First Planting of the Cider Apples

On April 27, our team of twelve planted the first 150 trees in our first cider apple orchard in the northwest field above the farmstead. Procured from a seller in New York, there are 10 individuals of 15 varieties, each dominantly expressing one of the three major components of Wessex style cider: acid, bitter, and sweet. In the Wessex style, ciders are made from each variety of apple and three or more of these blended to produce the commercial product. The varieties were selected not only for flavor but for flowering and harvest season, roughly a third each of early, middle, and late. This should help ensure against crop loss due to vagaries of weather, reduce labor requirements in a given period, and facilitate the production of "seasonal" ciders.

This was a remarkable day. The team quickly bonded, and self-organized into groups responsible for digging the holes, distributing supplies, placing the trees and replacing the soil, watering, and installing the stakes and protective geotextile mulch and translucent tree guards. The work groups cross-trained one another, and traded tasks to prevent burnout. We'd estimated the whole job would take ten to twelve hours but together we got it done in less than five. Yay team!

Here's a little video that Debbie made of Derith & Dave digging a hole with the big tractor and PTO-driven auger.

All of the photos that follow were made by Derith Vogt at D&G Photography in Anamosa, Iowa.

Here are some of the big tractor's hydraulic and mechanical controls. Grr.

Here's the whole operation in one shot. We began at the top of the hill and worked our way down. In the bed of the truck were water barrels we filled from the pond with a sump pump. The little tractor pulled the utility trailer loaded with the bare-root trees and supplies.

Debbie prepares to water just-planted trees.

Derith & Gary strike an American Gothic pose.

After the trees were planted, difficult as it was to do, we pruned away all the side branches, and cut back the central leader to a height of three feet. Eventually the trees, which are on dwarfing rootstock, will be trained to trellises and kept to a maximum height of eight feet. Here, Jeff assists Alan while Mary looks on.

Gary does the initial half-fill of soil. Water was applied next to consolidate the soil and ensure good contact with the roots, then the rest of the soil, and more water.

Scot and Donna complete a planting.

Your faithful, if erratic, correspondent, ready to set a stake and secure the sleeve with zip ties. The fabric mulch is primarily to keep the base of the tree free of other vegetation that would compete for water, sunlight, and soil nutrients.

Team portrait at the end of the job.

From these trees we should be able to clone as many others as we like, by cultivating shoots from the rootstock, harvesting scion wood from the top growth, and grafting the two together. It's a long-term project.

Accelerando Verdure

Now things are happening quickly. The forsythia is blossoming. I spent some time yesterday plucking dandelions, and today digging thistles. The grass seems to be growing before one's eyes and some places we'll have to mow in the next few days or the growth will become rank. Over the weekend we removed the mowing deck from the little tractor, got everything clean and sharp and greased, and put back together again. This is a finish mower for around the house and gardens; for the more remote areas we have the rotary brush mower to mount on the back of the big tractor. But we're resolved this year to mow less than last: the novelty has worn off, it uses a lot of fuel, and we've got lots of other work to do.

The kale is making a big comeback and will be featured at dinner tonight in a potato-kale soup.

Another good task accomplished over the weekend was laying out the grid to plant the 150 cider apple trees to be delivered in a few day. The flags are all labeled with the names of the fifteen varieties we'll be planting, and laid out according to early, middle, and late harvest season. Saturday is the big day.

We also made further good progress clearing and burning brush from the downstream dam embankment, though after nine inches (!) of rain over the past week, it took a lot of persistence to get the fire going. Yet to do is the area in the foreground of this image, surrounding the outlet structures, then seeding the embankment to a "waterway mix" of grasses.

Aside from the dam, over the past several months we did a lot of other clearing and trimming of brush and invasive species such as honeysuckle and wild grape, and yesterday got a lot of that gathered into this large windrow behind the barn. We'd prefer to process this stuff with a chipper-shredder but so far haven't found one for sale used or at auction, and they can't be rented, so this pile may fuel another bonfire. All of this came from along the lane and verges of the farmstead, where to leave it in place would have been unsightly (we're possibly a little too fastidious about appearances); the brush that gets cut in the wood and along the fence lines we've left in place to decompose and as wildlife habitat.

In addition to the cider apples, we're putting a lot of other trees in the ground, including black and Northstar cherries, black walnut, and red and burr oaks. And now Alan is home from his day job, so it's time to pull on my boots again and head back outside to get these hardwoods planted.

After the Storm, Our Attention Pivots

The storm has passed but floodwaters gather, the ditches and gullies into receiving creeks and rivers, and on to the Mississippi, which will continue to rise in the Iowa-Illinois-Missouri region for the next week. At home, runoff into the pond turned the relatively clear water brown with silt and clay. The water surface continued to rise and we awoke yesterday morning to find the Bass Tender, despite being half-filled with rainwater, had opportunistically tried to escape (a yearning for independence, one suspects, and new horizons).

As an engineer who has designed and built earthen dams, I have a pretty good understanding of the forces at work, so I've been fascinated by the rising level of the pond, its implications for the area of land draining into it and how that area generates runoff, and the testing of structures: the dam embankment itself, the principal spillway, and the emergency spillway. Is everything stable and balanced? Will the pipe connections hold? Did we survey the spillway elevations correctly? Are we creating any downstream hazard?

