special supplement on starting and managing a 500-tree organic

B-

Special Supplement on

Organic Tree Fruit

Spring, 2011

by Jennifer Williams & Steve GougeonBear Swamp Orchard, Ashfield MA

There are many ways to get into growing apples; you might start from scratch, planning varieties and layout and planting those little whips, or you might buy an actual orchard in production. In our case, we moved to family property with 4+ acres of recently abandoned apple trees. We moved here in part so we could grow more of our own food, not necessarily to grow food for others, but we couldn’t ignore those trees. So we found ourselves slowly learning about pruning, thinning, and organic management. Here we share the techniques that allow us to care for these trees, and the marketing path we have taken to distribute the apples we grow.

Our orchard contains about 200 apple trees in production, plus 300 that we have planted in the last few years. Most of the trees are semi-dwarf size and were planted in the 1980’s; others are standard trees planted during the last 100 years. This region of Ashfield is known as Apple Valley, since it consists of a higher-elevation, hilly landscape which allow for good air drainage and later blossoming times (which reduces the risk of late frost damage), the perfect location for growing apples. This area was covered with apples for 100 years or more. We also lucked out in that the trees planted in the 1980‘s are mostly the scab resistant varieties Liberty, Freedom and Prima, excellent small market varieties for growing organically. Some older varieties, including Cortland and Northern Spy, were also planted at that time. Scab is a fungal disease that is very difficult to control organically, so resistant varieties are a key to our success in organic growing. The oldest standard size trees are old New England favorites – Macintosh, Fameuse, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious. Many years, these varieties are irreparably blemished by scab, especially Macintosh which tend to fall off the tree altogether in a bad scab year.

This orchard was not managed for a few years in the early 2000’s, and a lot of trees were killed by voles or other pests during that time. We began caring for this orchard with no real orcharding background; however we knew we would be living with the decisions we made for a long time. With annual crops, you can change your mind about variety, number, and location from year to year, learning what works over time. But if you plant an acre of fruit trees, you must wait 3-5 years to find out if you picked the right varieties, trained and pruned them well, spaced them well, and kept your pests and diseases under control. Only then do you get a payoff in good apples for your good decisions (or poor crops for the not-so-great decisions). So we read a great deal and then just jumped in, making decisions about which trees to cut down, how to begin reshaping them with pruning, and what new trees to plant. We concentrated on varieties that are scab-resistant and/or good cider apples, including

Starting and Managing a 500-Tree Organic Orchard

Williams Pride, Golden Russet, Esopus Spitzenberg, and more Liberty and Freedom.

Management Some claim it is nearly impossible to produce apples organically in the Northeast, at least on a commercial scale. That may be true to

some degree on a large scale, since there is a lot of unavoidable hand labor involved. However, we have found that at our scale the work is manageable for two people with occasional help, at least so far. The first step (which took us a number of seasons) is to find out which pests are problems in your

photo courtesy of Bear Swamp Orchard

The authors are concentrating on scab resistant and good cider apples like the Freedom variety.

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orchard. Once you have that information, you can find a management strategy for each pest that works for your situation. We relied on Michael Phillips’ “The Apple Grower” for good information on pests and options for managing them, in addition to knowledge generously shared by other organic apple growers in the region.

An organizing principle we use to make management decisions is making our orchard (with it’s non-native, high maintenance apple trees) as much of an ecosystem as possible, kind of like an apple savannah. To that end, we minimally manage the understory, encouraging wildflowers and other companions rather than grass (which competes directly with apple tree roots), try to use on-farm or local inputs such as compost, and use highly targeted or non-lethal control methods for pests. One of our methods of understory control involves ranging our flock of Shetland sheep between the rows of trees, using electronet fence to keep them from damaging the trees. Grass control, tree fertilizing, and happy sheep all at one time, although it might make GAP certifiers cry. We try to provide healthy soil and good air flow for the trees, so they will be healthy enough to protect themselves from disease. We also try to make the orchard less hospitable for pests and diseases, by picking up dropped and culled apples as much as we can and pruning well. Apple trees are not a native part of our landscape, though, so we can’t expect they will ever be entirely care-free. We are always on the lookout for better ways to manage disease and pests, but the following is what we do currently.

Pruning Our first task every year is pruning. When we first started taking care of the trees we had to heavily prune to reshape them. We did this at the

same time we were learning about pruning – a steep learning curve! But the trees survived. We prune all the trees every winter in February and March, with the intent of opening up the trees to let in air, light, and people tending them (for pruning, thinning, and picking).

Fight Fungus We use sulfur to manage apple scab on our susceptible varieties. We have a 100-gallon Pac-Tank sprayer that attaches to our 32 hp tractor and a handheld wand sprayer, which works well for aiming the sprays exactly where we want them. We usually spray sulfur 2-3 times based on a degree day count and wetting periods (how long the orchard is wet after a rain) in the orchard. These variables control fungal spore release - that is, disease spread. The first sulfur spray usually takes place at about pink (just before blossoms open). For us this keeps scab damage down so that most varieties produce good fruit, but does not wipe out scab altogether. Compared to many growers, this is a small amount of sulfur, and not the more corrosive lime-sulfur and copper often used in organic systems. We do put up with more scab damage some years than other growers might want to deal with, but the scab resistant trees give us plenty of blemish-free fruit, and the damaged fruit still makes good cider and vinegar.

Insect Pests The first pest we have to consider is the plum curculio (PC). This weevil prevented organic apple growing in the Northeast for many years; in a heavily infested tree nearly every apple will fall off in June due to this pest. We find the kaolin clay sold as Surround works well for reducing PC damage to manageable levels – we get heavy yields with minimal PC scars on the apples that mature. Surround also discourages the other two pests of the spring triad, Codling Moth and European Saw Fly. Surround works as a mechanical irritant. The pests crawl/fly into the tree, and get the clay on themselves. Being irritated, hopefully they will go far away. The clay must be sprayed on the trees so that they are grey, and they must stay grey throughout the PC season - starting at petal fall and lasting for 4-6 weeks. This means repeated sprays every time it rains, which can make this time of year somewhat stressful. Given that Surround does not kill the pest, we often use it in conjunction with nonsprayed “trap” trees where the PC can go to lay their eggs. We have concentrated on picking up all the apples under these trees, but a group of hungry chickens fenced underneath would be a great PC control tool. We also thin apples in June to enhance fruit size and quality, and in order to reduce pests of all kinds we store thinned apples off the ground in buckets for a couple weeks so that larvae in the apples can’t get to the soil to continue their life cycle.

Our later-season pests are apple maggot fly (AMF) and codling moth (CM). The only control for AMF we have used successfully is orchard sanitation – picking up all apples that fall on the ground after the second week of July so that any fly eggs therein can’t develop. This is a devastating pest, since the larvae tunnel throughout the ripe apples, and it is difficult to tell a wormy apple from a perfect one. We do hang red sphere traps coated with a sticky substance (actually, branch slices painted red


Apples in bushels await being pressed into cider


Our cider mill set-up -- a Lancman water-bladder press and an OESCO grinder

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 �B-

mounted on yellow ¼-inch plywood) to monitor the number of AMF in the orchard. This will provide a heads-up if we have a problem with this pest in a given season, and on light AMF years can work to trap a lot of them out. As for codling moth, we are still experimenting with control methods. Sanitation helps with this pest too, and perhaps in future we will not need to control CM any other way. We have not gotten to that point yet though. We have tried to use Bt to control CM, but the number of damaged apples we had was higher than we’d like. This coming year, we will try the granulosis virus, a CM control method that is specific to this pest.

Marketing. The trees we have in production at this point produce something on the order of 300+ bushels of apples, with 3 times that on the way. Once we realized the volume of apples our orchard would provide, we knew we needed something more than a casual sell-to-friends plan. We have a number of constraints we had to consider. While our orchard produces far more apples than we and all our friends can eat, it is really a small amount for a wholesale business. In addition, we both have off-farm jobs, and the orchard will not provide sufficient income to drop those, so time for picking, grading and selling was a real concern for us. In addition, organically grown apples have imperfections at a higher rate than conventionally grown apples – 75% of grade A fruit might be good odds with organic methods. And we have a lot of trees that are scab susceptible, leading to a lot of blemished fruit on those trees. That leaves a lot of sound apples that can’t be sold as dessert fruit. What to do?

We decided to sell our apples in primarily two forms – open the farm for pick-your-own, and unpasteurized sweet cider. We do pick and grade a small number of apples for sale at the farm and one or two farmer’s markets, but we do not do that on a wholesale scale. Here are our experiences on these two methods of selling apples.

Pick-your-own Opening the farm for U-pick means we need to be here to welcome people for about 7 weekends during the apple season. We live in a fairly out of the way community, but people are willing to come quite a distance to pick organic apples. Many of our customers drive an hour or more to reach us. We rely on the scab-resistant varieties for pick-your-own, since they produce a heavy crop of scab-free fruit every year. They are also planted more or less in a block so we can direct people to them without too much trouble, and as semi-dwarf trees that we keep fairly short, people can reach most of the apples on the trees. We pick the tops of trees for farmer’s market sale and cider.

We have some benefits to offer – our location has beautiful views, our homestead includes sheep, chickens and a llama to feed apples to, and we are located adjacent to some wonderful hiking trails.

But we don’t offer tractor rides or other attractions. Customers come because they want that apple picking experience, and they want apples free of pesticides.

We have found that pick-your-own customers, like farmer’s market customers, are far more willing to try apple varieties they have never heard of. Most people have not heard of the Liberty, Prima and Freedom apples, but they are happy to try something new, especially once we explain that these trees require no fungicides. We probably could not sell these apples wholesale, since the variety is unfamiliar to customers in grocery stores. I know an IPM orchard near us planted a number of Liberty trees, but could not get anyone to buy them, so they ended up grafting the trees over to some other, trendy variety that requires more spraying. Our customers are also willing to pick apples with superficial blemishes that you could never sell wholesale. We have really enjoyed talking with our customers about local food systems, organic growing, and other topics near to our hearts. The conversations we have had with customers each season have been an unexpected benefit of selling apples. We have been able to keep our marketing simple. We made sure our farm was listed through the state agriculture website, www.pickyourown.org, and

the CISA site; otherwise we have not done any advertising. All of these sites point back to our own website (www.bearswamporchard.com) where we offer up-to-date information on what is going on with our orchard. Nonetheless, with just that, we have enough customers come to us that we sell all the apples we grow.

Cider Pressing Cider allows us to use the apples that don’t make the grade as whole fruit. It is a hedge against the unforeseen, like hailstorms in July, or new pests that might move in. We are only able to take this path because there is now some cider-making equipment that is relatively affordable for an operation at our scale, and because Massachusetts allows retail sale of unpasteurized cider. We chose to make unpasteurized cider because we think it is a better product than pasteurized cider, and of course the equipment to pasteurize or UV-treat cider is prohibitively expensive for a small operation like ours. Our customers rave about the cider – hard to say if it is good because it is unpasteurized, the apples are organic, they are grown in Apple Valley, or some other kismet. Perhaps a little of each. First, the equipment. We bought a Lancman press, a water-bladder style press. This cost around $2,000 rather than the many thousands to tens of thousands for a large, commercial press. These presses are only recently available, at least in the U.S., and provide a lower-priced alternative for smaller producers. We also bought a grinder made by OESCO that turns apples into mush faster than you can load the hopper, getting maximal juice out of the apples when they are pressed. This equipment has proven to be easy to use and quick to clean. Likely the most time consuming part of our process is bottling, which we do by hand using a maple syrup canner. The press will do about 4-4.5 bushels per pressing with a yield of about 11 to 12.5 gallons depending on the apple variety and season. (There is a video of our pressing equipment in operation at the Cider Mill section of our website.) Second, the regulations. Note that this applies only to Massachusetts – each state has its own completely different rules on this topic, and unpasteurized cider is completely illegal in many states. Unpasteurized cider can only be sold at a retail level (direct to consumer), not wholesale. As such, it is regulated by your local board of health rather than the state. Our cider mill is a small unheated addition to another building. As Steve is a builder by trade, and we scavenged some of the materials, this room was not a gigantic investment for us. Work closely with your board of health or its representative before and while you build – every agent may have a slightly different idea of what the regulations mean. We scoured the regulations and found an organic-approved sanitizer (Perasan A) for cleaning the equipment after each use. It is a peroxide cleaner that breaks down to acetic acid and


Bear Swamp Orchard in summer


Picking the 100-year old standard sized Astrachan requires ladders.

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water, infinitely preferable to the chlorine bleach our health agent wanted us to use initially. The only trouble with this sanitizer is that we have had trouble buying it in small quantities. As with the pick your own, we sell as much cider as we can make, both in half gallons at farmers markets and at the farm, and as bulk orders for people interested in making their own hard cider, or for people putting on a big event. We did turn some of the cider into vinegar this year, and we are excited to add raw, unpasteurized vinegar to our mix of apple products for 2011.

After five seasons of taking care of the trees and three years of selling apples, we are struck by the clamor for organic apples. We have stores contacting us unsolicited, asking if we wholesale apples, and we always have customers contacting us after we no longer have apples or cider to sell. Each year we have at least doubled the number of apples we have sold. We are still very new to this business, and we will increase the number of apples we grow as our new trees come into production, but we do not feel we will be able to keep up with demand as more people find out we exist, a rare position to be in in this economy for sure.

One thing we have learned is that how we grow here is not necessarily what would work for someone at another location, even a half mile away. The pests and disease factors will always be specific to

your exact location, and the balance of your time, interest, and ability is unique to each grower. And of course, many of us face different regulatory challenges depending on where we live. Talking to others, reading, observation, and trial and error are what have led us to the systems we use now, and we would freely admit that our methods are neither foolproof nor as effective as we would always like. Our management plan changes continually as we learn more about growing apples in our own location, always striving to improve our methods for growing healthy, great tasting organic apples as sustainably as possible.


Jennifer sorts potatoesphoto courtesy of Bear Swamp Orchard

Steve and a chicken admirer

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T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 5B-

by Nicko Rubin

Asking your trees why they aren’t producing any fruit is a good first step in getting them to bear. However, if you don’t listen to what the tree tells you, you will get nowhere.

A wide range of factors determine when your trees begin to bear fruit; figuring out which are at play in each case is usually a matter of spending a few moments looking hard and listening to the tree.

This discussion pertains primarily to younger trees just coming into bearing, though much of it also applies to larger trees. I refer generally to the patterns of apple trees, much of which also holds true for other fruit tree species in the rose family (pear, plum, cherry, peach).

Is the tree growing?

This seems like a simple question, but I often see trees planted 4-6 years earlier, which have done almost no growing.

Look for new growth on the tree. Learning to recognize this year’s growth will tell you a lot about how your fruit tree is doing, or any tree for that matter. New wood is slightly smoother, often with darker bark, usually separated by a small ring or node in the bark where it joins the previous year’s growth. New growth is hardest to identify when it is very small. I consider 8 - 24 inches a year good growth. However, the first year a tree is in the ground you may see less as the tree adjusts to the soil and site.

If the tree is not growing:

Look for animal damage. Hungry deer will devour any and all new growth in their reach, especially fruit buds. Tips of small branches will be broken off or slightly torn. Fruit trees may be able to sustain years of moderate deer browse but will never make any progress toward producing fruit. Rabbits or rodents often chew cambium at the base of the tree, interrupting nutrient flow from the roots. Complete girdling will often kill a tree, not just slow down growth. Protect your trees, especially during establishment. Fencing for deer and screen for rodents is best (I have also had good luck with Deerstopper type sprays when used religiously. Soaps and garlic clips may help when deer pressure is very low).

Check soil conditions. If there is no animal damage, the problem is likely in the soil. Excessive moisture or acidic soils (low pH) give the tree a hard time finding the nutrients that it needs. In cases of excessive moisture, the best option is often to move the tree, though soils can be drained. Ideal pH for fruit trees lies between 6 and 7. Amend the soil with lime and compost. Another problem may simply be very poor soil quality, in which case annual applications of mulch and compost in addition to an organic fertilizer in the spring should get things growing. During the first year or two after planting, particularly on well drained soils, lack of water may also limit growth. Watering and mulching will remedy this. Established trees in the Northeast should not require watering.

“Why Aren’t You Producing Fruit?”

If the tree is growing well it may be too comfortable.

The goal now is to get the tree to produce fruit buds. Tree vigor, health, location, rootstock, stress, and pruning all effect when and whether a tree begins to produce fruiting wood.

A vigorous, healthy tree with very little stress may grow happily for several years without producing any fruiting wood. It is taking advantage of good growing conditions and is in no rush to reproduce (fruit) which would divert energy and slow growth before it has reached what it considers optimal size for the site. Branches growing in part shade, including the shade of upper branches, are not likely to produce fruit buds, but rather will continue up until they find light. Branches growing over two feet a year, especially if growing straight up, are too vigorous and not likely to produce fruit buds any time soon. Withhold nitrogen fertilizer, as it will encourage more vegetative growth.

Minor or major stresses on the tree will induce the tree to begin bearing early (stresses such as large tree size constrained by relatively limited site conditions). We have various strategies at our disposal designed to reduce vigor or cause a minor stress. Semidwarf and dwarf rootstocks constrain the growth of the tree via the root system, signaling the time to begin bearing earlier. Root pruning via soil cultivation between rows (or row cropping) was common in old orchards (on standard rootstocks), thus constraining the size of the tree and inducing greater production. It can be done on a home scale with a sharp spade, making numerous cuts the full depth of the spade, at approximately the drip line around the tree. Planting vigorous matting grasses that compete in the root zone was another strategy in old orchards. A few more brutal strategies have also been employed (I hesitate to recommend either of these as they are somewhat drastic). Ringing trees, cutting with a razor blade through the cambium almost completely around the trunk, will very quickly and dramatically shock a tree and has been used to induce heavier fruiting. Beating tree trunks with pine bats (bruising cambium and interrupting sap flow) was another strategy.

