West Virginia. The Grimes golden went on to become the parent of the Golden Delicious.
The wild apple, Malus sylvestris, lives yet in the Caucasus. And I like to remember that an apple orchard was first mentioned in Homer. Despite the escalating loss of heirloom apples, I’ve read there could still be as many as ten thousand varieties remaining, a quarter of them in England alone. The great era of the English apple was the eighteenth century, during the cider craze. Over ten thousand hogsheads— about a million gallons—of cider was brewed every year in just the small county of Worcestershire.
THOUGH WE FAVOUR APPLE trees, we also grow a mixed orchard of cherries, pears, almonds, hazelnuts, and plums. The ravens, crows, and starlings are quick to clean out the cherries, even when we net the trees, so we are lucky to salvage more than a handful. I keep planting more trees, operating on the time-honoured farm tradition that I can “outplant the bastards.” The theory is that eventually there will be more fruit than they can eat. The birds appreciate this deranged delusion. They also will take the pears if we don’t harvest quickly enough. These birds might not realize it, but they’re fortunate we aren’t a modern, industrial orchard.
TWO YEARS AGO SHARON and I motored up to the Okanagan. It was the height of cherry season, and we bought a box of big, glistening Lamberts. Sharon dived into the unwashed fruit as we returned to our lodgings. They were too pretty to resist. Later in the evening her throat and upper chest turned a bright pink. That night her throat started to swell as the allergic reaction spread. A dose of antihistamine rescued her.
Canadian government regulations now specify that each orchard carry a record of its spraying programs posted visibly around its perimeter. The next day, on our way back to the George Ryga House (an artists’ retreat named after the fine writer who once lived there), where we were staying, I noticed an orchard of dwarf Lambert cherry trees. The berries were full and sweet looking. I would have picked them if they had been my trees. But there was something artificial about these glowing trees in the blue dusk. I got out of the car and read the long list of spraying applications on the post. It was daunting: pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, including things like cholinesterase inhibitors, which could shut down the liver. These neurotoxins are components of biochemical weapons (such as sarin gas) and snake venom. Despite the apparent ripeness of the fruit, the instructions for final spraying specified that no one was to enter the orchard for a further eight days without wearing a full anti-contamination suit. I guess on the ninth day they sell the cherries to foolish victims like us.
A young friend who has just done a stint of cherry picking in the Okanagan told me that after only a few days the skin sloughed off his hands, so he quit. These could have been the same cherries that attacked Sharon’s throat. The spraying regimes for other fruit are equally scary.
“Don’t eat the apple!” For the first time in history that phrase has more than mythological meaning. The tree of knowledge that Adam and Eve ate from has proved dangerous indeed. When I think of our fresh, sweet fruit at Trauma Farm, I realize how privileged we have become in a society so immersed in poisons that supermarkets are now selling chemicals to detoxify the chemicals on fruit and vegetables.
Since many fruit varieties need to be cross-pollinated by another variety, we planted trees whose blossoming periods matched. This also allows us to enjoy extended colour during the long, slow spring of our climate: the first ornamental plums of the garden crack pink early in March, along with the stunning almond trees, followed by the fruiting plums,
pears, cherries, ornamental chestnuts, pearapples, and apples. It would be a pleasure for the flowers alone. The fruit is a bonus. On sunny days the orchard is alive with our honeybees and the more efficient solitary orchard mason bees, each of which can pollinate thirty times as many blossoms as a European honeybee.
I love the river of fruit and nuts that begins in July, when we collect our few cherries and the golden egg plums adorn the green leaves, reminding me of a Christmas tree with only one colour of bulb. And the red blush on the yellow Canors! The late, great crop of Italian prune plums. They all come in their time, and it remains one of the joys of life on this planet to stroll through an orchard over several months and to finally reach up and pull down a ripe fruit.
We have close to a dozen fig trees in two varieties, Turkish brown and what might be a variant of desert king. My late Italian uncle, Giuseppe, gave me a half-dozen cuttings of the latter—about six inches long—which I merely stuck in the ground, according to his instructions. They all sprouted and thrived in the spring. He told me they came from the old country—one of the many varieties brought over in the pockets of impoverished immigrants. Most failed, but this variety flourished and was passed through the community. Now it dominates the Italian backyards of Vancouver, and I pass along the vigorous cuttings in spring to islanders.