Naturally, as the rains eased, the pond is filling more slowly as the rate of runoff slows, but also because the banks spread out, so that every next cubic foot of water entering the pond has less effect on raising the level.

And this is how it looks this morning – I think we can call it full. The emergency spillway is an earthen weir six inches higher than the pipe lip, and the top of the dam embankment is another two feet higher.

So, now: next Thursday the first cider apple trees are scheduled to arrive, our work team will assemble on Friday, and we'll plant those trees on Saturday. Ideally, we'll have quite dry weather between now and then so the planting tasks won't be so sloppy and muddy. Digging around in too-wet conditions destroys soil structure and this can take many years to recover. Once we have our own nursery established, timing won't be so crucial, but when the trees are being shipped from upstate New York, we've got to get them in the ground shortly after arrival.

We've accumulated some new kit recently. This is a PTO-driven generator, sufficient to power the farmstead in the case of outages. Overhead lines plus the history of ice storms in the area (not a good combination) drove the motivation for getting a generator, but also the need to operate power tools remotely.

This is a 3-point hitch-connected, hydraulically-driven post driver. The cider apples (on dwarfing rootstock) will be trellised, and the orchard protected from deer by electric fence. This implies a lot of post driving. We'll have to convert it from a Category 2 hitch (for tractors larger than ours) to a Category 1, and modify the tractor's hydraulic system to supply power to the driver.

And we're feeling quite official as a farm with the cleanup, painting, and installation of this diesel fuel tank. Because fuel taxes primarily fund road construction and maintenance, on-farm use of fuel is exempt from the taxes, so we can get a good discount by purchasing in volume for farm delivery, rather than fetching five gallons at a time from a gas station in town.

Behind the tank is one of our collections of stuff we've found around the place, much of this uncovered while tilling the east garden. Some of it will always be junk, but other bits we expect will find a use in art projects. The Fred Smith Memorial Sculpture Garden awaits its first installations and, by the way, we're accepting applications for exhibition of others' work, and even for artists-in-residence.

Fire Good

By small increments we prepare to put 150 cider apple trees in the northwest field at the end of April. Early on a calm Sunday morning three weeks ago we burned the large brush pile in the corner. This is what remained when I pulled all the metal and glass and every other damn thing from the burn-and-bury dump that had been there. And we'd added a lot of invasive mulberry and other matter that we'd cleared and trimmed elsewhere.

Cattle foraging on soybean stubble:

To the west and north of our northwest corner:

A diesel-soaked rag as a torch:

A few creatures, pheasant and rabbit and vole, abandoned homes in the brush pile, most before the fire but a couple rabbit not until the flames licked close.

These intriguing tracks, we finally concluded, represent the last steps of pheasant before their wingtips scrape the ground and they fly into the air:

It all went pretty quickly:

And that was that. But we've got a bunch of other brush piles...

An Omnibus of Activity

Frank and Debbie visited recently and we kept them busy. One of the tasks was constructing and installing a 100-yard target at the range. Debbie is shown here taking some of the first shots at the new target with the .223 "varminter".

Another task was salvaging this culvert. Sometime before we arrived, it washed downstream in a flood from a former creek crossing. We found it standing upright in the bed, buried several feet in mud, and had been waiting for more helpers before attempting to move it. We shoveled enough mud to get it loose, then applied chain and tractor power in several configurations before freeing it and pulling it out.

The culvert isn't nearly large enough even to pass a two-year flood so our current thinking is that we'll use it for a low-flow crossing, weighted with chunks of concrete, and with stone approaches that will simply be overtopped during floods. Water is so dense that not only does it have great pushing power but also produces large buoyant forces, physics evidently not well understood by whoever previously installed this culvert, and also the ruined bridge farther downstream.

Halloween is another cross-quarter day (those that fall between the solstices and equinoxes) and we set another two points on the observatory at sunrise (which was rather spectacular) and sunset.

The northwest field will be the beginning of our cider apple orchard, and we decided to build several swales to capture and infiltrate runoff from that rounded hill before we install the trellises upon which we'll plant dwarf and semi-dwarf trees at a density of about 340 trees per acre (16-foot row spacing by 8-foot tree spacing). We have a new (used) piece of kit, this PTO-driven tiller, which did an admirable job breaking up the pasture turf. We then switched the tiller for the blade, moved the loose material downhill to make berms, and compacted the berms with the tractor wheels.

We have arranged with a "sharecropper" to hunt deer on the farm, as none of us have any experience; this takes us a step closer to resolving some of our qualms about killing animals if we intend to eat meat. If you click on the photo you can see the stand he erected on the verge of the woods. In recent weeks I've seen a four-point buck and several does, and a half of one or another will wind up in our freezer if the hunter is successful.

In Muscatine County, Iowa

Two-hour tour with DNR forester Mark just completed. Very good meeting. He was totally impressed by the diversity, varieties, and condition of the woodlands. Much advice to follow. We have our work cut out for us but the results will be worth it.

The red oak are in; going out in a little to plant the nanking cherries. This is Red Oak Avenue.

This is Red Oak Grove:

I believe this is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life.