Lowering branch angles via tying, spreading, or weighting down branches can also induce the production of fruiting wood. Branches growing at a lower angle (closer to horizontal) are less vigorous and more likely to produce fruiting wood. This relates to a change in the movement of the growth regulating hormone, auxin. Reportedly, pears (notoriously slow to bear) at Dwight Miller Orchards planted at an angle produced their first crop a year early.

Pruning

Pruning correctly is one of the best tools we have to control the vigor of our trees. How we prune is determined by what we hope to accomplish. The vast majority of pruning is done in winter when the energy of the tree is in roots. Winter pruning will invigorate the tree as the same amount of energy is trying to push fewer buds. It is an essential strategy for trees which have been producing little new wood. Conversely, summer pruning reduces the tree’s vigor as it removes part of the tree actively contributing energy (photosynthesizing leaves grown in part with last years stored energy).

Improper pruning is the most common reason for delayed fruit production on otherwise healthy trees. Pruning is not too complex but requires an understanding of how fruit buds develop. Fruit buds develop on two year old wood on apples, pears, and most of the time plums (plums can produce fruit buds the first year, but mostly they occur on two year old wood).

How it works:

Year one: A new shoot grows, perhaps stimulated by last winters pruning.

Year two: One or two buds, likely at the tip of the branch send out new shoots. Several of the lower less vigorous buds develop into fruit buds . If the branch tip is pruned (tipped), many of the lower buds will send out a new sprout and fruiting wood is unlikely to develop for another year.

Year three: If unpruned, fruit buds flower and potentially produce fruit. Last years sprouts

photo courtesy Nicko Rubin

Fruit buds on apples stick out a bit from the branch, are fatter, rounder and often fuzzier

than other buds.


Pear fruit buds are fat spurs, sticking conspicuously off the branches.


Fruit buds on plums are often clustered in bunches formed on spurs.

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e r S p r i n g , 2 0 1 1�B-continue with new growth at the tips and develop new fruit buds.

Notice: It takes three years for a new branch to produce fruit.

The most common pruning mistake is constantly tipping branches which invigorates buds further back on the stem to form new wood rather than fruit buds. This can lead to a densely branched tree that produces very little fruit. If left unpruned for a year these trees will often produce lots of fruit buds, then fruit heavily the second year. Your suckers may be your fruiting branches in two years. It is a good idea to leave a few of the less vigorous and well placed suckers to develop into fruiting branches. Pruning less, particularly in the dormant season, is often a good idea in the case of non productive but vigorous young trees.

Is the tree flowering?

If you have fruit buds, you will have flowers.

Are the flowers getting pollinated? Do you have adequate and varied pollen sources? Most fruit trees require a pollinator of the same species but of a different variety. Flowering time must overlap adequately, and some trees will simply not pollinate other trees. Heavy flowering crabapples are often excellent pollen sources for apples, but a couple trees of different varieties are usually adequate assuming none produce sterile pollen. Plums flower early, when weather is cold and insects are moving slowly and so benefit from very close proximity, even to the point of branches intermingling. Pears produce very little nectar and so are not a preferred choice for many insects. More insect pollinators, and a reduction of competing flowers may be a reasonable strategy. Keep track of what varieties you have planted and check with your local nursery if you suspect you need additional pollen sources.

Even with flowers from many pollen sources we are still at the whim of nature and dependent upon natural systems to ensure adequate fruit set. Climatic conditions during flowering often determine whether we get a bumper crop or no fruit at all. Fruit trees are insect pollinated. Warm dry conditions are optimal for spring insect activity, as well as flower life-span. Cold, damp, and frosty conditions can mean little insect activity and damaged flowers. Healthy native or introduced insect pollinator populations can significantly increase the yield as well as the quality of our fruit. If every seed in the apple is pollinated, the fruit will actually grow larger and more uniform. Increased bee presence has also been linked to reduced caterpillar damage.

Go ask your trees what they need. Careful observation will tell you a lot. All of these strategies take time, and time may be all your tree asks for.

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T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 �B-

by Tracy FrischThis article was originally published in Hill Country Observer, October 2009.

Hugh Williams has spent the better part of four decades working to disprove the conventional wisdom that good fruit can’t be grown without pesticides.

At Threshold Farm, the orchard Williams runs with his wife, Hanna Bail, in Claverack, NY, the apples, peaches and pears are strictly organic. The orchard’s hundreds of trees have never been treated with poisons since Williams planted them 15 years ago.

This year, by the middle of August, the crop was so plentiful that sturdy wooden supports were strategically propping up the trees’ overloaded branches.

The farm sells its fruit through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, in which members pay in advance for shares of the harvest, and it also sells in bulk to groups and nonmembers who buy at least 5 pounds at a time.

Bail, who handles the farm’s marketing, said these approaches are important because they allow for direct contact with consumers, which in turn helps to build an audience that can better appreciate locally grown, organic fruit.

If the farm sold its apples at a store, for example, people might be reluctant to buy them, because they’re “a little blotchy” when compared with organic apples from California, Bail said. But the

An Orchard That Defies Convention: Grower Achieves Rare Feat In Northeast:

Organic Fruit

slight discoloration is purely superficial and affects neither flavor nor storage, she explained.

Grown under irrigation in a dry climate, California apples look cleaner, but “Northeast apples tend to be far superior in flavor,” Bail said.

photo by Tracy Frisch

Hugh and Hanna in their apple orchard

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“The cold weather brings out the sugar in the fruit,” she explained.

Bail said researchers have shown that a certain amount of moisture after blossom fall causes sooty blotch and fly speck, as the blemishes are called. In conventionally grown apples, these surface blotches generally are prevented by the chemical fungicides sprayed against apple scab.

But using such poisons is anathema to Williams, whose long experience has made him a respected expert on organic fruit production.

“Since 1972, my life mission has been to develop a nontoxic way to grow fruit,” Williams explained.

Biodynamic Bloodline

Williams’ interest in fruit production actually started when he was 14, when his parents bought an orchard in the Blue Mountains west of Sidney, Australia.

“My happiest time was on that farm in the bush, surrounded by wild nature,” he recalled.

In 1972, after studying literature and philosophy in college and traveling around Europe and the United States, Williams said he realized that he wanted to be an organic farmer.

Through his mother, Williams had been exposed in the 1960s to biodynamic agriculture, a system of organic farming that focuses on the holistic interrelationship of soil, plants and animals. Biodynamics features the use of special herbal

and mineral preparations, along with compost and manure, to improve the health of the soil. Williams’ mother also was a follower of anthroposophy, another movement inspired by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.

Williams’ father, “an absolute skeptic” about biodynamics, had started a juice business by the time Williams returned to Australia in the early 1970s, and he gave his son the opportunity to try running the state-of-the-art family orchard. After a year, though, Williams returned to the United States.

He settled in the Northeast, drawn by the climate, which is well suited for tree fruit, and the presence of several biodynamic communities, including Hawthorne Valley Farm in Harlemville and Camphill Village U.S.A. in Copake, plus one in Wilton, N.H.

After marrying a woman from eastern Long Island, he put in a 2,000-tree orchard on 15 acres of conserved land in Southampton. By then he already had seven years of fruit culture under his belt.

In the early 1990s, divorce freed Williams to move to Columbia County, where today he enjoys being part of a peer group of about 20 organic or biodynamic farmers. Williams said the new locale also beckoned as a place where he could develop an integrated, whole farm, with animals for a homegrown source of manure. (On Long Island, he’d had to depend upon a horse show for manure, because of the barriers to having livestock in the Hamptons.)

Williams planted his new orchard 15 years ago on leased land. Because the semi-dwarf trees he favors take 10 to 12 years to attain peak production, he wanted to make sure he would have long-term land tenure.

He found a good match with the Reiss family, who yearned to have a working biodynamic farm to bring life to their land. In return, they receive a share of Threshold Farm products.

Several years ago, Peter Reiss, who owns half of the family property, signed a 40-year lease with

Williams and Bail. Reiss’ stepmother rents the rest of the farm to the couple under a rolling 20-year lease.

Synthesizing a System

Despite the growing interest in organic food in the past two decades, organic orchards like Williams’ remain rare in the Northeast.

“People are terrified to get into it, because they think it’s very difficult,” Williams said.

Those who try their hand at growing organic fruit also face the confusion of “too many competing paradigms,” he said. And there’s a “never-ending tendency to look for a silver bullet,” which strikes him as futile.

“I’ve developed a system that works,” Williams said. “But you can’t pick and choose bits and pieces. It’s a coherent whole.”

For Williams, growing organic fruit entails much more than choosing organically approved pesticides or simply not spraying at all. First, he said, it requires a sound foundation in the soil and the trees themselves.

Williams uses a large semi-dwarfing rootstock for his apple trees, for example. (The type of rootstock that the scion is grafted onto controls the tree’s size.) Given what Williams calls the “very potent propaganda against larger trees,” many growers are apt to reject this element in his system. But, he warns, trees on smaller rootstocks are less drought-tolerant, and insects called borers can wipe out whole stands of them.

Trees with smaller rootstocks also cannot compete with sod, which is why conventional growers use herbicide strips to eradicate grass and weeds around them.

Through extensive contact with different fruit growers, Williams also developed his own system of tree pruning and training. It maximizes the amount of light and air reaching the fruit without “violating the tree’s natural form.”

Hand thinning is the biggest chore at the Threshold Farm orchard. In late spring, a crew of eight to 10 people removes all the fruit but one in each fruit cluster. The thinning operation, which is accomplished with chemicals in conventional orchards, increases the quality of the crop and ensures that the trees will produce fruit the following year. (If trees produce an overabundance of fruit one year, they often don’t bloom the next.)

Williams manages the two most notorious apple pests – apple maggot and coddling moth – by rigorously picking up every last apple that drops from the trees. Proteins formed in fallen fruit serve as attractants for these insects.

He controls two other destructive insects, plum curculio and European sawfly, by spraying an organically approved insect repellant called Surround. Consisting of a specially processed white china clay rather than a poison, it repels insects by covering the leaves and fruit with a fine powder. Williams sprays it up to six times, but only until June 15.

At Threshold Farm, only three applications of sulfur per season are sufficient to control the worst apple disease, apple scab. Although it’s an organic-approved material, too much sulfur destroys soil life. Yet organic orchards that have no other defenses against scab may spray as many as 20 times a season, Williams said.

This year’s wet weather has been very challenging, he said. Although the farm happily missed the hail that caused damage at other orchards around the region, it was at one point deluged with 11.5 inches of rain in a single week.

On top of that, the engine of Williams’ new tractor quit, and he had to scramble to borrow tractors from several farmer friends. He relies on a tractor to power his sprayer.

“My strategic plan is not to need the sprayer” in the future, Williams said.


Threshold Farm’s ripe apples look “a little blotchy” says Hanna, but local fruit buyers are happy with them.

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 �B-Vegetable Sideline

After planting his Claverack orchard, Williams and later his young family needed a source of income while waiting for the trees to come into full production. In the interim, Threshold Farm turned to vegetable production, organizing several community-supported agriculture groups, in Woodstock, Manhattan and Long Island, as well as a local group. As the fruit harvest gained momentum, the farm phased out the three distant CSA groups, giving them over to other organic and biodynamic vegetable farmers.

Threshold Farm currently provides 300 fruit shares, locally and through other community-supported farms in the Hudson Valley. It also maintains a smaller CSA vegetable system.

“Most commercial orchards want to compress the harvest season,” Williams said, but Threshold’s approach is the reverse. Williams has chosen fruit varieties that extend the harvest as much as possible – from early August into November. This makes the farm more attractive to CSA shareholders and allows Williams and Bail to pick all the fruit as a family.

Threshold has one full-time employee, Jonathan Ronsoni, a former CSA member and avid foodie who started out by volunteering on the farm.

Domestic and international volunteers provide additional labor in exchange for room and board at the farm family’s home in Philmont. They come for stays of two weeks or more through an organization called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. So far this year Threshold has hosted 14 of them.

With the strength of recent fruit harvests, Threshold Farm has expanded its consumer base with a direct marketing strategy that complements its CSA system.

About five years ago, the farm began supplying private groups in bulk. The practice started when a group of Taiwanese people in Washington, D.C., approached the farm about buying biodynamic fruit. Currently the group buys 40 bushels of fruit three times a season.


Hugh shows the kind of production he can get from his semi-dwarf trees with extra help provided by wooden supports

Threshold Farm also taps into other existing networks, such as a yoga ashram and a Waldorf school that makes use of the fruit in fund raising.

Bail said they are looking to do more direct marketing to their north as well.

For more information about Threshold Farm, call (518) 672-5509.

earn from an extraordinary gathering of herbal teachers, elders,

and healers from 12 different countries including Dona Enriqueta

Contreras (Mexico), Rocio Alarcon (Ecuador), David Hoffmann, Rosemary

Gladstar, Caroline Gagnon (Canada), Mark Blumenthal, Dale Pendell,

Christopher Hedley (England), Michael Tierra, David Winston, Cascade

Anderson Geller, Chris Kilham, Isla Burgess (New Zealand), Dr. Juan

Almendares (Honduras) and over 35 other highly respected herbalists.

Cost: $255 until March 30; After March 30, $295 plus room and board.

For information please write to: IHS, P.O. Box 420, East Barre, VT 05649 or check us out on the web at www.internationalherbsymposium.com

Tel: (802) 479-9825; E-mail: [email protected]

Mycelium Running

- How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

10th International Herb SymposiumCelebrating the Healing Power of Plants

June 24-26, 2011

Sponsored by:

Held at Wheaton College, MA ~ A benefit conference for United Plant Savers

Inspirational! Educational! Entertaining!If there’s one herbal event you plan to attend this year, this should be it!!!

Inspirational! Educational! Entertaining!

Mycelium Running

- How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Sponsored by:

earn from an extraordinary gathering of herbal teachers, elders,

and healers from 12 different countries including Dona Enriqueta

Contreras (Mexico), Rocio Alarcon (Ecuador), David Hoffmann, Rosemary

Gladstar, Caroline Gagnon (Canada), Mark Blumenthal, Dale Pendell,

Christopher Hedley (England), Michael Tierra, David Winston, Cascade

Anderson Geller, Chris Kilham, Isla Burgess (New Zealand), Dr. Juan

Almendares (Honduras) and over 35 other highly respected herbalists.


by Jack Kittredge

Julie and I started planting apple trees in 1980, shortly after we bought our land. We were saving up to build our house and still living in Dorchester. But we knew we wanted an orchard and there was no time to lose! We would drive out to Barre for a weekend, throwing the kids in the back of the jeep and packing in a dozen seedlings for transplanting. Since then, most of our trees have generously repaid our efforts. But not the apples. We have struggled to get decent production from them ever since.

So I felt fortunate to attend the four and a half hour seminar on Organic Orcharding which Michael Phil-lips gave at the 2011 NOFA/Mass Winter Confer-ence. While it would take too much space to reprint a transcript of his full seminar, I am printing my detailed notes of what was most important to me. Although it is in Michael’s voice, these are not di-rect quotes but rather my paraphrase of his words. In order to make this article more helpful to readers, Michael generously shared with me some of the im-ages he used during the talk.

Orchard Health

When I say apple tree I also mean pear, peach, plum and cherry tree.

One of the challenges of orcharding, besides the fact that there are dozens of moths and curculio and all these bugs we could name and all these diseases we could name, is that we all have our own unique sites. If someone was living 5 miles from me, a lot of the same things would be going on. But there would be that little nuance, that little something that was different.

Where does an apple tree want to grow? The edge of the forest. There is lots of sunlight, which fruit trees need, but there is a diverse woodsy biology there that is important:

• Mycorrhizal connection -- The question: “What should I feed my tree?” is wrong. The question should be: “What should I feed my soil?” The soil food web is complex. For instance, nematodes and protozoa consume bacteria and fungi in the soil. In the process of devouring them, they absorb their nutrients and they give off waste products. They give off nitrogen in a certain form which actually correlates quite closely to a tree being more resistant to a certain disease. If your soil ecosystem is domi-nated by bacteria, you are going to get a form which makes the trees more susceptible to disease. We, in managing the trees, can move the orchard floor in a fungi-dominated direction.

Notes from a Michael Phillips Seminar

photo courtesy Michael Phillips

Michael scything his orchard floor


Adding long term fungality

In the lawn, and the garden where you put down a hot compost, those are bacterial dominated systems. A lot of garden vegetables like that. But in a woodsy area, where raspberries fall over, goldenrod falls over, it becomes a more cellulose or a more lignin type of material which only fungi can break down. You get a fungal dominance that in the forest is on the order of ten to a hundred times that of bacteria. We get that in our orchard by feeding fungal foods.

• Fungal dominance requires fungal foods -- Some-thing like 90% of the plants on the planet have a symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi. The roots of a tree go only so far, an area roughly equal to the drip line. But the fungi have hyphae which can go hundreds of times as far, and form a network. A handful of healthy forest soil is said to contain 28 miles of hyphae! In exchange for bringing water and nutrients to the trees roots, the tree provides the fungi with sugars and carbon substances that only photosynthesis can create. Mushrooms are a great sign that you are doing something right!

In the orchard there are two times each year when the feeder roots grow rapidly. They do this for a few weeks and then most of them slough off and only 10% or so add to the permanent roots of the tree. The pathways the feeder roots and hyphae have opened up in the soil are maintained by the “super glue” of glomalin which the fungi secrete. It builds what we farmers call “tilth”.

When you get young fruit trees from a nursery most likely they have been grown in a field environment, devoid of fungi. You are also likely to be planting into an area which was a field or lawn. It makes sense to use a mycorrhizal root dip to help the fungi colonize the soil where you are planting the tree. These are available from a number of sources, in-cluding www.mycorrhizae.com, who sells through distributors. Or you can bring in “Ent soil”, or soil from the base of a healthy apple tree. It will have those mycorrhizal spores and connections. Bring in a quart of such soil and spread it around each tree. This concept is being used in the “Hugelkulture” movement of burying woodsy debris in orchard areas, and burying of biochar – utilizing the enor-mous amount of porous carbon spaces found on the surface of charred wood – for mycorrhizal coloniza-tion.

