Tag Archives: Humble

Orchard Learning

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Mottled red apples in green leaves and branches
Our first Honeycrisp apples are almost ready to pick!

Our semi-dwarf apple tree is bearing fruit for the first time this year, and we are excited for the dozen or so apples that will be ripe soon.

How naive I was when I first decided to plant an orchard in our back yard. We started with two dwarf cherry trees in 2017, of the varieties Lapins & Black Tartarian. The next spring we planted a Contender peach tree, the Honeycrisp apple, two blueberry bushes, some raspberries, and three hazelnut bushes. In 2019 I grafted two other apple trees, Black Oxford and Blue Pearmain, this last just transplanted to its new bed this year. (Not to mention our mulberry tree further back in the yard, and three more blueberries planted later.)

I think I imagined that one would put in a lot of effort at the beginning, with preparing the ground, planting the seedlings, adding companion plants, tending, and so forth, then the work would ease and the fruit would be there for the picking in the years to come. Maybe that was some of what attracted me to permaculture and a food forest. Little did I realize that an orchard requires even more tending as the seasons go on.

And there are the ups and downs–the first peach harvest went entirely to the squirrels-we were so sad. Then we had an amazing crop last year, that we ate fresh, shared with the neighbors, and froze, some packages of which are still in the freezer. This season, no peaches at all. We have yet to have a cherry harvest. This would have been the year, I think, but the abundant flower buds were empty from the deep winter freeze. On the other hand, the raspberries are very reliable, and the blueberries have begun to come into their own. And the number of birds have multiplied in our yard, whether or not there is any fruit on the trees. They love the orchard.

All that preamble to say, I did some more pruning this past week! After watching a whole bunch of Youtube videos about summer pruning, I gained the courage to go and cut off a whole lot of branches that were vigorously seeking the sky on the peach tree and the Black Tartarian cherry. (I had already done some pruning on the Lapins because of its black cherry aphid problems.) When I post the “after” pictures below, you might not believe how many branches were piled up on the patio waiting for me to take them to the compost. The trees still look flush with abundance green, though I think their tops might be about three feet lower than before.

Peach tree and Lapins cherry after pruning.

I also discovered a lot of small curled leaves on the Black Tartarian, without any evidence of aphids. After some research I learned that there is a fungal disease, cherry leaf curl, similar to the peach leaf curl that I dealt with by picking off the affected leaves. I can’t be certain what it is, but I went back around and pruned off any branch ends with those curled leaves on both cherries. All the pruned cherry branches I cut up and put into garbage bags to go out with the trash–three bags full–so they wouldn’t spread the problem.

You might notice from the photo that the companion planting under the trees is now very low to the ground. I have taken to mowing most of it, including the oregano that spreads everywhere, and I put the cuttings in the compost to bring back later. The mowing doesn’t seem to bother anything, it all comes back. Under the Lapins cherry tree, I actually put down some cardboard to inhibit the oregano and then covered it with wood chips. It is an experiment.

Pruned Black Tartarian cherry tree.

This is not to say that the trees won’t also need winter pruning. That is the thing. They will always need lots of pruning, summer and winter. The work is never done. I might do less of it or more of it, depending on my own energy levels. But there is always more work that I could do to tend to their care. Even with my trying-to-be-minimalist approach. (I have read that there are people who secretly plant fruit trees in random places, to great environmentalist applause; but I wonder about who will do the tending.) So while I often wax eloquent about permaculture and gardening, please be warned about the other side: this relationship with garden trees requires a lot of work, more than I ever expected.

I should end this post with a caveat: I consider myself a learning gardener, and none of these reflections should be taken as advice. I have no idea what I am doing at least 50 percent of the time. My intention is creating a mutual relationship with the earth and the plants, and reflecting on that process. As always, I am humbled by it all.

Humble

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Red rain barrel in front of house, heat pump seen on upper right, behind oregano plants all over the place, green with white flowers
Overgrown oregano all around the rain barrels and heat pump.

I love sharing photos of beauty in the yard. But it is harder to know how to share the challenges and failures. I actually feel like a failed gardener right now. Yes, there are little harvests, yes there are elements of beauty. But there is so much that is overwhelming. I don’t enjoy “weeding” which seems to be what real gardeners often talk about enjoying. A weed is merely a wrong plant in the wrong place. We make further distinctions to talk about invasive plants that are harmful to the local ecosystem. And there are also native plants that are aggressive in the ecosystem.

One of my overwhelming senses of failure comes from the oregano that is spreading all over the orchard. When I originally planted some donated oregano as a companion plant to the orchard trees, I had no idea how it would take over. Oregano is a tasty herb, not native, but useful, and the bees love the flowers; I’ve dried some of the plant for seasoning. Last year as it spread, I thought, okay, just let it go where it wants. This year I tried taking out a tiny patch using a garden fork. Its roots form a thick mat under the soil. Even a tiny patch was challenging to remove. I’ve lately taken the mower through the orchard a few times. With the rain and heat inhibiting our outdoor time this summer, I can’t imagine how to get it under control. I hate the feeling of needing to get a plant under control.