• Ramial wood chips -- These are coarse chipped remains of small deciduous trees (one to two inches

in trunk diameter) and are ideal for perennials such as fruit trees. The newest growth of a deciduous tree contains soluble lignins that have not yet polymer-ized into outright wood. Thus the proportion of es-sential twig nutrients in the chips increases as aver-age branch diameter decreases. They contain more cambium, buds and twigs and thus healthy nutrition than bark mulch or sawdust. It is broken down by “white rot” fungi which create fulvic and humic acids, the building blocks of humus. Humus is nu-tritional gold! This is different from softwood trees, which are broken down by “brown rot” fungi. These produce compounds such as tannins which are actu-ally allopathic to deciduous trees.

Carbon to nitrogen ratio in treetops is 30 to 1, ideal for fungi. The ratio in trunks and firewood is as much as 700 to one. It will tie up nitrogen for a long time if you mulch with that. Most agricultural soils (other than the prairie grasslands) are of forest origin: Soil that has been built from the top down through fungal action undergoes humic stabiliza-tion—such soil has staying power and maximized nutrient recycling.

Chipped prunings are ideal to add back to the or-chard floor. Some diseases are spread that way, like fire blight. But that can be removed during prunings when you see the cancre. Black rot is specific to apples and black knot can also get on cherries and plums. I will chip both those.

The zone under the apple tree, out to the drip line or a foot or two beyond, is where I do fungal man-agement. I spread mulch haphazardly. I never have enough ramial wood chips. Think of that zone as a diverse salad bar, where the roots can get what they need. The fatty acids in neem oil and liquid fish are ideal fungal foods. Sometimes we spray them right on the ground.


Mulch rings around the tree at the drip line

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T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 11B-• Well-aged compost -- Heavy mulch makes sense in the early years as it helps suppress sod growth. Later the shade of the tree will do that. I mulch with 50% green materials and 50% brown ones. There is more carbon and less nitrogen in brown materials.

My two favorite soil condiments are kelp and azo-mite clay. Both are rich in all sorts of trace minerals. I don’t apply them to the soil, though. I apply them to the compost pile. They go to the guts of the com-post and when I spread it in the garden I have those nutrients ready to go. But I will mix in a half pile of ramial wood chips, which moves things in a fungal direction, for the apple trees. We spread compost in the fall, when the leaves fall off the tree. But I let my pile sit a year to let it go fungal.

Up to 20% of softwood in your chips is okay and the white rot will still predominant. But if you go higher, the brown rot will take over.

• The timing of green hay -- An apple tree uses a lot of potassium when it gets into fruiting. It is replenished easily from mulch hay, ramial wood chips, compost. I put hay bales out in the orchard because field mice will form homes there. They are not voles, which eat the bark of fruit trees. You want field mice because the next year bumblebee queens will seek out those nests. I attract pollinators there. The next fall I take them apart. Gypsum, which is what sheetrock is made of, is a great source of cal-cium. We put raspberry canes, hardwood bark out. The plants that draw out nutrients and then decay are also a big source, as are the decaying leaves of the tree.

Tree buds, whether fruit or leaf, grow totally from nutrition which was stored up the previous fall.

When you see a lot of growth up on top with shoots, it is quiet below, in the roots. At fruit set, when little fruitlets are just starting to form, is the time when the feeder root system starts to grow. It is this flush which will get the nutrition for this year’s fruit. It will also put nutrition into next year’s flower buds. They are reaching up into the top inches of the soil, where a lot of the biological action is. This is when you want to cut that green hay and weeds under the tree. You are laying it down as mulch and adding to the carbon/nitrogen mix just as the feeder roots are looking for more nutrition.

If you notice, for two or three weeks at fruit set the shoots stop growing. But they start again in a few weeks because the feeder roots slough off at that point. This is when lightly cultivating the ground is okay, because the feeder roots are no longer in the top layers of the soil.

Later we will have terminal bud set, when growth stops up top and again there is a flush of growth in the feeder roots to get nutrition to form terminal buds and store nutrition in them for next year’s har-vest. That is why we spread compost when about half the leaves have fallen. One, it helps decompose the leaves, but it also adds nutrition just when those feeder roots are looking for it. The soil condiments, the kelp and azomite, now can add their nutrients to the tree. We are timing all this according to what the tree is doing. Mowing in the fall is to reduce cover for voles and to shred or breakup leaves.

• Diverse understory species -- Comfrey is an in-credible plant ally for fruit trees. This is a Russian comfrey which propagates by root, rather than by seed. So it doesn’t take over the farm. It gets flowers right after the apple trees. That provides a home for


Comfrey

bumblebees and pollinators. Comfrey has very deep tap roots which draw up nutrition from the sub soil. Grass has shallow but dense roots. All roots give off carbon dioxide, but grass gives off more. This causes feeder roots to dive down rather than up to the top few inches. I’ll plant comfrey once a tree is 4 or 5 years old. Before that I’m trying to grow wood. But then I’ll plant it in the edge of the drip line.

Red clover -- Only the bumblebee can get its nectar. They have a long enough tongue. Also red clover pushes things in a fungal direction compared to white or yellow clover.

Medicinal herbs: Thyme, Marjoram, Lavender are woodsy herbs

Biology in the soil always trumps chemistry in the soil

• Mineral ratios -- pH needs to be 6.3 to 6.7 range in the context of cation balance based on the cation exchange capacity for your soil. It is really about the balance between calcium, magnesium and potassium. These are from base saturation ratios.

A ratio of 2 to 1 for P to K tends to result in a high brix, increasing flavor and resistance to insects and disease. In our soils there is lots of potash, so we go for a 1:1 ratio. You want to have 200 lbs. per acre of each. If your soil test gives you parts per million instead, remember that P comes as phosphate (P2O5) and K as potash (KO2). Thus 43 ppm of P and 83 ppm of K will give you your 200 lbs. per acre.

Magnesium pulls soil together, good for sandy condi-tions. Calcium helps spread soil, so good for clay.

70:10:3 an ideal average for calcium, magnesium and potassium.

Getting organic matter up is really important.

The ammonium form of nitrogen does not cause the tree to be more susceptible to disease, whereas the nitrate form does. The nitrate form occurs when ni-trifying bacteria consume the ammonium form and give off the nitrate form. Those nitrifying bacteria are much more prevalent in a bacterially dominated soil.

If you put fresh cow manure under a pear or apple tree, you are going to see all kinds of disease. That is nitrate.

Holistic Disease Management

The potential of millions of fungal spores released in your orchard on a rainy spring day is a reality. You have to understand where it comes from and how to deal with it.

Our current modern mentality about disease can be called the “clean slate” approach – knock out the germ or source of infection. That equates sterility to disease control. The trouble here is that sterility also takes out beneficial organisms.

Holistic thinking suggests a different approach. Ev-ery organism in nature is colonized by large numbers of microbes. Most of these serve to protect their host

illustration courtesy Michael Phillips

The growth stage of the apple tree suggests the tasks be timed to influence disease resistance and winter hardiness alike.


Scab conidia

and enhance its immune function. This holistic ap-proach intervenes to “prime” the immune system of a tree in stressful times, rather than eradicate the infection.

An old organic approach is to use sulfur or copper or other minerals as fungicides. They are relatively effective in getting rid of fungus, but they can be very toxic and hard on the ecosystem. If you use this approach you are always balancing use of toxic sub-stances versus allowing disease to infest your crop.

A holistic approach focuses on making sure leaf decomposition in the fall reduces the number of spores which can be released in the spring. If you can reduce it by 90% or 95% your pressure goes way down.

A degree day is the average temperature above freezing. So in Farenheit, if the high was 60 and the low at night was 40, the average is 50 and if you subtract the base of 32 the day counts for 18 de-grees. Scab matures slowly until about 300 degree days have accumulated.

Stages of apples in spring: You don’t have to track degree days -- apple buds also track degree days be-cause they require warmth to continue to grow.

Stages:

Buds are a quarter inch green

The flower buds reveal themselves but are sticking together – that is “tight cluster”

The buds spread apart and show a little pink – this is “pink”

Then you have bloom.

The 300 degree day point occurs at tight cluster. The buds are unfurled and you see about a half inch of leaf tissue and you actually see flower buds. This is when, if you have a rain event, your odds are going the other way and scab may spread. After about 700 degree days, or 10 to 14 days after petal fall, there is also not a lot of risk from scab because the leaves are starting to get older and tougher.

But in between there is a huge amount of risk. This is when we want to either use old school organics and use mineral fungicides, or reinforce the biology and boost the immune system. This is important be-cause if you do neither secondary scab can continue to spread all summer.

It rains, down on the orchard floor spores are ma-ture, the raindrops cause the spore sack to pop, releasing thousands of spores into the air. They land


on a leaf. It takes that spore so many hours of being wet to create an enzyme which will enable it to enter the leaf and hold onto that tissue.

If you have a period when there have been a number of warm days and you know a lot of scab has ma-tured, and then there is a light rain but it is breezy and dries out afterward, then a wild apple doesn’t show much scab. Its own resistance is working. And if you don’t need to use a mineral fungicide, you don’t want to.

This chart shows that, on a typical spring day it may be 48 to 50 degrees, and at that temperature it takes 10 to 12 hours of leaf wetness for an infection to oc-cur. Here is where you might use protectant sulfur. If you can get it on before the infection period has passed, you will get a leg up on it. If you do this, micronized sulfur is a better bet because it will have a longer residual effect – up to 7 days – compared to wettable sulfur with a 3 to 4 day residual.

But it helps to determine whether marginal wetting periods need to trigger action on your part.

Alternatively, there are things you can do nutrition-ally to increase the resistance of the apple leaf and make this interval even longer. If you can reinforce the community of microbes in the soil, and especial-ly the rhizosphere, you can build resistance.


Dancing with the scab fungus Mycorrhizal fungi help feeder roots bring in miner-als to optimize health. In some cases they colonize the locations pathogenic fungi might take, crowding them out. Some saprophytic fungi even consume scab. Proper maintenance of the orchard understory makes these biological subtleties possible.

A number of practices favor bacterial dominance in the orchard soil. Others favor fungal dominance.

Practices in fall to reduce inoculum: Choose three of the following beginning at 50% leaf fall: Lime, Mowing, Compost. and Fall holistic spray (liquid fish or neem oil).

Before we looked at the stages of the tree’s feeder roots. Now we are looking at the fungal world. Con-sider the illustration at the bottom of this page.In spring there is some decomposition below the tree but the ground has been cold. The rising and falling curve through fruit set represents both the disease organisms rising up and being released, but also the soil food web rising up – the fungal and bacterial organisms that colonize the surfaces of leaves. The underground line represents the mycorrhizal fungi. They are in synch with the feeder root flushes.

And that mycorrhizal system really carries on with lots of nutrient gathering in the fall. Come fall, when we do our stirring of the biological stew, sap-rophytic fungi are active. This illustration shows the flow of the seasons.

Trees have a phytochemistry which helps them re-sist disease, A fungal pathogen lands on a leaf and has to get through the cuticle and the upper cellular layer to get into a leaf cell to feed. Whatever nutri-ents are in the cell get accessed. One is an amino acid which is a favorite of fungi. If it has a long enough period of being wet, the fungus will get a hold on the leaf. As soon as the pathogen begins to produce enzymes to etch it’s way in, the plant responds. An oxidative burst is an early response, much like we use hydrogen peroxide to disinfect. If that doesn’t work salicylic acid levels build up. That is the active compound in aspirin, discovered in willow twigs. Then the tree produces a series of phytochemicals which take the form of terpenoids and isoflavonoids. The degree to which the tree can produce those chemicals depends on the health of the whole system, and that it hasn’t been overruled by the use of a lot of “medicines”.

Neem oil, from an Indian tree, contains a number of useful chemicals. One inhibits a hormone needed by insects to metamorphose. Another is a terpenoid similar to what the apple produces in response to disease organisms. The presence of the compound stimulates the plant to produce more. This is the concept of stimulated acquired resistance.

The Arborial Food Web is the network of photosyn-thetic bacteria and other species helpful to the tree. 70% colonization of the leaf surface by that network will out-compete disease organisms. But natural forces such as high heat, deep cold, ultraviolet radia-tion, ozone depletion, acid rain, dry spells, etc. work against high levels of colonization. Sometimes food just runs off the leaf surface. We need to be aware

of the need for nutrition of the beneficials. That is where fatty acids play a role.

I use effective microbes – a mix of bacteria and yeasts. They are used for sewer lagoon stimulation, lactic acid creation, lots of purposes. I have had positive results introducing them. I use one gallon for two acres of apples.

I do four sprays in the spring. They are designed to get a competitive organism system in place before we hit tight cluster, and prime that immune function during bloom and right after petal fall. The sprays are mixes of liquid fish, pure neem oil, and effective microbes. I spray on a warm day which is conducive to running my sprayer.

If you are a home orchardist, this program is going to get you a big leg up in terms of holistic manage-ment of your fruit trees. If you are a commercial orchardist and you have a long warm period after bloom, you might want to do a fifth spray, or some sulfur, if there is big release of spores after all that heat.

Recipe -- Mix in a 4 gallon backpack sprayer: 2.5 ounces of pure neem oil with a generous teaspoon-ful of soap emulsifier to achieve a 0.5% neem con-centration. Use 10 ounces of liquid fish and 3 table-spoons of mother culture of effective microbes. Add 3 to 4 tablespoons of blackstrap molasses to launch those hungry critters. Include 5 tablespoons liquid kelp or a half ounce (dry weight) of seaweed extract.

For larger orchards using a 100 gallon spray tank to cover 1 acre of trees, use a half gallon of pure neem oil mixed with a quarter cup of soap emulsifier to get your 0.5% neem concentration. Use 8 ounces (dry weight) of seaweed extract, plus 2 gallons of


Bud break


Pink

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 1�B-

liquid fish and one gallon of activated effective mi-crobes (mixed with molasses at an initial rate of ¾ cup of mother and molasses and allowed to brew and multiply for 7 to 10 days.) Fish emulsion is pasteurized and of limited nutritive value. Liquid fish is not pasteurized and is preserved with phosphoric acid. Brands are Organic Gem, Neptune’s Harvest. The fatty acids stimulate the my-corrhizae.

First spray wets tree and ground and uses double neem and liquid fish.

Herbal foliar sprays including willow, wintergreen, osage orange, stinging nettle, horsetail (high in sili-ca which increases strength of cuticle), comfrey and garlic, all infused in hot water, stored in cold water for a week where it ferments.

Pruning Principles

Pruning is about the space into which a branch can grow -- the sunlight and drying breezes it needs.

Apple fruits grow on the ends of little spurs. Those spurs can be fruitful for 20 to 30 years, but best is 3rd to 9th year. Pruning is to open up tree so that twiggy wood can develop spurs to get younger wood. Old branch begins to hang down and new branches head up, there is a thinning cut.

Diameter-based pruning rule: above 2nd scaffold, when a limb becomes half the diameter of the lead-er, it is time to take it off and let younger wood de-velop into that light space. Think many years ahead.

Grafting timing – up to 10 days before bud break and 10 days after

Tight cluster – good time to pay attention to leaves. Is there feeding on the edges? Bt is phenomenally effective at control of budworms and other foliar feeding caterpillars.

With moths, learn their timing and over-wintering patterns – as adults, as eggs, as larvae, as pupae? Codling moth over-winters as a larva. It pupates in

the spring. The adults don’t show up until the time of bloom. They lay their eggs and the eggs hatch 10 to 14 days after petal fall.

At pink, this is the moment to enjoy your orchard. It looks perfect, except for the edges that have been fed upon. But everything will go downhill from now on!

With bloom, you need only about 3% to 7% of those flowers to have a full crop. There is a lot of extra built into nature. You sometimes regret it because you may have to do a lot of thinning to get that tree into balance. Bloom is the time you need a lot of sunlight and photosynthesis to grow this year’s fruit and next year’s flower buds.

Pollination – with apples, things have warmed up enough you usually have bumblebees and other pol-linators. It is much harder with early blooming trees like plums and apricots, unless you have honeybees and it is a warm day. Honey bees are the pollina-tors that keep bankers hours. They like it 60 to 70 degrees and then they only work from 9 to 5. The bumblebees are out there a lot longer. With plums, pollination happens with a lot of light flyers. The recommendation now is to plant 2 varieties of plums very close to each other, often even intertwined, so light pollinators can pass pollen between them with-out getting buffeted by so much wind. Or you can wait to prune your plums until they are in bloom. Then you can stick your prunings in water in a ma-son jar in another tree and the pollen will be viable for 12 hours or so. You find ways to work with this. I’m growing a plum thicket with about 8 varieties in a small space, intertwined.

Bumblebees over-winter as solitary queens. In the spring they look for nest sites. But they need con-stant sources of bloom and nectar all summer long. That is a good reason for plant diversity. Herb farms are great for this.

The solitary bees, Osmia or mason bees, are native species. In nature they would be laying a single egg in a sapsucker hole. But you can build up their num-bers by creating nesting tube condos. They can take the form of a wooden block with 5/16 inch holes drilled in it, or other systems you can find on the web. (If you have a smaller than 5/16 inch holes, the eggs will develop into males, so you want the larger ones.) They are only gathering nectar for 4 weeks or so.

With honey bees, you need one hive of 40,000 to 80,000 bees per acre. With the solitary bees, it takes 200 female Osmia to do the same. That is because honeybees don’t usually pollinate all 5 double pairs of ovules in an apple. It is said to take 7.6 visits by honeybees to properly pollinate one apple. With one or two visits you get those flat-sided apples. The seeds developed on one side, but not the other. Osmia, however, like bumblebees, complete the pollination job before they leave and you get more full-sized fruit.

The backpack sprayer is very useful for up to a dozen trees. But as you get more trees, there is a lot to be said for mechanical pressure. You want to put on enough spray that you cover the tree to the point of letting it run off. A lot of the stomata are on the underside of the leaves. That is where a lot of the foliar absorption will take place.

Spraying is labor intensive. A lot of time is devoted to it. Figuring out how to make orchard economics work on a small scale of one or two acres is one of the challenges we face.

Disease resistant varieties. -- Some people avoid the sulfur issue by getting scab resistant varieties. These were all bred from a tree in the 1930s which showed scab resistance. Good ones are Gold Rush, Williams Pride, and Liberty. The resistance is conferred by a gene which makes the cell die and dissolve that the fungal hyphae is penetrating, rather than sustain-ing the fungus by providing nutrition to it. But the fungus is evolving too, and in Europe this defense doesn’t work with the strains of fungus there. Now some scab resistant varieties are getting scab here, too. So my advice is grow an apple you love and don’t avoid varieties because they can get scab.

On a full sized tree, with a drip zone 16 feet in di-ameter, I’ll spread one and a half 5 gallon buckets of compost.

Cedar apple rust is a fungus with a co-host, the red (not white) cedar, which is prevalent in southern New England. It appears as an orange gelatinous blob. It’s timing is the same as apple scab, and those holistic sprays are going to give improvement. Eradicating red cedar right near the orchard is a good preventative. There are also varieties resistant to cedar apple rust.

Insects

When fruit starts to show, there are a number of in-sect species which zone in on it. The 3 big ones are: European Apple Sawfly, Plum Curculio, Codling Moth.

European Apple Sawfly came here from Switzerland about 60 years ago. It is still primarily on the east coast. It is a pollinator, but also deposits its egg in the base of the blossom. It leaves a chemical scent to ward off other females.

When the eggs hatch, they leave a winding trail on the surface of the fruit which shows up as a scar. Then the larva goes into each fruitlet and eats the seeds until no apples are left in the whole cluster. Once the numbers of females builds up in your trees, you can lose a significant amount of your crop to them. And it likes to start on the outermost fruit, so you lose a higher proportion of your best fruit, out where the sunlight is the most.

The sawfly pupates in the soil under the apple tree. This is a point of vulnerability. Use of parasitic nematodes or a parasitic fungus to saturate the soil will get the over-wintering larvae. That is not some-thing you want to do orchardwide, but if there is a variety they really like you might do around that tree.

The most successful control in the spring is using Spinosad, or Entrust, at petal fall. Spinosad is a fermented byproduct of a Caribbean bacteria. This strain has produced a compound that is highly toxic to caterpillars and certain other insect. There is a chemically synthesized version of it, but the organic one is about four times the price, around $625 per pound. If you see a lot of scars on pea-sized fruit, you know you have a bad sawfly problem. I scout for damage and if necessary spray Spinosad at the rate of 2 ounces per acre in my first Surround spray. It is really effective at getting that second instar, so the fruitlets of the cluster remain.

Plum Curculio has long been deemed the Achilles heel of organic orcharding. Rodale recommended rotenone, others used chickens in their orchards. The curculio over-winter in the soil in the woods, fly into the orchard when it is warm enough, and lay three to four eggs a day.

pillustration courtesy Michael Phillips

Renewal spur


Tight cluster


Osmia bee nesting tube condo


Plum curculio


Full bloom


Codling Moth adults show up at bloom, lay their eggs at the time the fruitlets are being pollinated, and they hatch 10 to 14 days after petal fall. They eat their way into the fruitlet within 24 hours of hatching. That makes something like Bt not very useful. In warmer growing zones they face multiple generations during the same season.

In the mid-1990s researchers began looking at spraying clay onto the plant as a physical bar-rier. The idea came from the 1920s and 30s when they tried clay for this purpose. But the particles were too big and they blocked photosynthesis, so the plant didn’t grow that well, and the particles weren’t small enough to come off on the bugs. But now the clay has been refined in giant electromag-netic centrifuges in Georgia and the particle size is 4 microns or less. To a curculio crawling through it, these would be like little pinheads everywhere. This would be irritating and force the curculio to be constantly grooming to clean out its parts. You don’t want to stick it on the tree with an oil or it won’t come off on the bug.

But if you don’t maintain this coverage, the curculio can outwait it. So you need to keep the clay on the trees for weeks. That means applying after every rain. Kaolin actually cools the apple during hot sum-mers, so that the growth continues. Kaolin is very popular out west to reduce the sunburn factor. But for us it is getting good coverage by the week after petal fall and keeping it on. Or you can leave the clay off a trap tree, to which you attract the curculio. Then you knock them out of the tree and catch them in fabric or turn chickens onto them, or you cover the ground with carpets or other things to prevent them from reaching the soil again, so they will des-iccate in the sun.

The curculio are most active in the evening. Their defense mechanism is to drop back to the ground.

It is important to thin the crop. If all five fruitlets develop, you will get five apples the size of golf balls. Also, larvae can hide among the fruitlets more easily than if only one remains. When the fruitlet starts to grow at the base of the fruitwood, the meristem tip is also growing. To support the ten seeds inside each fruitlet takes a lot of nutrition and

hormonal energy. If too many are growing it short-changes the meristem tip, so return bloom doesn’t happen. That is why you often see a biannual pattern in wild apples. Thinning will give you a much more likely annual cropping cycle, and also give you the chance to thin the fruits which are sawfly damaged and possibly get the larvae inside as well. These you want to burn or otherwise destroy. And you get more bushels of fruit at the end because your apples size up properly because you are now putting those re-sources into apple flesh rather than expensive seeds. Thinning must be done 35 to 40 days after petal fall. If you do it later, you may get bigger fruit but the stress on the meristem has happened already.

Some varieties require much more thinning than others. It is meditative work, but there is a lot of it with some varieties like Gala or Macoun. With Cort-land there is hardly any thinning involved. The goal is to leave a fruitlet, one per cluster, on the order of every 6 to 8 inches. It is hard to do this, and you will take years to realize you have to do it if you want to get good return bloom. As much as 20% of your labor will be spent hand thinning. You can do this chemically, but not in an organic system. That is one of the huge cost differences between the two.

Codling moths and other Lepidoptera like Tent cat-erpillars, Lesser apple worms, Oriental fruit worms and Red humpbacked caterpillars can be controlled by various techniques. We have a lot of tools. Para-sitic wasps will lay their eggs in the larvae of some. The external feeders can be controlled with Bt. Spinosad can be very effective but it is expensive. Granulosis virus is specific to Codling moth and to a lesser extent Oriental fruit moth and Lesser apple worms. The virus replicates and goes on to the next generation. Mating disruption with pheromones can keep the males from finding the females.

On a home scale you can tape 6-inch bands of cor-rugated cardboard around the tree trunk just below the lowest limb, and just above the soil. When the Codling moth larva comes out of the apple it wants to find a hiding place in the rough bark at the base of the tree to pupate. It is either on the ground and it wants to climb the tree, or in the tree and wants to climb down. In either case, it will find the cardboard and settle in it. Then, a month to six weeks after petal fall those larvae have gone into cocoon stage there. You can remove the cardboard and burn it. You can renew the band and after harvest take the ones who would over-winter there. Understanding what works and why will help you devise strategies to control your problems.

For summer diseases we use baking soda success-fully in this country. Biodynamic growers are big on equisetum or horsetail. In Europe they use coconut soap. I use neem oil and the whole idea of a silica defense. I don’t have the pressure you have in south-ern New England, and none of us have the pressure they do in the humid south.

Fireblight is a bacterial disease. It can get into the vascular system of the tree, often through the blos-som. If you prune on a warm day you can leave a cut which will be colonized by fireblight. In a bad case it looks like the tree and the leaves were burned. You can use antibiotics to control it, but we are learning about competitive bacteria species which can be put on pads in bee hives and the bees carry them into the blossoms to out-compete the fireblight. The same process happens with effective microbes or compost tea. Some varieties are more resistant to it. As we get more warmth in New Eng-land we will probably have to deal with this more. If, during the summer, you see a branch with it, cut it off to keep the blight from getting to the rest of the tree. But do so 8 or 10 inches out, leaving an “ugly stub”. The cut will be colonized, but then you return in the winter and make the final finish cut, removing the stub which has been colonized.

The Round-Headed Apple Tree Borer is an evil thing! It is a striped beetle which lays its eggs in lit-tle slits right at the soil line. If a tree snaps off at the base, it is probably the borer. It is a local pest, not everywhere. You need to get down on your hands and knees to dig out the borer. Some repellant strat-egies have been developed to make it unattractive at the base of the tree – say a kaolin slurry spread on it. But I have found that those spring neem sprays of the trunk and soil are disrupting the borer life cycle. Now I am doing a mid June and mid July neem trunk spray, too. I found two borers this year, where I have found hundreds.

The Apple Maggot Fly, or Railroad worm is about 3/16 of an inch long and has black markings. It was a native American pest focused on the Hawthorn tree. But it moved to apples when they became available. It is hard to see but when you open up the apple you see the brown windy trail it makes. The fly is drawn to the odor put out by ripening apples. This is the pest the red sticky ball was developed for. There was a scented lure which brought it to the ball, where it would get stuck. More recent versions of the trap involve using Spinosad in a matrix which the flies ingest and die. This is an effective and cheaper way of delivering the Spinosad than spray-ing the whole orchard repeatedly. You can also do a soil soak with a parasitic fungus which will find the larvae. The biggest thing you can do is clean up your drops at least twice a week. It takes from 3 to 9 days once that apple hits the ground for the larva to get out of it and into the soil.

You need to educate your customers that a little wart or scar on an apple will not kill their children. Once they cut into it and taste it, it is so much better than any conventional apple your customers will be com-ing back for more.

Deer and apple growers can’t be friends. They will reprune your trees in a couple of nights. Meadow voles can kill your trees in the winter if you don’t protect the base. I buy a plastic mesh and put it around each tree. It is a little easier for me to re-move than metal when I want to work sprays for borer on my trunk or do checks. There are meadow voles and pine vole. I don’t have pine voles.

Check my website GrowOrganicApples.com and sign up for my newsletter!


Codling moth


Kaolin clay on fruitlets


Thorough kaolin clay coverage


Fruit thinning before and after


Fireblight


Round-headed apple tree borer


Apple maggot fly


by Brian Caldwell

There are indeed a few bugs in the well-managed organic orchard, as well there should be. After all, a diverse arthropod community replete with predators and parasites helps keep serious pest numbers down.

Perhaps we should start exploring such an orchard with a fox’s-eye view of how the orchard floor is managed. The freestanding semidwarf trees are spaced widely. No tilling is done to the soil. Grass is allowed to grow in the spring until a tall stand is obtained in the long days of mid May. The effect of this is manifold. Fungal scab spores are trapped beneath the tall grass during the latter part of their primary cycle. Insect, fungus, and small mam-mal activity is rife under the tall stems. Individual grass and herb plants grow big and shade out oth-ers around them. Their roots grow large and deep, but not so deep as those of the trees. They make a patchy pattern of groundcover growth, not a thick lawn-like mat.

Then the orchardists intervene and cut the thick growth down with a sickle bar mower. When the stems are lain down in swaths under the trees, they temporarily mulch out other growth. After the aboveground grass tops are cut down, their roots too die back, releasing a pulse of nutrients to the hungry trees.

Later on in the season when days are hot, broadleaf herbs like yarrow, wild basil, clovers, and Queen Anne’s lace are in flower around and beneath the trees. Grass species are not quite so prominent now. The summer plants have grown up through the mat of decaying cut grass. A myriad of buzzing creatures drink nectar—flies, tiny wasps and bees. Some are enemies of the caterpillars whose goal is to burrow into young apple fruits….

Overlain on top of these patterns are other activities of the orchardists. At the right time, insect-killing or repellant sprays are mixed and applied in a din of engines. They knock back the building crescendo of tiny creature activity going on, killing many but some key pests more than the others. First is Bt, a bacterial toxin that kills a batch of caterpillars emerging when the buds are swelling and green. Next, starting shortly before apple bloom, a series of kaolin clay sprays are applied, which repel some moths and the weevil called plum curculio. The second of these is mixed with spinosad, another bacterial toxin, targeted at later baby caterpillars and marauding European sawfly larvae. The tree leaves

Bugs in the System: A Northeast Organic Apple Orchard Tale

are colored a ghostly gray for a month with the repeated clay sprays. Trunks of the trees also, espe-cially young ones, are also doused with clay. After the curculio is no longer migrating into the orchard, the clay sprays are discontinued and there is peace for a time.

In other organic orchard lands, the human fruit growers are out even earlier and more frequently with their sprayers, and the air stinks of sulfur as they try to quell the growth of fungi that attack the leaves and fruit. But not in this area. The trees here have been chosen to resist apple scab themselves.

The orchardists make an important foray into the trees shortly after the last clay spray. Talking and joking, they strip most of the young fruit right off the branches! True, the fruit that is left grows larger. True, the damaged and larva-infested fruitlets are removed and taken far away. But at what cost!

Attractive scents pervade the orchard in July, and male totricid moths are lured onto sticky traps. The

photo courtesy Brian Caldwell

Organic applesorchardists count them twice a week. When the catches decline, the orchardists wait 4 more days, then put spinosad on again. This is repeated again in August with a final spray of Bt, and then the orchard is free of insect-killing sprays for the rest of the year.

At any time, the orchardists might look at the tree trunks, particularly the young ones, for evidence of orange sawdust-like insect excrement near the ground. If it is found, the humans lie down as if in supplication and dig out grubs with their sharp knives. It may be in the nature of things for a few trees to be weakened and die from the larvae of beetles feasting on the tender inner bark, but the or-chardists strive to prevent this.

As fall approaches, a few other things happen that relate to this buggy story. The orchardists leave strips of summer flowers even when they mow and scythe around the trees in preparation for harvest. A week before each variety is ripe, the orchardists crawl around under the trees, muttering under their breaths, and throw into buckets whatever apples have recently fallen. These early dropped apples of-ten contain pest insect larvae which are destined to drop onto the ground, burrow down, and pupate. But they are removed from the orchard and their destiny frustrated. After each tree is harvested, the same thing is repeated. Meanwhile, outside the orchard fence in the hedgerows and woods nearby, wild deer eat apples as soon as they fall, larvae and all. These larvae also do not reproduce.

In the late fall just before winter, the trees are bare and almost all the leaves have dropped onto the ground. The orchardists come through with their noisy riding mower and chop and blow the grass and leaves away from the trees into the aisles. A light dressing of compost may be applied. After that, the orchard is quiet. A hawk may sit nearby to spy exposed voles in the now-short grass around the trees. Unless a fox or owl has gotten them first.

The following spring, an empty space in the orchard is planted with a new tree. But it is a native persim-mon, not an apple.

Brian Caldwell farms at Hemlock Grove Farm,West Danby, NY where he has been growing certified or-

ganic apples since 1988.

photo courtesy Brian Caldwell

The orchard floor


by Jack Kittredge

Central Massachusetts seems to be ideally suited for apple production (as it should to honor the heritage of Leominster’s Johnny Appleseed). For many years orchards dotted the high country north of Worcester. Although some have now fallen prey to the high price of land and general decline of local farming, hardy souls are bringing some back into production. This is the case with the sisters Cathy Harragian and Sue Harragin, and their certified organic orchard at Bird of the Hand Farm in Sterling.

The story starts with Roland Morin. For years a welder at Digital Equipment Corporation, Roland’s real passion was apples.

“I loved apples when I was a kid,” he recalls. “I grew up on an old farm in North Oxford, Massachu-setts, which belonged to my grandfather. I got to see the old style apples. I loved them.”

So when he moved to Sterling and bought 68 acres, he decided to start an orchard in his spare time. Be-ginning in 1979, for two years he cleared trees and rocks behind his house. He opened up 10 acres, cre-ating a mowable field into which, in 1981, he started planting what ended up to be 650 apple trees. But he could never make a go of it financially.

“It’s 25 years of work back here,” he says, “picking rocks, planting trees, taking care of them. I started from scratch and made it a beautiful orchard. I was selling strictly U-Pick, but I couldn’t compete. I couldn’t get enough people out here. Most of the apples ended up on the ground. I was selling them dirt-cheap. But there are so many apple operations that have been here a long time. People went to the places their parents did.”

Morin didn’t use organic practices in his orchard. “I was just like the rest of them.” he says, “except I used a lot less spray. I used to pinpoint the spray so none was wasted. I could do the whole orchard with 350 gallons.”

Apples Galore at Bird of the Hand Farm

But Morin’s practices weren’t different enough to attract buyers to his orchard.

“In 2004,” he recalls, “I said ‘If I don’t make a profit this year, I’m done!’ I never made a profit any year. So I didn’t make a profit again in 2004 and I said: ‘That’s the end of it! Either that or I’m going to lose the house and everything.’ I really didn’t want to sell, but it was either that or I’m broke. We were living off of home equity. So I sold the orchard in 2004. The state bought it for the watershed.”

Roland’s beautiful labor of love quickly grew into a weed infested thicket, trees entangled in bindweed, branches breaking in ice storms, and shade over-whelming any apple production.

Enter the sisters Harragin, or Harragian if you prefer Cathy’s spelling. “After I got my divorce,” she ex-plains, “I went back to my name, but added a letter. We misspelled the family name when we came over from Ireland.”

Cathy is a NOFA-accredited organic landscaper. She

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Roland Morin, founder of the orchard, shows off the Winter Banana apples he planted �0 years ago.

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 1�B-wanted to grow perennials to sell to her customers, but has only a small backyard. So she began looking for land. Then she had a brainstorm.

“Some of the perennials are shade-loving,” she rea-soned, “and I said: ‘Where better to grow than under an apple tree?’ So we could have apples and peren-nials!”

So the sisters began looking for a place to grow apples. They had heard of Roland’s orchard, scouted it out and knew it was owned by the state. They pur-sued it aggressively.

“They want people to maintain the land,” she says, “much as the Department of Agricultural Resources does, through haying and other forms of farming without chemicals or destructive practices. We were persistent, offering to lease the land as a pilot proj-ect. Eventually we got a special permit. They’re testing us to see how much we rile up the neighbors, how we take care of the land. We have to use no-till practices, no chemicals, no U-pick. But they’re just putting their toe in the water a little bit right now.”