Everything in the yard is ragged and overwhelming. For each native plant I newly discover and appreciate (like the evening primrose that the goldfinches adore), there is another tall unknown plant that I have no idea about. The orchard trees have to be pruned each year, and face challenges from mysterious pests and diseases. Will the Lapins cherry survive its challenges?

Perhaps in all of this, I discover that I don’t enjoy tending and caring for this patch of earth the way I thought I would? I am not good at gardening? I’ll never be good at harvesting much food? I want to give up sometimes, but how can I? Everything is right outside my door. I acknowledge that it is much more difficult for all gardeners because of the climate catastrophe of our times. I realize that I don’t have teachers to show me how–mostly just books really, and the internet. I don’t think gardening was meant to be so all alone.

But I have made this commitment to a spiritual journey into earth community. These overwhelming challenges are part of that journey too. So what can I do? This morning, I took myself out to our new screen tent, placed a blanket on the ground, and sat on the ground. It has been a while since I have done that. At our old yard, I used to sit on the ground in a screen tent almost every day. Lately, instead, I have been walking around looking at things that need tending. Today, I sat on the ground and let the ground tend to me. I turned to each of the four directions, to honor the powers of east, south, west, and north–and the powers of the earth below, the sky above, the spirit within.

The sun shining through in the eastern sky, from within the screen tent.

It reminds me that I am small, and these powers are large. Spirit is large. They are my teachers and carers. I hear the cardinal singing from the tall trees. Truthfully, I am not really the one who tends the earth, the earth is the one who tends to me.

I am remembering a chant song I learned from a friend in English, and then heard later in Wolastoqey; As far as I can discern, it originated from Wolastoq people, and has since been performed by other indigenous people as well. My friends and I sang it something like this, in several verses substituting the word “creator” with all manner of beings, such as trees, ancestors, water, stars, dragonflies, children–all the creatures around us.

We've got to humble ourselves in the eyes of the creator, we've got to bend down low.
We've got to humble ourselves in the eyes of the creator, we've got to know what they know.
We can raise each other up, higher and higher. We can raise each other up.

Perhaps the failures are also teachers, a reminder of our ultimate dependence, an opening into something more mysterious and powerful in whose eyes we are seen and held.

Humbling

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Crabapple tree broken at trunk and lying on the faded green of winter lawn, with street behind, houses visible on other side.
Fallen crabapple tree

On December 23rd, a severe rain and wind storm passed through Maine, after also creating havoc with storms and snow in other states. In the early afternoon, I was sitting in the living room, and suddenly heard some sort of clattering outside. I had previously gone out in the rain to right overturned trash barrels, and so I went out again to look around. At that moment, Margy was driving into the driveway from an appointment, and she asked me–did you see the crabapple tree? Going round the side of the house, this is what came into view: one of the ornamental crabapple trees in our front yard had suddenly cracked through its trunk and fell over. It didn’t land on anything or damage anything, which was a relief, but the tree was dead.

A couple hours later, our electric power went out, along with many other thousands in Maine–though only a segment of the people on our street. The thing with power outages is–you never know if it is going to be a brief interlude, a few hours, or a few days. You enter this limbo time of unknown duration. We waited until dark, and then lit our wood stove–thank goodness our house had this wood stove when we purchased it. It is a very fine wood stove, and it will heat the entire house when needed. We don’t usually use it except for emergencies. But in fact we had used it just a week ago when our heat pumps were being repaired. We have a few flashlights and candles, so we lit those too. And I could connect to the world via my cell phone, and Facebook.

However, I have to acknowledge that it felt very dark, the sun setting at 4 p.m., and not rising until about 7 a.m. Keeping up with wood in the stove was exhausting. It was hard to just relax with the uncertainty of it all. After a Friday of warm and windy rain, the temperature dropped on Saturday to a frigid 12 degrees. I was worried about our refrigerator food, and the freezer in our basement. I covered the freezer with a few blankets. I put the food from the fridge freezer into rubber tubs, and put them out on the back deck. Then, an unexpected grace–our neighbor Brian came by, and offered to run an extension cord from their house to ours–they had not lost power. So by this gift, we were able to plug in our refrigerator.

Before the storm, we’d purchased a round shrimp plate for a holiday treat–so Friday dinner was shrimp and cheese and crackers and cucumber and carrots. A little picnic. Margy had also boiled some eggs before the storm, and we had some sliced ham, so those were other meals that didn’t need cooking. On Saturday early evening, I got a text that the power should come back at 7 p.m., but then it did not. I felt such disappointment then, and crankiness, and boredom. Later, we tried to work on a puzzle, but without a good light source, it was mostly frustrating.

It is humbling to realize how difficult I found this time without electricity. I felt disconnected, restless, and bereft. I tried reading the book I had started a little while ago, but it was a heavy subject, and I couldn’t manage it in the midst of everything else. I missed the entertainment and mental stimulation of television or streaming channels like Britbox and Prime. I missed connecting to Christmas Eve services through Zoom. I felt at a total loss. I had imagined that as I grew older, I would become more resilient with age. But I see that I am perhaps less resilient after all, that I am vulnerable and dependent in many ways. When I went to bed, I felt defeated.