The orchard is landlocked, the only practical access is using Roland’s driveway and going right by his house. But he was happy to see someone try to bring his apples back.

The sisters got their 5-year lease in 2008, just before the ice storm that felled so many trees in Central Massachusetts.

“We had to cut our way in with chain saws, wearing snow shoes,” recalls Cathy. “A river of water runs through here in the winter -- it isn’t really accessible by car or truck until May, when the flowers are al-ready blooming.”

The women renovated starting at the end of 2008 and going through all of 2009. By the winter of 2009-2010 they had just pruned half of the trees.

“You could come out in June in 2009,” Harragian says, “and there were no leaves on the trees. They were just covered with bittersweet, and you had to cut each one loose from bindweed. So in 2010 half of the trees are just getting into their first year of be-ing healthy again.”

Roland planted the bulk of the orchard in a pattern of 3 Macintosh, a Red Delicious, 3 more Macs, a Cortland, 3 more Macs, another Delicious, etc. down the row. At the time Macs were considered the trees to plant, but the others were necessary for good cross-pollination. Now, however, times have changed and heirloom apples are more in demand, so the Macs are being replaced as the opportunities present themselves. Currently there are 20 some varieties.

There were originally 650 apple trees on 5 acres, but now only 551 remain. They are all semi-dwarf. Roland planted them ten feet apart because his neighbor told him that was the spacing for high pro-duction and you would save on sprays to have them close. But after many years he has concluded they are too close.

“I’d rather have twelve or fifteen feet apart,” he says. “I can’t hardly walk between them. I’d have my son mow between them. This place looked like a front lawn! Then he’d mow again just before we opened up for Labor Day weekend. To prune it I’d start when the leaves started falling, in November, and by January I was all done -- eight feet high maximum. Each tree was painted with a color mark for the variety. Then when people came I’d give them something telling them the variety, what row they were in, and what color they were marked. It was simple! I’d just sit there and give a talk to each group about what trees to pick for what they wanted – apple sauce, cider, pies. For a pie you want a Red Delicious for flavor, but they turn to mush when cooked so you just want one or two. I used to stand and talk to them for five or ten minutes. I’d give them rides back in to the orchard in my pickup. But I just couldn’t compete. I started off selling them for $3 for a half a bushel. Drops were a dollar per half bushel. It was also all you can eat. I told people we don’t weigh you going in and we don’t weigh you coming out. Eat as many as you want in there. But even so I just couldn’t bring in the people.

“A semidwarf should produce a maximum of five bushels,” Roland continues, “the way I was pruning them. The girls let them go higher, but when I was pruning I kept them low. The trees were unbeliev-ably beautiful. They looked like the surface of an aircraft carrier! I probably got less than five bushels per tree. But it is all in the way you prune them. When I had this orchard any person could come in and stand right here and pick every apple on this tree. No ladder, no apple picker tools. Two year old kids could come and pick all the apples they wanted. As long as they could stand up they could reach them. Because all the apples kept the branches so low they literally touched the ground.”

Cathy’s sister Sue Harragin is a free lance writer. But she has thrown herself into the orchard project with her sister, sharing the pruning, the picking, and generating ideas for better management. She won-ders if it wouldn’t be productive to run pigs through the orchard to eat the dropped apples, a la Joel Sala-tin. But of course they can’t do that because it is protected, watershed land.

She explains their fertility and soil management sys-tem: “We bring in aged compost for fertility. All the trees get some in a ring around the tree at the drip line. Then woodchip mulch is spread over top that and three feet out from the tree. The trees which got that treatment this year are definitely healthier, hap-pier trees. We also amend the soil with calcium and use liquid fish which has a mystery component that seems to engage the soil and fungal life in it.”

“One of the things that we are experimenting with,” she continues, “is pulling up the sod and putting in plants as ground cover. The original concept that brought us here was that we would be planting na-tive New England medicinal herbs beneath the apple trees. A lot of them are locally extinct because back in the 1800s Massachusetts was clear-cut and a lot of these plants need forest shade -- things like Black Cohosh, Bloodroot, Goldenseal, Bee Balm, and Jacob’s Ladder. The idea was maybe we can get two crops with one set of inputs. Some of the herbs have fungus problems, so maybe if we are treating the apples for fungus some of the spray will drip down onto the herbs as well. That was the original idea. I’d say we have mixed results on that, at this point. Fortunately, we’re both pretty stubborn and don’t listen to others tell us what we can’t do. Cathy is a tremendous experimental farmer and she is always tinkering around finding out what can work. We’re now shifting more to perennials, including the me-dicinals, but not exclusive to them.”

The amount of labor involved in bringing five acres of apples back into profitable production is stagger-

ing. So far the sisters have been able to get some help from volunteers. Veterans of Worcester’s urban program “Youth Grow” have come to help, as have friends. But the major worker aiding the women is Brian Igwenagu, a young man from Boylston. He graduated from the Porter and Chester Institute in Westboro’s electrical program, but has been slow applying for electrical employment because he en-joys working five days a week in the orchard.

“These Cortlands are delicious,” he exclaims. “I can’t get enough of them! I never knew there were so many different kinds of apples! I knew there were green apples and red ones – the ones my parents buy at the grocery store. But there are so many here!”

Brian spreads the compost and wood chips, digs up the sod for planting the perennials, helps with the pruning, the thinning, the spraying, and the harvest-ing. The pruning starts in December.

“Without having been here,” Sue groans, “you can’t appreciate what a tangled knot of flora this place was! When we first started the trees were tied to-gether by the bittersweet, abetted by the occasional rose bush with prickly thorns. You would lop off a branch and then have to cut for another 15 minutes to get it away from the tree! It was a huge process and took us two years to get it done.”

The sisters had professional pruners the first year to help them, but would like to do more of the pruning themselves as they understand the principles and get an eye for what they want. Sue says she’d like to start earlier and go a little slower to get better light infiltration into the trees. But this is a source of great controversy.

“Last winter,” she recalls, “while we were pruning. I would say: ‘Light, light, light for the apples.’ Cathy would say: ‘Shade, shade, shade for the under-plants.’ We’d go back and forth. We’d kind of have that discussion about everything, like the alternate rows between the trees – one for driving, the next for shade. I think perennials and apples go together well, but I’m not sure you get forest conditions in an apple orchard. I hate adding one more thing into the mix, but I guess that’s how you have to do it. We don’t want to have a monoculture of apples here.”

Speaking of monocultures, being surrounded by orchards is not an ideal situation for raising apples organically. Plum Curculio and scab are Cathy and Sue’s two biggest problem. After that it is codling moth. They also have flatheaded apple borers. They have been pulling off the screens wrapped around the base of the trees to get at them. They go up the holes with coathangers to kill the borers.


Cathy Harragian, who co-manages the orchard with her sister Sue, poses beneath a Red Delicious apple tree. The fruit looks good, she says, but won’t be ripe until November,

after it has sweetened up after several frosts.


The women spray about 15 times a year. For scab they use a dry Bordeaux mixture, which is a mixture of copper sulphate and hydrated lime, in backpack sprayers. They are only protectants, so they have to be sprayed before the rain and dry onto the leaves before the fungus arrives with the wet weather. You can’t knock the scab out afterwards. So if you don’t predict the rain right, you miss out.

But the primary component of their sprays is Sur-round, or finely ground kaolin clay.

“Our original idea,” says Sue, “was that we would spray dry powders and they would interact with the dew on the leaves in the morning. That was nice in theory but our humidity levels were so low in the Spring that we didn’t have damp trees. So we got a sprayer – a 225 gallon sprayer on a trailer with it’s own gasoline engine. We mix Surround with water and spray it wet. It has 200 feet of hose. We have alternate rows – one you can drive through and

then the next is a shade row. You park your vehicle a third of a way down the row and then walk back and forth with the hose and wand to get all the trees covered.

“For a couple of months,” she continues, “it seemed like we were spraying Surround once or twice a week. Surround is supposed to be an irritant. And having handled it a lot I can tell you it is. I can’t be up here for five minutes without wearing gloves!”

“We didn’t get to Surround early enough this year,” adds Cathy. “This is a Plum Curculio sting. It is just superficial. We do have some superficial insect damage. That starts right at flowering. We have an abutting 150-acre abandoned orchard next door where all the bugs can come to us from. We took some challenges on here that are way over our head. So you start at blossoming with Surround and we did another 10 sprays during the season. In our 15 sprays, 10 of them had Surround in them. We did it continually to keep a coat on. Every time it rains some washes off. We use a lot of Surround. Maybe too much. It is ridiculously expensive.”

Although it is an irritant, Surround just washes off picked apples and hasn’t really affected the wom-en’s marketing. The apples are picked selectively for the right color, shape, and feel to get the highest quality apple. Sue says they sample each variety until getting a sense for what the characteristics are they should pick for to get the best flavor. The ap-ples are picked into a bucket strapped to the picker, who then carries full buckets to boxes in the van.

Marketing has been difficult for the sisters, just as it was for Roland.

“We were going to plan all this marketing ahead of


Sue Harragin, Cathy’s sister, stands with a Cortland tree from which she has picked a ripe apple for snacking.

time,” says Cathy, “but we’re just running by the seat of our pants. We’re going to restaurants, farm-ers markets, and organic health food stores. We’re selling to Living Earth in Worcester, Debra’s Natu-ral Gourmet in Concord. The Natick Community Organic Farm took some to sell. I’m also making applesauce and jelly and selling that. I’m trying to sell the organic apple firsts for $3 a pound and I’m having a really tough time. Conventional apples are selling for 59¢ a pound at the supermarket.

“I feel like we’re making inroads on marketing,” she continues, “but it will be better next year. The crop is a little early this year and people aren’t ready for apples. The restaurants are supportive. They are in-volved in the local food movement. But this is mid September and they are not buying a lot, yet. And we’re not doing any better at farmers markets. But the apples are ready now!”

While you would think being organic would help sell the apples, in an apple area like Sterling it can be a problem. A friend of Sue who runs a farm stand decided he didn’t want their apples because he sells other apples and didn’t want to deal with the conver-sations that would come from having conventional and organic in one place at different prices.

Stores like Whole Foods are interested in carrying apples from the orchard. But Cathy and Sue are re-luctant to sell so many wholesale.

Sue asks: “Do we want to be selling retail or whole-sale? The farmer is going to do best by selling to the end user. Not by selling to the middleman. That’s the way it has been in farming in the United States for a hundred and fifty years.

“It might be easier to have a Boston market mind-set,” she continues, “ rather than a Central Massa-chusetts one. We’re trying to get $3 a pound for first quality apples. That is asking a lot, but that is what it costs.”

And those costs are mounting while the apples are producing faster than the sisters can market them.

“There are so many costs,” sighs Sue. “I’m not quite ready to look at the books yet. I’m really horrified to think about how much money we are spending. It all adds up so very, very fast.”

But the difficulties the sisters are experiencing are common to new farmers. Next year marketing will be better organized, more of the orchard will be pruned and producing, much of the equipment will have already been purchased, and routines and schedules will be normalized. Cathy and Sue will have found ways to utilize seconds in diverse products, and the original plan of raising herbs and perennials will be a little closer to fulfillment. It will never seem quite as overwhelming as it does now.

Asked about how the year has been overall, Cathy smiles and replies in an understatement: “Well, as it turns out, it’s been a little busy with the apples. I’ve traded one obsession for another!”

photo by Jack KittredgeOne of the many trees at Bird of the Hand weighed down with ripe apples.


by Nicko Rubin

Trees producing fruit for commercial production do not grow on their own roots. We take this funda-mental break from the common pattern of nature for granted. We propagate fruit trees via grafting on to an appropriate rootstock. What are the implications of this activity and what might we gain through growing fruit trees on their own roots?

I have frequently found myself marveling at mas-sive wild apple trees growing along the edges of old fields; sprawling and unkempt, older branches bent nearly to the earth by the weight of fruit from seasons passed. Alternatively, I have watched a 60 acre orchard planted and abandoned about 15 years later quickly degenerate into a non productive and disease ridden eyesore, large swaths of trees dying off completely.

What is happening in these different cases?

The 60 acre orchard was carefully planned and planted according to the norms of the time: hardy productive varieties on semi-dwarf rootstocks (prob-ably M7), designed for conventional management including the “necessary” fungicide and pesticide applications common to fruit production in the Northeast. Upon abandonment (likely for economic reasons, exhaustion, market changes, site challenges related airflow...) the orchard’s productivity rapidly declined and trees actually began to die. In many in-stances unproductive rootstock suckers have snaked their way through to the canopy of the ailing trees.

A prevalence of a single species, likely not selected for disease resistance and planted over 60 acres, set the stage for a high rate of insect and fungal disease. Trees planted at a spacing designed for pruned trees

Growing Fruit Trees on their Own Roots: A Radical Proposition

constrained by dwarfing rootstocks may not have been able to sustain themselves as their tops were allowed to grow unchecked. An imbalance between the vigorous unpruned tops and the dwarfing root-stocks could have proved too taxing. This combina-tion of factors led to the present mess of non pro-ductive dead and dying trees.

The wild trees on the edge of fields have grown with little to no maintenance, and continue to produce for decades. Several significant differences set these trees apart from the ones in the orchard. They have grown up from seed deposited by animals, they have likely suffered rodent damage, deer browse, or any other number of traumas, they have seen little to no pruning, manipulation, or spraying, and unlike the grafted trees they are growing on their own roots.

This seedling vigor can dramatically enhance the long term health of the tree and likely the qual-ity of the fruit. Following severe damage, perhaps from wind or snow, suckers from the base grow to produce apples of the same quality as the parent tree. Unfortunately the size, flavor, and appear-ance of these wild, seed grown fruits may not meet our expectations for fresh eating or cooking apples (though they will lend themselves beautifully to ci-der).

Given current production pressures on farmers and orchardists, often forced to compete with a global market, growers take advantage of any production efficiencies available. Dwarfing rootstocks for fruit trees have allowed for higher yields/acre realized sooner, as well as dramatically increased efficiencies for spraying and picking. New orchards are almost entirely on fully dwarfing rootstocks and most major fruit tree propagators produce no trees on full size or standard rootstocks. The common reason given

for not producing trees on their own roots is that the mature size and rooting pattern and correspond-ing vigor of a particular variety is not known, and thus research is needed to assess the growth pattern, fruiting, etc. of each variety. This is a daunting task in terms of time and money and for most purposes not necessary. Most trees will reliably grow to be full size, approximately 20 - 25 feet though a few varieties will naturally stay a bit smaller; trees hardy in your zone will have a hardy root system.

Many contexts outside of the commercial fruit or-chard may benefit from a tree on its own roots. Hard cider producers, able to harvest press dropped fruit, may find it economical to grow larger trees on their own roots. Own-root trees planted in pasture or hedgerows to generate animal fodder would produce more fruit per tree, better withstand browse and rub-bing, and live significantly longer. Home orchards often lack effective deer protection and thus don’t reap the same benefits a well fenced commercial or-chard does by having much of the fruiting wood be-low 5 feet (as deer will typically chew the low fruit buds before they ever have a chance to flower). A larger tree allowed to grow with little to no pruning (as is the reality in many home orchards) may be an ideal fit and is likely to provide fruit for generations

Larger vigorous trees on their own roots would be ideal for very lightly managed deer yards, where trees get a minimal amount of attention. Trees al-lowed to naturalize often revert to the variety of the rootstock following some kind of damage from wind, snow, or animal browse. A tree on its own roots would be quick to bounce back and continue to produce fruit of the desired variety.

Trees growing on their own roots have not been well suited to conventional production systems due

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to their more vigorous growth; several strategies, however, can effectively constrain the growth of fruit trees:

• Tying down branches or whole trees to encourag-ing heavy, early cropping.

• Withholding nitrogen or irrigation to slow growth and encourage production of fruiting wood.

• Cultivating in the root-zone (row-cropping, or some other form of root pruning).

• Pruning in the summer to encourage fruit bud for-mation, as opposed to the winter, which encourages new growth (Corbett).

Modern horticulturists have done strikingly little with fruit trees on their own roots. British horti-culturist Hugh F. Ermen was one of the few who worked extensively with own-root fruit trees. In an essay advocating for fruit trees on their own roots he wrote: “Many fruit growers with long experi-ence will know that growing a tree as naturally as possible is the best way... Differences occur in trees on rootstocks due to the various degrees of incom-patibility between stock and scion” (Ermen). This “degree of incompatibility” likely hinders the tree’s capacity to produce to its optimal potential.

Phil Corbett, who has built on Ermen’s research remarks further: “Hugh discovered that there are several advantages in growing apples on their own roots, i.e. not grafted onto a rootstock. Those ad-vantages are: better health (although not altering the basic susceptibility of the variety to disease), fruit development is typical of the variety, giving: best possible flavour, best storage life, typical fruit size for the variety, [and] best overall fruit quality” (Cor-bett).

Corbett is working to develop different cropping methods and strategies that take advantage of the own-roots trees including the coppice orchard. Own-root fruit trees may be deliberately cut to the ground during the dormant season and allowed to resprout, effectively removing many persistent pests or diseases. This practice (to coppice) also creates a yield of useful wood products and mulch. He cuts a full north-south row and grows rotations of veg-etables until the fruit trees once again shade the row; at which point another row is cut. The surrounding orchard buffers winds and climatic fluctuations, and root die-off following the cutting feeds the soil.

How do we clonally propagate fruit trees growing on their own roots?

For hundreds of years people have propagated trees not only through grafting but also through a tech-nique called layering. Layering is essentially forcing a branch or shoot to develop roots while still con-nected to the parent plant. Today a form of layering called stooling or mound layering is still commonly used for the propagation of various fruit tree root-stocks. It can take several years to establish a highly productive stoolbed so the up front investment for a commercial operation can be high. However, the technique is essentially simple and may be done efficiently on a smaller scale, likely reducing plant production costs over time.

How to create a stoolbed:

Select plant material of your desired variety (a two year old grafted tree will likely be easiest to find and transplant). Heavier cropping varieties may be a good place to start. Species of fruit tree besides apple, such as pear, plum, cherry, or apricot are also suited to propagation via layering.

Prune the tree heavily while it is dormant, removing most or all branches and heading back the leader to about 30 inches. This will encourage vigorous growth of new branches. If you are transplanting an actively growing tree, wait until the following win-ter to prune.

Plant your tree in a well prepared bed, with adequate nitrogen and high phosphorus (for root develop-ment), at a low angle (about 20-30 degrees). {see figure 1}

When new shoots reach about 4-6 inches tall, pile friable soil or sawdust a few inches up their base ensuring good contact. Repeat later in the season (July), covering a total of 6-8 inches of the sprouts. {see figure 2}

In November once the wood is dormant, carefully expose the now rooted shoots and remove them from the parent plant with clean sharp pruners. Be sure that the shoots you are selecting are emerging from above the graft, as those below will be of the rootstock. {see figure 3}

The rooted shoots can now be transplanted into another bed or pots to grow on for another year or until ready to be planted in the field.

It may be advantageous to give trees a year to es-tablish themselves on the site, prior to attempting to layer them, as it may be asking too much of less vig-orous stock. Layering may also be attempted with larger trees. Simply planting a tree deeply, burying the graft, will often result in trees growing on their own roots in addition to on the grafted rootstock; however you also run the risk of suffocating and rot-ting the root system of the tree, particularly if plant-ing in heavier soils.

One challenge of beginning a stoolbed with grafted stock is that the rootstock will persist in the bed. Once the wood of the desired variety roots suf-ficiently the rootstock may be dug out and cut off. It would be preferable to establish a stoolbed with plant material already on its own roots. Rooted suckers from trees on their own roots will also be true to type.

I plan to establish stoolbeds this coming spring here in Central Vermont, and I encourage others to do the same. Own-root fruit trees offer a number of exciting and underutilized opportunities for home orchards, naturalized landscapes, and organic pro-duction. Own-root fruit trees represent something as old as the forest itself and something new for ecological fruit production. The fact that they do not fit well in our conventional orchards, and are thus rarely propagated, is no reason to disregard them. Trees on their own roots are likely to be an asset for generations.

References:

Corbett, Phil. “The Own-Root Fruit Tree Project.” Cool Temperate Plants and Services for a Sus-tainable World 2002. 28 Dec. 2010 <http://www.cooltemperate.co.uk/own_root.shtml>.

Ermen, Hugh F. “Growing Apple Trees on their Own Roots.” Orange Pippin November 2008. 28 Dec. 2010 <http://www.orangepippin.com/articles/own-roots>.

Macdonald, Bruce. 1986. Practical Woody Plant Propagation for Nursery Growers. Portland, OR: Timber Press.

Nicko Rubin owns and operates East Hill Tree Farm, a nursery for fruit trees, nuts, and berries in Plainfield, VT. He also offers consultation and ed-ible ecological landscape design and planting. He

can be contacted at [email protected].

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by Jack Kittredge

East Dummerston, Vermont, is in the extreme Southeast corner of the state. It is hilly country, go-ing from a thousand feet in elevation down to the Connecticut River. These hills, where the frosts roll downhill and don’t freeze early blossoms, grow good tree fruit.

It was on land in these hills that Read Miller’s fam-ily settled in 1760, before Vermont was even a state. Dwight Miller and Son is the farm name now, even though Read’s father was that son.

“We are one of the longest continually operated family farms in Vermont,” says Read. “Deerfield, Massachusetts, is just a two days walk from here, but you are going back to the 1600s there. Then settlement stalled, because of native American pres-sure. The settlers were afraid to come up the river and to leave what was known. Then things finally broke open in about 1750 and you go from Deerfield to Guilford.”

About four generations ago there were five Miller brothers on Read’s road, and each one had a farm. But the last two generations, there has just been one male descendant. First Read’s father and then him. He worries that it wouldn’t take much to break that chain now.

“I do desire to keep things together,” he admits, “partly because I like what I do and partly because you can’t make at will the opportunity I was given and that my children have been partaking in. It has cost me as much to hold onto the real estate and the business that we have as it would have to buy it from scratch. But it is worth it to have that opportu-nity. I don’t know what will happen with the kids.”

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photo by Jack KittredgeRead Miller in his lovely Vermont hills.


Daughter Martha is 25. She went to Hampshire College and then decided to come back. She runs the CSA and all the farmers markets. But will she end up with someone who wants to settle in East Dummerston? Son Will just got out of Alfred State College, where he studied construction. He’s part of the farm and likes to sugar, but doesn’t like stress. Daughter Ruth is in Ithaca studying herbology. She wants to grow herbs and make tinctures. Ruth asked her father a month ago: ‘What are you going to do if the kids don’t come home?’ He said: ‘I’m going to make syrup ‘til the day I die.’

Diversity

Miller has about 60 acres in apples now, which is fewer than he had before. But he has changed his thinking from apples alone, to apples and everything else too. In order to keep the farm in the black he has had to diversify and take a look at how each enterprise affects the other ones. He was paying too

much for organic feed for his pigs, for example, so he started planting corn.

“I realized I could maybe sell an acre of corn for $1000,” he says. “But if I fed it to pigs I could real-ize $3000 to $4000 for it. It’s like Walmart – you have to leave out the middleman and be integrated top to bottom. But it drives you a little crazy be-cause you have to do that as one more farm venture – livestock feed production!”

Miller doesn’t have the equipment to raise soy, so his feed is long on energy and short on protein. Be-sides the corn, he feeds apple pomace, peelings from the squash operation and other farm waste. That gets the pigs to December, when he buys a few bags of grain to finish them.

Besides pigs, Read sells 200 broilers every two weeks. He keeps them in 12 by 12 pens which get

moved once or twice a day. He also has enough land to devote to three peach orchards. Because of their short life he has one or-chard coming, one working, and one going.

“It’s a simple, stupid way of thinking,” he says, “but it works. Think of a peach as a tomato plant. It doesn’t tolerate stress and doesn’t like weeds. They have a very brittle wood so you don’t prune them as large trees. You want the crop to be held close to the center of the tree. Consequently you want to prune hard every year, and if you lose a crop you want to cut the tree back to two or three feet from the base and let it regrow.

“The way most peaches are grown,” he continues, “is the pits come from a cannery. They are lined out in a nursery row and grow up from the pit. Then they are budded in the summer. They take one bud from a good fruit variety and place it in an incision in the bark of the growing pit. The next year they cut the top off above the bud and force it to grow out from the bud. The pit, which has genes from all over, is the root stock and will produce a fairly large tree. So you plant them close and prune them hard. I plant them 10 to 12 feet apart. I train them to an open vase, but I want the crop in the center so it doesn’t split the wood.”

Read spent a year budding 4000 fruit trees a day in Maryland to pay for college. His family has been growing peaches since the 1800s. The farm charges $3 a pound for retail peaches, and $2 a pound for pick-your-own. He cans the ones which aren’t any good and still gets $2 a pound for them.

Miller also does well with pears. He has a dwarf bosc planting that is doing well which he put in at 10 by 16 feet per tree. He would like to do more plantings, but pears present a cash flow problem.

“I can’t afford to tie up $10,000 now and wait 8 years to get it back,” he explains. “I can plant lettuce or spinach and see that money in a month. Raspber-ries are a little more of a wait, and blueberries are even more. Even apples will produce in 3 years for a dwarf or semi-dwarf. But when you get into pears, it’s really difficult.”

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Farm sign outside the packing shed.

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 2�B-In addition to the tree fruit, Read drills 8000 to 9000 maple taps per year. Currently everything produced at the farm is certified organic except the processed products and the eggs. Although they feed the chick-ens organic feed, they buy in young birds from a non-organic farm rather than getting just-hatched chicks.

Apples

Miller’s farm has always been productive. The Uni-versity of Vermont did a study in the 1980s looking at all the commercial apple orchards in Vermont. At that time, Read says, they had the lowest chemi-cal inputs of any farm, by a large margin. But their production was about double the state average per acre – 680 bushels. That included non-bearing trees, too. Their high production wash what indirectly got Read to go organic.

“What happened,” he explains, “was the Chinese government found out about our production and hired me to consult for them. So in 1994 I went to China. They told me straight up that they were hir-ing me to figure out how to improve and modernize their agriculture so they could move their popula-tion into the cities to generate cash flow working in factories.

“I worked,” he continues, “in an area the size of New England – the Xi’an area – which is now one of the largest apple producing regions in the world. At that time they grew very little – they grew kiwis, strawberries and grapes, but very few apples. When I came away from there I thought: ‘I can grow or-ganic apples.’ Where I was they didn’t have any tools – no chemicals at all. They had no sprayers. You go into a peach orchard and they were folding newspaper around each peach to keep disease and insects off. This whole place infused me with the realization that there are different approaches.

“Of course the fruit that they were raising wouldn’t have been put on our market shelves,” Read con-cludes. “Maybe 2% to 5% of it was what we would call saleable. The rest of it they consumed because they needed everything that was grown. To us, it would have been a processing crop. Also, we had some serious wet weather issues for a decade start-

ing right about then. I literally almost lost the farm two or three times because I wasn’t dealing with normal moisture levels. Since then I’ve learned how to deal with these disease problems.”

At one point in 2000, Miller asserts, his farm pro-duced half the organic apples raised east of the Mis-sissippi. Of course that can’t compare with the state of Washington, where they raise apples in the east-ern half of the state that is a desert, and are growing some 20,000 acres of organic apples. Read sighs that they had two weeks in East Dummerston where it rained more than in a full year in the Columbia River apple belt of Washington.

Where a lot of modern apple orchards have opted for dwarf trees for their good use of space, early

production and ladderless management, Read sees some problems with them in an organic setting.

“I’m a fan of dwarf trees,” he insists, “but the prob-lem with them is you need to manage them. It’s an incredibly efficient tree, but it doesn’t have any abil-ity to deal with weeds. Semi-dwarf trees have more support structure and ability to deal with stress, even though their yield per acre might be off. I don’t have an easy, cheap herbicide. So I don’t want to go to the full dwarves.”

Basically, apples are a huge gamble, says Read, largely dependent on the weather: “It takes a hell of a lot of money to raise an acre of organic apples. If the weather were to give us a full crop we would need over $1000 an acre just to run the sprayer.

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But the return can be very great. We had a freeze this spring that cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were 9 days earlier than the earliest year on record, then we had this freeze that came through. It was 25˚ here. You can’t really do much on apples to save them at that temperature. There is a copper-based frost preventative we used to use to gain a couple of degrees. But they don’t make that anymore and it’s not organic anyway. Then we had a drought. This year we lost the middle and bottom apples, and whole varieties like Fuji that I’m re-ally happy with. But we just moved on -- the rate of return on worry and frustration is from zero on down!”

Back in the 1970s Miller Orchard went low spray. But they had a number of apple varieties that people didn’t want. So Read grafted over a number of the old trees to the Macintosh, Cortland and Red Delicious that were popular. But preferences have changed and now people want Fujis and Empire and Mutzu, so those varieties were added.

“I can sell Fujis and Mutzus all winter long,” Miller states. “I can grow them with much more success than Macs or some of the other varieties. But there

are problems, too. Apple Maggot loves Honey Crisp and Gala. Gala are easy to grow, but you have to get through the maggot season. So I have Fuji and Mut-zu, which maggot doesn’t like and scab doesn’t get to very well, and Cortland which I can grow clean (no blemishes from scab) but it has a hard time with maggot.”

One of the things that makes a huge difference to success with apples is the spring weather.

“We need about three weeks of dryish weather dur-ing bloom time,” Miller sighs. “The materials that we use, whether it is lime sulfur or sulfur wettable powder, have a very short life. We need to apply them in dry weather. Think of it this way: ‘Your painted house repels moisture, but you don’t paint your house in the rain.’ We have to make sure that we are applying to a dry leaf so it will stick on. Lime sulfur does that very well, and it won’t wash off. But we have had periods of 46 days of wet weather during two months. That is why we do so many diverse things. We have to protect ourselves if the apples don’t have a good crop.”

Read has found that Lime sulfur works really well on summer diseases at the right rate, and it also is a miticide. He starts spraying about the first of May because it is so effective if the weather is right. He also likes Serenade.

“It works great on black rot,” he explains, “and it works better than captan on fruit rot for strawber-ries and peaches. Fruit rot is the spot on peaches that turns brown and starts to rot in your hand. It’s a fungal problem. It’s simple with fruit. If you have rain, you’ll have problems with disease. If you have a drought, you are dealing with insects!”

To understand insect problems, Miller says, you have to understand the apple.

“The seeds drive everything,” he stresses. “They produce the hormones that hold the apple on. Any-thing that abscises the seeds takes the fruit off. Anything that puts a stress on the seed will abort the fruit. The spur leaves that open up first thing in the spring have a lot to do with driving the quality of the fruitlet. You don’t want to have a caterpillar coming in and feeding on those spur leaves. Even though the big leaves come out later, the spur leaves are connected to the fruit flower. So if you damage the spur leaves it is immediately connected to the

flower parts. When you have these little caterpillars that are coming out before bloom, when you are in pink, you want to be out there looking for anything that is going to cut or nick or damage that little leaf. You want to kill it. You do that with spray materials.

“If you’re not organic,” he points out, “you can spray once a week with a one-size-fits-all spray with several chemicals. That will work, but what you don’t realize is those one or two sprays killed ev-erything. They may have been labeled for pest A or pest B or pest C. But really they killed 90% of what was there. You might have had D or E or Z that you weren’t aware of, being taken out. So you make one application and you might have had a two and one half week window, which was a critical time. Whether it was post-bloom petal fall, or the start of maggot season in the summertime, that application really cleaned your plate for a long time, if not the entire season. What I do is nothing like that.”

“If you are organic,” he continues, “the timing is a critical problem. Wet weather can interfere with your spray program, either washing it away, or

photo courtesy Miller Orchards

A Miller apple tree laden with apples.photo courtesy Miller Orchards

Read Miller can’t get enough pears to satisfy his customers.

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 25B-concentrating it on certain areas so it burns. All the mistakes I’ve made over the years have cost me millions of dollars, literally. When someone asks me how to grow organic apples, I ask them how big their checkbook is!”

You have to learn about pest cycles, according to Miller, because there are times you have to pay at-tention to and use broad spectrum compounds.

“When they flower,” he says, “as the petals start to fall off, go through every four days with a full dose of Entrust and or neem and or pyganic. There are insects loving it then. There are about 10 of them that are just getting the red carpet. Four of them will wipe you out. You will have codling moth, and if you have little fruit the insect will feed on the end of the apple and go in and take the seeds out. The other big one you might have is European Apple Sawfly. It looks like a small ugly housefly. It will lay an egg in the open petals and go in and abscise the seeds.

“Pyganic is very expensive,” he continues, “and often doesn’t work well. The problem with it is that it is very short acting. You spray it in the morning and it’s done in the afternoon. It’s a broad-spectrum contact killer that comes from chrysanthemum. It is pyrethrum. I use neem products sometimes. But I’ve fallen in love with Entrust. It’s the organic version of Spintor without the inerts. You have to remember that the products that we use don’t have preservatives or modifiers in them to intensify their effectiveness. So we tolerate problems, and I hope my customers will too! But anything you use is incredibly expensive. It is going to cost you $50 an acre and isn’t going to work the day after tomorrow. But if you don’t spray, you might as well take your apples out and plant lettuce.”

To control curculio, Miller bought a trailer load of Surround in 2000. Because of wet weather he sprayed all 200 acres of apples three different times within 10 days. It works, he says, but it is not cheap!

A few years ago the orchard suffered a fire which destroyed their main packing building and put the farm in a real financial hole. That was a defining moment for Read, who decided they had to get more for their products. Where they once sold wholesale to Shaw’s and Stop and Shop, he began to focus on how to sell direct.

“I’m putting any apple that is reasonably clean,” he says, “in a box and getting paid top dollar. I take it straight to the customer who wants that kind of apple. I can get paid a lot more money for fewer ap-ples. And instead of having 10,000 bushels of some-thing that we need to sell in the next 10 minutes, we have 10,000 bushels and make it a point to spread it out in storage with a controlled atmosphere so we can market them for 8 months. Fresh quality fruit will get $40 a bushel. For vinegar apples we get $30 a bushel, and for cider apples we get $15 a bushel. That’s because I don’t sell them as apples. Instead I press them and I charge $5 a gallon for cider, and $10 a gallon for vinegar.”

Occasionally people will call Read up and say: ‘We want your Northern Spy cider apples.’ He tells them: ‘No, I’ll sell you Northern Spy cider.’ They will be perturbed because he is not selling them what they want. But Read says he sells fresh fruit, and juice. He doesn’t sell cider apples. He needs to add value to them and get $15 a bushel instead of $4 or $5.

“I’m a dead man without apples,” says Miller. “They’re a lot more than half of our gross. But to survive we have had to be diverse. I used to figure I wouldn’t touch a crop unless I could do $10,000 in it. That’s not the case now. Butternut squash is important, probably spinach is our biggest surprise crop. We sell that 8 months of the year. Maple is year round, our pear crop I can keep 3 or 4 months, but it is always spoken for before it comes off the tree. We do a lot of pear processing, I make a lot of juice for fermenters. We also process rhubarb for juice for wineries. It’s one of my first cash crops other than maple syrup or greenhouse crops. We have acres of rhubarb and most of it goes for wine. We wash it to get the field taste off and then run it through our chopper four times. We end up with what looks like a paper slurry. Then we press it in our cider press under 2500 pounds for 45 minutes, until you can count the drops coming off it.

“We’re selling spinach, vinegar, tomatoes, peaches, apple pies, applesauce, anything that goes along with the fresh fruit,” he continues. We just add more to the truck. Yesterday we sold 30 gallons of cider and 15 organic chickens to someone who was get-ting married on a hilltop. We’re servicing maybe 50 small customers. They all want something differ-ent.”