For whatever reason, I woke at 3 a.m. on Christmas, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I added a log to the fire, and wrote in my journal. I think then that I surrendered to the situation I was in–that here we were, in the dark, and we didn’t know for how long–and yet, we were warm, and we had food, and kind neighbors, and offers of support via Facebook. We were not alone. I thought about the people in Ukraine right now, also facing the loss of electricity in winter, and maybe no heat or water, along with the devastation of war and bombs–so much loss and uncertainty. I found myself praying for those folks who were facing so much greater hardships. I acknowledged my vulnerability and exhaustion.

By the time the sun rose, I felt peaceful sitting near the fire, drinking some tea after I’d managed to heat water on the narrow five-inch ridge on the top of the wood stove. I was still exhausted, still humbled by the difficulty of my managing in these circumstances, but somehow at peace with all of that. It would be a lie to say that I was not relieved when our power came back on at 10 a.m. But I am glad I came to some peace within my spirit before the end of our 44 hours without power.

Fire burning in the wood stove.

Humbled

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Photo: Future Peaches?

I have been having a few days in the garden that humble me to my core. This process of finding our way home to earth community is so difficult. Trying to care for fruit trees involves learning about so many insect pests and disease processes. Observing the trees carefully every day. Yesterday and today I was thinning the tiny peaches leaving only one every 6 inches, so that the branches can support them to grow. Often I am trying to figure out which organic solution goes with which problem. And yesterday morning, I saw one of our squirrel neighbors climbing the peach tree–a whole other issue. Will we get to eat any peaches, or will the squirrels take a bite out of each one? Or will birds peck holes in them? Or some other insect pest eat them from the inside?

I hate how gardening sets me at odds with the other critters on this land–figuring out which are “beneficial” (to us) and which are “enemies” (to us.) I remember that when I first had a little garden, many years ago now, I was surprised that so much of it was about killing–pulling weeds, drowning slugs in beer, and so forth. And now that I am caring for an orchard, a permaculture food forest, it’s the same thing. A constant battle. So how is that teaching me how to live in a mutually beneficial relationship with this land?

I start to wonder if human beings should ever have shifted from hunting/gathering to agriculture. Hunting and gathering certainly included the taking of animal life, but it seems like it was more in balance, it was received with gratitude, it was a kind of partnership. I am thinking about the different role of the groundhog in the lives of different cultures. The bane of many gardeners’ lives, groundhogs are incredibly inventive and persistent garden eaters. It was amazing to me that here on our land, the groundhog whose den was next door seemed to respect the orchard as our place, while the garden bed behind the garage she claimed for her own. But I have a friend who built a fence deep into the ground around her entire garden, and still the groundhog family dug a tunnel and emerged right in the center of the garden to eat her vegetables.

However, the groundhog played a different role in Wabanaki cultures, in tribes that were traditionally hunting and gathering. I only know a few of the stories about the legendary figure for good, Koluskap (Glooscap), the creator of human beings. But I learned that his grandmother was the groundhog, Munimqehs, and she guided him and taught him the wisdom he needed. What a different perspective! She taught him that people and animals relied on each other, that hunting was necessary for the people to be strong, but that taking more than was needed was destructive to both.

Photo: The groundhog who used to live near our yard.

Likewise, deer might be a blessing for hunters, but destructive to trees and gardens. We see about one deer each year passing through the back of our yard. We used to have a gang of turkeys that roamed the streets of our neighborhood. They are gone now. Eventually, the groundhog disappeared too–I think a neighbor had something to do with that. Now, it seems, along with birds, we only have squirrels and a little star-nosed mole that tunnels under our wood chip paths, and an occasional chipmunk. But the squirrels are very adept at causing trouble to our garden. All winter long, for example, they climbed up our hazelnut bushes, eating the catkins that would pollinate the flowers in spring. After, they would act drunk and run around wildly in circles. Eventually I put some nets over the two smaller shrubs, to try to protect them. Maybe it worked? The smallest shrub now for the first time has some “future hazelnuts” forming on the end of its branches. I don’t know why the larger two do not.

Photo: Future hazelnut?

Sometimes I am amazed at what grows, what we can harvest. I just cut a whole bunch of soft thyme to dry, and I’ve been finding wine cap mushrooms hiding under clover to add to meals. The sea kale was delicious, and now its flowers smell like honey. There are green berries on the blueberry plants. I got the advice to buy some fake rubber snakes and hang them in the trees to scare off the squirrels–as long as I move them every few days. Last night, Margy and I sat in the back of the yard and watched fireflies signaling to each other in the tall grasses and weeds. In this garden, I am bewildered, sometimes discouraged, often exhausted, and always humbled by how little I know, and how difficult it is. What are you trying to teach me, little squirrels?

Photo by Margy Dowzer: Squirrel sitting, eating, on a sunflower last fall