Miller says he started off producing vinegar as an organic herbicide. He had a lot of cider one year and put a thousand gallons into a tank, added some vinegar mother, and forgot about it. The next year he started using some of it to burn weeds, but then a dairy farmer called him up and wanted some as a feed additive because it balances the cow’s stom-ach pH and lowers the somatic cell count. The next thing Read knew he was making 8000 gallons, bot-tling it, and selling it as a high quality vinegar – it still tastes like apples!

Working with crops like cider and maple syrup, Miller has dealt plenty with government regulators. He realizes it is a losing battle to resist their require-ments and is usually among the first to embrace change.

“I don’t have much energy for a battle I can’t pos-sibly win,” he explains. “When I get up in the morn-ing, I have to pay for this farm. And it doesn’t take $10 to do it! But sometimes I move too fast! In 1998 the E. coli thing really ramped. We were making a lot of juice. At times we have peaked at over a hundred thousand gallons of cider. The market said: ‘You’ve got to do something to control E. coli.’ So I built a UV light machine that worked. But then Stop and Shop said: ‘We’re only taking cider if it is pasteurized.’ I had just spent everything I had to put in the UV light. But three weeks later I had a 500 gallon per minute pasteurizer in and I was selling to Stop and Shop. I did that because I felt I needed to do it to be financially viable.”

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Worm Power Nat Farmerad_Layout 1 12/20/10 2:16 PM Page 1

photo courtesy Miller Orchards

Miller peaches packed for shipment.


by Michael Phillipswww.GrowOrganicApples.com

All fruit growers likely can agree that “orchard health” implies building some degree of innate re-sistance on the part of fruit trees to fungal and bac-terial disease. It’s a concept readily understood with respect to our own bodies, after all, when germs come on the scene and our immune systems respond accordingly. Nothing is ever guaranteed but inner fortitude certainly offers a leg up. Biological health in the orchard provides a similar advantage for our trees. Our job as growers is to steward certain help-ful associations. What follows is a whole new way of thinking about disease and the choices we make as organic orchardists.

Holistic methods emphasize building system health across the board. I’m a big believer in understanding how things work so growers can then visualize the effectiveness of ideas, both old and new. Innovation to fit the situation at hand is a huge part of what we do in our orchards. Nature is dynamic... climate is changing... and every ecosystem is localized. Shap-ing a better biological reality lies at the heart of good management choices. We rely on both science and intuition to perceive an ever-evolving course of action. Years go by in tweaking effective methods with respect to nuance and health-gained subtleties. What counts are a bountiful fruit crop that delights our customers and packs a nutritional wallop—and damn straight—makes a respectable living for our own families. What follows is my thinking on using orchard health to grow that kind of harvest and a re-port to date of how it’s working here in Lost Nation.

Fruit tree culture has been stuck in allopathic mode for far too long, solely seeking out short-term fun-gicides and antibiotics to destroy disease-causing organisms from without. We never understood that the tree’s own immune ability could be coupled with the stimulation of friendly microbes to defeat disease from within.

Action CentralA scab ascospore erupts forth from pseudothecia on fallen leaves (from the year before) on a rainy spring day. Significant odds guide this harbinger of fungal disease to an unfurling leaf where prolonged wetness facilitates hyphal growth of the spore. En-zymes are required to “crack the cuticle” and thus access nutrient resources within a single leaf cell. An infection occurs if everything goes along for a long enough time (the so-called wetting period) and no biological processes or allopathic fungicides interrupt the pathogenic intrusion. Bacteria work openings in the tree’s vascular system in a similar fashion.

Old School OrganicsThe traditional organic approach to defeating this disease plan utilizes copper early on, then various formulations of sulfur and/or lime sulfur. Copper works akin to a blunt barrier by unfavorably alter-ing surface hospitality. Sulfur works as a protectant fungicide in altering solution pH thereby inhibiting the production of penetration enzymes. Lime sulfur

The Holistic Approach: Using Biological Health as an Effective Means

for Abating Tree Fruit Disease

brings an eradicant edge by actually penetrating the leaf tissue and thus whacking that hyphal start out of the ballpark if applied within the first 24 to 36 hours following successful wetting. All these mineral fun-gicides have significant impact on soil and arboreal organisms, return bloom, beneficials, yield, fruit fin-ish, and perhaps even your happiness.

We accept such compromises in using these fungi-cidal medicines as rampant disease would be a far worse scene. Yet before we go on let me support that impact statement with some words from Dave Rosenberger at Cornell several years back in a New York edition of Scaffolds:

Scab-susceptible cultivars such as McIntosh have no place in organic orchards because they will require constant spraying with sulfur and liquid lime-sulfur (LLS). Repeated applications of sul-fur and/or LLS will reduce yield by at least 20 to 25%, and there are no other organically approved fungicides that will control apple scab. Further-more, the fuel costs associated with spraying sul-fur and/or LLS 10 or 15 times during the season will only increase in coming years. If consumers begin buying products based on energy use or carbon footprint, then organic apples sprayed 15 times per year with sulfur may ultimately prove no more acceptable than conventional non-or-ganic apples.

I can and have argued with extension bias on nu-merous occasions. You see such substitution ap-proaches to organics most often in orchard opera-tions transitioning from IPM for the better market price. Limiting sulfur and lime sulfur applications by accurately gauging wetting periods and mature spore presence is critical. (All this gets explained in detail in my book, The Apple Grower.) The savvy use of micronized sulfur, on the order of 2 to 4 applications in the primary infection period — and absolutely coupled with fall sanitation of leaf inoculum -- has proven successful for a number of organic growers in the Northeast and Midwest. But the point remains there are impacts and all this costs money for nothing more than “disease control” if all goes right.

The Heart of Holistic A number of tangents lie exposed in that ascospore scenario that suggest courses of action beyond the typical allopathic dose.

• Hyphal intrusion initiates production of secondary plant metabolites that provide a systemic immune response for the tree. This phytochemistry can be stimulated by applying certain plant extracts and foliar nutrients.

• Numerous other microorganisms play both a competitive role and a symbiotic role through full arboreal colonization of the tree canopy.

• Balanced tree nutrition can best be brought about by fungal duff management favoring beneficial fungal species.

I will be very brief on all three points here, relying on the majority of you to perceive what orchard ecologist George Bird at Michigan State University has been teaching for years to be true. Interdepen-dent and interconnected networks of living organ-isms interact together to bring the overall system to a fuller or better state. The question before us now becomes what happens when we honor such wis-dom?


Scab lesions on a leaf


Fungus’ hyphal intrusion into cuticle of leaf

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Stimulating the immune response of the tree can be done by introducing the very compounds a healthy tree produces in response to disease presence. These so-called phytoalexins are various terpenoid and isoflavanoid compounds... which happens to be among the attributes proffered by pure neem oil. Similarly, the cuticle defense of the leaf which must be overcome by spore enzymes can be supported by boosting levels of silica. Fermented herbal teas of horsetail and nettle are premium sources of bioavail-able silica for the summer months.

Sustaining critter health throughout the tree canopy requires that we understand what depletes arboreal colonization as well as what nourishes this critical holistic force. I utilize activated effective microbes (boosted by a molasses feed) to introduce “biologi-cal reinforcement” onto the scene — others choose to do this with aerated compost teas ala Elaine Ingham of the Soil Food Web — but the fundamen-tal missing link by purists has been food resource reserves to keep the arboreal communities running in full gear. The fatty acids in unpasteurized liquid fish and pure neem oil are the fuel behind prolonged colonization.

Ecosystem relationships at ground level also have absolute relevance to how the tree stands up in the face of environmental disease pressure. Here we enter into emulating the forest edge with respect to fungal dominance of the soil microorganism com-munity. Healthy fruit trees rely on both mycorrhizal and saprophytic fungi to access balanced nutrition which in turn creates that internal fortitude I spoke of earlier. You simply can’t buy this kind of nutrition in a bag! Fungal duff management is all about feed-ing fungal allies through the use of woodsy mulches (read my lips: ramial wood chips) and those fatty acids of fish and neem dripping to the ground when sprayed to the point of run-off.

The Four Holistic Sprays of SpringThe establishment of a holistic approach to disease begins with four health-supporting sprays for our

fruit trees early in the growing season. I absolutely forego copper and lime sulfur by doing this. Com-mercial growers may feel compelled to make a time-ly application of micronized sulfur on more suscep-tible varieties during this time if faced with a major infection event. Sometimes weather patterns induce serious disease risk — thereby calling for a shot of old-time assurance despite what it does to canopy colonization in the short term. Home orchardists can ride through more difficult circumstances than com-mercial ones simply by emphasizing orchard health across the board.

These fixings of orchard health consist of pure neem oil, unpasteurized liquid fish, and a diverse complex of microbes. This is primarily a nutritional brew for beneficial fungi that also happens to stimulate tree immune function. A competitive arboreal environ-ment will ward off pathogenic disease and all the more so when fruit tree phytochemistry is activated. The primary infection period for most tree disease is effectively straddled by these sprays. Yet there’s more to this story. The nitrogen boost (from the fish) going into bloom will strengthen pollen viability and meristem development for return bloom. Foli-age pests will be impacted by azadirachtin com-pounds in the neem which inhibit the progression of egg to larvae to adult... thus these holistic spray applications serve as a biological replacement for petroleum-based dormant oil as well. Early season moth cycles get disrupted, setting up “lesser genera-tions” the rest of the season.

Now for the specifics about timing and rates. The bud stages given here are for apple but can be bounced a week earlier for stone fruit where other diseases have proven a concern. Apple timing is absolutely correlated to the primary infection pe-riod of most fungal diseases and appropriate for berries as well.

• Week of Quarter-Inch Green. The soil is a sleepy place coming out of the dormant season, even after sap flow has begun in the tree. This first application works in part as a catalyst spray to get both soil and arboreal food webs engaged. Buds are showing solid green tissue, somewhere

between green tip and half-inch green. Pick a warmer day than not within this time frame to thoroughly wet down the entire branch structure and trunk and ground surface within the dripline of each tree. Target any fallen apple and pear leaf piles from the previous fall to facilitate pseudo-thecia decomposition. Both the neem rate and the liquid fish rate can be doubled for this one appli-cation only as phytotoxic risk to exposed foliage is minimal.

• Early Pink. Leaf tissue has filled out consider-ably at the base of blossoms, with that first smile of pink revealing itself in the apple flower. We’re still in catalyst mode as regards the trunk and ground but also tuned into the competitive ben-efits of arboreal microbe communities on the leaf and flower cluster surfaces. Don’t wait too long for this as neem oil and effective microbes should never be applied directly on open king blossoms.

• Petal Fall. Spraying to the point of runoff is now the name of the game, with lots of leaf and fledgling fruitlets to cover thoroughly. This is an important renewal spray as the bloom period may have been extended by cool weather. You will need to average what marks orchard-wide petal fall between early varieties that finish blooming well before later varieties. Weather plays a big role in this interpretation as rain “tickles the fan-cy” of pathogenic fungi especially at this moment in the season. Timing here is a dance between the need to potentially smother excess bloom (via the fatty acids) and interject a sulfur application after the holistic application because of a “guaranteed” major spore release.

• First Cover. Ditto. But wait... some of you may not realize what an orchardist means by the term cover spray. This marks 7 to 10 days following the petal fall application. Spray strategies for cer-tain pests (particularly the use of refined kaolin clay for curculio) overlap at this time... bringing the concept of multi-faceted nuance into full play.

Community Orchard RatesThis assumes a hundred gallon spray tank capac-ity to cover one acre of trees. A half gallon of pure neem oil mixed with a quarter cup of soap emulsi-fier mixed into 100 gallons of water achieves a

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phyto-safe 0.5% neem oil concentration. Two gal-lons of liquid fish and one gallon of activated EM completes the brew.

I can’t emphasize enough that the benefits of whole plant medicine only come when using cold-pressed 100% neem oil rather than any of the patented neem extract products! Please see my website and/or book for instruction on how to mix pure neem oil prop-erly and subsequently clean out sprayer lines after-wards. You’ll also find a complete resource section for biologically-approved suppliers.

Home Orchard RatesThis assumes a four gallon backpack sprayer is used to cover so many trees to the point of runoff. Mix 2.5 ounces of pure neem oil with a generous tea-spoonful of soap emulsifier to achieve a 0.5% neem concentration. Use 10 ounces of liquid fish and one ounce (4 tablespoons) of EM mother culture for this backpack volume. Add a dollop of blackstrap molas-ses to launch those dormant microbes.

Summertime ContingenciesWe have done wonderful things to get microbial al-lies into the orchard system with these four holistic sprays. The majority of plant surfaces have been colonized going into bloom and beyond petal fall despite the vagaries of weather and ultraviolet deg-radation and limited use of mineral fungicides. Now we must be sure to feed and nurture their existence through the growing months ahead when other dis-ease-causing organisms come onto the scene. Some may think this sounds dubious — even preposter-ously risky from a commercial perspective — yet ultimately we can either fight “microbe reality” with heavy-hitting spray materials or work from a deeper level of understanding.

Arboreal brews now go totally herbal. Pure neem oil continues to be at the heart of an on-going nu-tritional spray program along with certain herbal teas. Basically, what’s being achieved during these months when the fruit sizes up is ensuring good cal-cium levels, interrupting the summer moth complex, and boosting resistance to rots and other surface diseases like sooty blotch. I aim to keep a 10 to 14 day application schedule through the rest of June, all of July, all of August to achieve a respectable fruit finish for community sales. Commercial fruit grow-ing demands such additional attention be directed at aesthetic disease pressure... which may not matter quite so much in home plantings... making the rec-ommendation for summer health sprays just that.

Having whetted your whistle about the homegrown herbal approach (I hope) I’ll share a bit more detail. Fermented teas of horsetail are included 3 times in the sprays starting at petal fall. The silica content of Equisetum arvense is high, and it turns out that silica plays a role in the cuticle defense against particular summer fungi that “smudge” the surface of apples and pears. Fermented teas of nettle could actually be used anytime but I wait to do this in con-junction with horsetail and beyond into the summer months. Nettle is pure tonic nutrition for plant and food web alike. Comfrey packs a wallop of calcium in its deep green leaves and this gets included each time with the pure neem. Making a fermented herb tea is simple. Fill a five gallon bucket with fresh

herb, lightly packed. Boil a pot of water to pour over the leaves (as opposed to boiling the herb in the wa-ter) as this maximizes nutrient extraction. Now fill bucket to brim with un-chlorinated water. Let set for a full week, loosely covered to prevent significant evaporation. This fermentation period makes the constituents that much more bioavailable for foliar absorption. These teas are “diluted” in that I add the strained tea from each bucket for each herb being used to each 100 gallon batch of spray.

Stirring the Biological StewOften we refer to reducing overwintering disease inoculum as good sanitation practice. This involves aggressive mowing, spreading woodsy compost, lightly liming atop fallen leaves, and spraying nitro-gen-rich compounds to facilitate leaf decomposition. All important and useful techniques... I just prefer calling this “stirring the biological stew” in order to keep the concept of fungal duff support upfront in my conscious efforts to always build biological con-nection.

Fall pulsing agents have treble the relevance. I time this application of neem oil and liquid fish when ap-proximately 40 to 60 percent of the leaves have fall-en off the apple trees. Lots of dynamics are going on following harvest. I spray the entire tree and re-maining leaves as it’s this “stocking of the arboreal pantry” that helps our allies buckle down in the bud crevices for the dormant months ahead. I definitely make the ground wet, targeting fallen leaves to in-crease decomposition with the fatty acids and think-ing about the fall root flush now hitting its stride. A brew of non-aerated compost tea (or effective microbes, if you still have some product remaining from spring) would be an especially great addition for furthering leaf decomposition and boosting end-of-season diversity yet again.

The Lost Nation ExperienceWhew! Getting through the theory and practicalities of the holistic approach barely leaves a guy room to expound on what my own fruit looks like.

The past ten years have seen cleaner and cleaner crops here overall compared to my immersion into organics in the late 80s and 90s with mostly McIn-tosh/Cortland transitional blocks. I felt good about the results of my minimal sulfur approach as the apple crop from my farm orchard came into full swing. I would see scab on the order of 5 to 10 per-cent with the usual lesion upswing in varieties like Gravenstein, Pink Pearl, and Gala. McIntosh tends to be exceptionally clean here, on the order of a few percentage points of light scab in the typical year. I’ve maintained these numbers while steadily reduc-ing sulfur applications each year while evolving a more nutritional reliance.

In 2009 it rained incessantly in the months of May and June, creating what can readily be acknowl-edged as the “scab year from hell” in the East. My four holistic applications were made on May 2, May 12, May 23 (early petal fall), and June 3. I didn’t act allopathically until May 25, when I applied 10# of micronized sulfur per acre in anticipation of a major wetting event on May 26 when four inches of rain fell over the course of the next three days. Come the end of June I found one Honeycrisp apple

with scab while thinning, McIntosh looked its usual happy self, but varieties like Gravenstein were start-ing to show enough black spot to have me worried about secondary infection. I applied herbal remedies (including neem) on June 23, July 9, and August 1, not as often as intended but just how life worked out that year. Moth suppression was fantastic with no additional treatments beyond the neem presence. Scab in Gravenstein rocketed up to 60 percent but it was pinpoint spotting and didn’t spread to neigh-boring varieties. Important lessons were learned this season as to how to properly brew effective mi-crobes. Calcium deficiency in the form of mild bitter pit became apparent in heavy-cropping varieties by harvest time.

In 2010 the gods seemed to smile upon that portion of the crop that survived the serious blossom freeze on May 11. My four holistic applications were made on April 26, May 4, May 20, and May 31. Possible infection periods occurred on May 5 - 7, May 19 - 20, with a major ascospore release to conclude the primary infection period on June 1. There’s an inter-play to those dates — a right regular scab dance — that encouraged me to forego the use of any sulfur. The result was the cleanest crop I’ve ever grown. Additional holistic applications (with herbal teas) were made on June 14, July 2, July 21, and August 15. Yellow varieties like HoneyGold were stunning. One token scab spot smiled back at me from the McIntosh tree. Sweet 16 and Northern Spy showed far less bitter pit. All varieties were better-sized and — most poignantly — fruit buds are plump and ready for this coming spring.

High HopesAll in all, something positive is happening here. I will continue to fine tune this holistic approach to disease management as I listen to what the trees and the fungi have to teach. Trial trees in one bear-ing block will receive a sulfur app or two (when the rains beckon) so I can make legitimate comparisons with cold-turkey trees of the same variety in another block. Soil fertility ties in here as well as growers fi-nally develop a biological take on the numbers. The work of Alyson Mitchell at the University of Cali-fornia at Davis is especially exciting: She’s showing that fruits with higher levels of antioxidants result from agricultural practices allowing plants to partic-ipate in resisting disease. Chemical fungicides and excessive use of organic mineral fungicides have never been good for our health either. Take to heart what makes sense here. Keep me informed of your observations and insights. These are indeed cool times to growing healthy fruit.

Michael Phillips is known across the country for helping people grow healthy apples and under-

stand the healing virtues of plant medicines. The “community orchard movement” he helped found can be found at www.GrowOrganicApples.com

and provides a full immersion into the holistic ap-proach to orcharding. His Lost Nation Orchard is part of a diversified medicinal herb farm in north-

ern New Hampshire and can be found at www.HerbsAndApples.com. Two acres of trees supplies

local families with many varieties of organic apples, with a cider mill in the planning stages. Michael’s book, The Apple Grower: A Guide for the Organic Orchardist, is available in a revised and expanded edition. Michael teamed up with his wife Nancy to write The Herbalist’s Way: The Art and Practice of Healing with Plant Medicines, as well. A new book tentatively titled The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way will be available

from Chelsea Green Publishing later this fall. Mi-chael was honored by Slow Food USA to receive the first Betsy Lydon Ark Award for his work promoting

healthy ways to grow fruit.

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Certified Organic FarmMike Merner & Jayne Merner Senecal

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by Michael Phillips

This task compendium doesn’t tell you everything to do in your orchard as much as provide a starting place. The specifics of each orchard site and the fruit being grown have to be woven in accordingly. Writ-ing down your orchard’s schedule will deepen your understanding both of what needs to be done and what can be improved. The timing of avant-garde holistic techniques is included here to guide you in the healthiest ways I know to grow tree fruit.

Dormant Season• Check for deer incursions at least weekly; snow-shoe around the base of tree trunks to pack down vole tunnels.• Order rootstock; collect scions for grafting.• Prune all bearing trees. You need to establish an open framework of scaffold branches that allows maximum penetration of sunlight and drying breez-es.• Remove all mummified fruit (still on the trees) to reduce rot spore inoculum.• Complete routine maintenance on all orchard equipment.• Order organic orchard supplies for the coming season. Be sure to include seaweed extract to add to every spray tank throughout the growing season.

Bud-break• Chip prunings in orchard for the benefit of soil fungi. Any obviously-cankered wood (and thus a source of disease inoculum) should be removed from the site.• Finish any compost spreading not completed in late fall. Spread deciduous wood chip mulch in hap-hazard fashion.• Prune out old canes in berry plantings; fortify the soil bed annually with an organic fertilizer blend or compost; spread deciduous wood chips or leaves (bagged back in the fall) as bed mulch.• Plant new trees as early as possible.• Boron needs are met with a sprinkle of Borax ev-ery few years. Most other micronutrient shortcom-ings can be corrected by good compost habits and using seaweed in tank mixes when spraying.• Remove any spiral trunk guards used on young trees.

Week of Quarter-inch Green• 1st holistic spring spray (liquid fish, pure neem oil, effective microbes) at double rate aimed at ground, trunk, and branch structure. This is a catalyst spray to wake up beneficial fungi, establish arboreal colo-nization in bark crevices, and interrupt the develop-ment of foliage pests now in the egg stage. Stone fruit growers can initiate the holistic sprays as much as two weeks earlier than apple timing.• Apply an organic fertilizer blend to non-bearing trees in order to grow a strong framework of branch-es quickly.• Train branch crotch angles on young trees with limb spreaders.• Cultivate around non-bearing trees and replace “shade mulch” if available.• Check all trunks for borer damage missed in fall inspection.

Pink• 2nd holistic spring spray (liquid fish, pure neem oil, effective microbes) aimed at unfurling buds, trunk, and branch structure. A good amount of run-off should reach the ground as well. Direct a blast at any obvious leaf piles as not yet decomposed from the year before.• Spray fruit trees with Bt (add to holistic tank mix) if unfurling leaves reveal a significant presence of bud moth larvae.• Hang white sticky traps for European apple sawfly.• Primary scab season has begun. Relax. The holistic applications have the trees primed to deal with early ascospore release.

Bloom• Cut down wild fruit trees spotted in bloom within a hundred yards of orchard to prevent pest migra-tion to your trees. The exceptions here are those trap trees managed (i.e., pruned at this time) as an “alternative home” for insects put off by repellent strategies.

Seasonal Checklist for the Organic Orchard• Become a honeybee steward and give three cheers for the wild pollinators.• Hang pheromone wing traps for monitoring moth presence (pheromones are species specific) and tim-ing of first generation egg hatch.• Lightly cultivate edges of dwarf tree rows in prep-aration for a summer cover crop.

Petal Fall• 3rd holistic spring spray (liquid fish, pure neem oil, effective microbes) aimed at leaf canopy and devel-oping fruitlets. Make this application early if king blossom pollination was good as oils may assist in smothering excess flowers. Including a light rate of • Surround® in this mix will help establish a “clay matrix” for bonding additional kaolin clay layers.• Initiate full coverage of the refined kaolin clay. Two or three applications are necessary from the get go to build up barrier protection from the imminent curculio invasion and to be helpful in suppressing moth oviposition (laying eggs). Repeat every 5 to 7 days for next 2 to 3 weeks, taking into account the wash off factor due to a heavy rain.• Gather EAS sticky traps. If damage to fruitlets seems apparent and widespread, include spinosad in the first full-rate clay spray to check further EAS damage to additional fruitlets.• Primary scab season is in full force now. Some growers may deem a micronized sulfur application on disease-prone varieties necessary if spore matu-rity has built up and definite rain is predicted. Sul-fur can be tank mixed with subsequent Surround® sprays. Take note: Mineral fungicides will compro-mise arboreal colonization.• Prune out shoots and break off blossom spurs if fire blight strikes become apparent. Good arboreal colonization is the best offense against fire blight.• Begin mowing of green understory (preferably with a sickle bar and/or scythe) and pile resulting mulch thickly under trees around the dripline.

First Cover• 4th holistic spring spray (liquid fish, pure neem oil, effective microbes) aimed at leaf canopy and devel-oping fruitlets. The fish will help meristem develop-ment for return bloom, neem stimulates immune function and hinders moths, microbes are biological reinforcement for the summer ahead. Add horsetail and nettle teas as well to this brew.• Full clay coverage continues on bearing trees for growers faced with curculio.• Place drop clothes under trap trees to contain in-fested “June drops” thus preventing larvae from getting to soil to pupate. Alternatively, give those chickens a particularly rousing pep talk.• Hand thin crop, beginning with heaviest-setting varieties. Leave one fruit per cluster, being even more aggressive on varieties that tend to bear bien-nially otherwise. Timely thinning must be com-pleted within 40 days of petal fall. Place infested fruitlets in buckets for disposal via the chicken coop or as road splatter.• Primary scab season usually ends with a daytime rain around this time. A second micronized sulfur application may be deemed necessary on susceptible varieties, especially if more than a week has passed since the previous rain. • Spray for first generation codling moth according to degree day tracking if egg laying suppression from the clay has been gauged insufficient the previ-ous season. Options include Bt, spinosad, and gran-ulosis virus; any of which can be tank mixed with fish oil as a UV inhibitor and molasses as a feeding attractant. Growers may rely on parasite control and cardboard banding if high moth pressure has been abated previously.• Pinch off shoots on young trees to correct crow foot situations from heading cuts.• Continue “biological mowing” with a scythe or sickle bar mower.• Hang bird netting in place over cherries and blue-berries.

Those Lazy, Crazy, Hazy Days of Summer• Hang out sticky traps for apple maggot fly by mid-June. Target early varieties and/or the orchard perimeter. Renew tangletrap coating every 4 to 6 weeks if using a sticky variation of this strategy. Traps should be moved to mid-season varieties in late July.

• Apply thick kaolin slurry by brush for borer pro-tection in late June and late July. Alternatively, botanical trunk sprays (at a 1% neem oil concentra-tion) can be directed to saturate lower bark tissues and the soil at the immediate base of each tree.• Summer prune watersprouts on especially vigor-ous apple trees in late July/ early August to improve fruit color.• Spray for summer moth control according to the timing of the species attacking your fruit. A rotation of spinosad and Bt just as eggs hatch is typical. Pure neem oil may well get this job done in its own right if holistic spray options for disease are being contin-ued in the summer months.• Holistic summer sprays include pure neem oil and nettle tea. Horsetail tea should be included the first two rounds as well to build up the silica defense against summer diseases. These are ideally applied every 10 – 14 days up till harvest. In addition, bi-carbonates may help with sooty blotch and flyspeck on light-colored apples where humidity tends to be especially high.• Spray foliar calcium (at biweekly intervals) begin-ning when the fruit reaches the size of a nickel if bitter pit has been a problem on certain varieties. Fermented comfrey tea is a homegrown source for bioavailable calcium and can be included in the ho-listic summer sprays.• Mow pathways for better harvest access and en-joying your orchard. A light scything under heavily-laden trees will help in keeping early drops picked up.Visit your trunks: hand weed that pea stone circle, check for borer, adjust mesh vole guards, rub loose bark off, place a repellent mudpack over active sap-sucker holes.• Sow an oat (or legume mix) cover crop along the edges of dwarf tree rows.• Take ongoing soil tests every few years to check on nutrient status and thus the need to obtain spe-cific soil amendments for fall application.• Place intact bales of mulch hay around orchard en-virons. The goal here is nesting sites for field mice (which are not voles) so that abandoned nests the next spring become bumblebee habitat.

Harvest• Prune stone fruit post-harvest in dry zones to less-en winter establishment of bacterial canker.• Check for borer egg slits at soil line of trunk and smush these in along the edges with the tip of hand pruners.• Gather AMF traps and clean; remove all other monitoring traps.• Gather all drops biweekly to feed to the cow or other livestock. A hot compost pile (turned often, for garden use) will work to destroy larvae in infested fruitlets whereas a laissez faire pile will not.• Applying soil amendments at this time works best as the soil remains relatively warm and feeder roots are in uptake mode.• Oh yeah... pick an amazingly high percentage of beautiful fruit!

Winter Preparation• Spread lime (if light applications of “renewal lime” were indicated earlier on a soil test) on fallen leaves, mow aggressively, then spread well-aged compost.• A holistic fall spray (liquid fish, pure neem oil, ef-fective microbes and/or compost tea) made when 50% of the leaves have fallen off the tree is abso-lutely recommended. Target the ground, trunk, and branch structure. This is important for leaf decom-position as well as competitive colonization from bacterial and fungal disease within bark crevices. The nitrogen in fish should also help alternative bearing trees shore up bark nitrogen reserves for spring bud growth.• Remove limb spreaders.• Install tree guards on young trees and fork thick “ring mulch” further back to deter nearby nesting. Check that mesh protection from voles remains in place on all bearing trees with tender bark. Speak kindly to resident foxes and coyotes if vole numbers seem especially high.• Renew whitewash on smooth trunks to prevent snowline freeze injury. Growers using “borer slurry” in midsummer may find enough whitening still in place.• Hang peanut butter strips on electric fence for bait-ing “uneducated” deer tongues.• Give thanks for another blessed year on this good earth.

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e r S p r i n g , 2 0 1 1�0B-

by Michael Phillipswww.GrowOrganicApples.com

Orchardists know several years of investment in branch training and soil building go into creating a strong tree that will bear fruit for many decades to come. What follows is a similar vision of what can be. The hopes and offerings being shared here make up a “grower tree” now coming into bearing in its own right. So without any further adieu, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you, the one and only Sargent Pepper’s Holistic Orchard Network. Hmmm... that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? Never mind. Methinks we’re going to have some fun strutting our stuff and intriguing the inner druid in each of you.

The Berkshire RoundtableHere in the Northeast, a couple dozen “alterna-tive-minded” apple growers have been meeting every March for what will be 20 years running now. Which is a fairly phenomenal feat for those of you who know some of the mainstays in this circle like Alan Surprenant, Bill MacKentley, John Bemis, Hugh Williams, Brian Caldwell, Jim Gallot, Eliza-beth Ryan, and myself. The lessons shared in this inquisitive circle have helped each participant be-come a better orchardist. This includes numerous up and coming young’uns who represent the rising tide of tree people inspired to grow good fruit.

This roundtable meeting got its start back in 1992 and 1993 when the NOFA chapters sponsored five farmer-to-farmer exchanges under the auspices of one of the very first SARE grants. Growers involved with sweet corn, bedding plants, livestock, strawber-ries—and the most tenacious of the bunch—apples were brought together for two days to explore the gamut of their respective passions. Margaret Chris-tie facilitated the Apple Meeting, first held at the Rowe Conference Center in Massachusetts, the next year at the Rodale Research Farm in southeastern Pennsylvania, and mostly since then at the Stump Sprouts Cross-Country Ski Center high in the Berk-shires. Reading back on earlier proceedings reminds me of what a long way we have come in organic orcharding since those heady days.

Apple growers kept their momentum going full steam ahead. Here’s how our grower invitation flyer reads today:

No other get-together better explores the cutting edge issues facing community orchardists. Our unfettered talk ranges from how to best manage repellent strategies for curculio to the complex overlay of fruit moth woes. We’ll discuss what global warming means for our beloved trees and how a beneficial microorganism complex furthers holistic disease control. Is organic thinning (be-yond endless handwork) becoming a real possibil-ity? What are the latest discoveries regarding soil health and wood’s edge ecology? And you bet we share our marketing success stories and frustra-tions. Local agriculture is truly one of those earth-saving graces now needed more than ever.

GrowOrganicApples WebsiteThe creation of a networking website naturally evolved from our Berkshire Meeting. All sorts of things emanate from this virtual orchard that grow-ers have put out to the world! I’ll share important bits with you here by way of snippets. Feel free to go directly to the source—as projects underway, an exciting biological curriculum, and marketing promotion shine that much brighter on the computer screen compared to newsprint.

We set the stage for both tree fruit growers and apple lovers alike on the opening page. This dual in-vitation is deliberately designed to make folks who want to support local agriculture an equally appreci-

The Community Orchard Movement: Bringing Healthy Orcharding to a Neighborhood near You!

ated part of the team. These are the words that greet you when first checking out the site:

You have stumbled onto something good in your search for healthy apples! GrowOrganicApples.com is where holistic-minded orchardists come together to explore thoughtful ways to grow good fruit. Our orchards are interconnected webs of biodiversity, deep nutrition, heirloom varieties and exciting new cultivars. Connecting sensible grow-ers with apple lovers broadens the marketing base vital to every local orcharding effort. Here we share with you what it takes to grow healthy fruit, and post listings of community orchards where such wholesome fruit can be found.

The Vision in a NutshellThe Holistic Orchard Network is about bringing orchard health to the fore. Health is not necessar-ily a concept emphasized in the national organic certification standards. Nor does Health necessarily have value in research trials where a “natural spray” must match the results of the chemical it’s being tested to replace, more often than not in a non-ho-listic setting. Reductionist agriculture will never be able to grasp the worth of woodsy compost, fungal allies, herbs, biodiversity, tree-ripened fruit (with flavor to boot!), and grassroots marketing. The Health contained in nutrient-dense fruit supports our Health. That is “the word” driving all we are going to achieve in community-based orchards as we learn how to grow wholesome fruit.

Community Orchards DefinedFruit grown locally comes fresher and tastier. The choice of varieties can get to be astounding. Fami-lies who know their farmers share in a vital con-nection to the land. And that in turn means you are informed about decisions of how that fruit is grown.

We need to grow healthy food in the places where we live!The venerable apple is absolutely what it should be when orchardists steward the growing of fruit with health-enhancing practices. Holistic Orcharding goes beyond certified organic, encompasses biody-namic principles, and at the same time is accom-modating enough to recognize that some growers -– in some places, facing certain pressures, in some seasons -– may indeed feel compelled to use limited allopathic measures (including mineral fungicides) to keep a small-scale orchard viable. Ignoring the ecological cost of transporting food from thousands of miles away is wrong. What’s right is helping consumers understand the dynamics that go into one good apple and clearly pointing the way to where such fruit can be found.

Holistic Core ValuesOur healthy orchard manifesto establishes the para-digm that growers are asked to take to heart. Ho-listic Core Values (please go to the site and check these out!) provide consideration for “apple diplo-macy” as well. This is our way of listening yet prod-ding all fruit growers to do better. I will add only this: Our grower circle began by embracing all com-ers, many of whom do far less allopathic spraying today—if at all—then was common 20 years ago. Serious change takes time and always, absolutely always, begins with mutual respect amongst grow-ers. . .

Philosophical approval of one’s farming practices is indeed a tough nut to crack! What follows is a work-in-progress: Holistic growers, let your thoughts be known! We have no intention of launching yet another certification process here. On the other hand, giving orchardists a nudge to embrace radiant system health that results in the growing of nutri-ent-dense fruit on the local level is an honorable achievement. Orchard challenges are many — the work overwhelming at times. What follows are posi-

tive guidelines to keep us on track in managing or-chards based on minimal off-farm inputs, living soil practices, and integrated ecosystem health.

The term “organic” as now in the hands of the US Department of Agriculture has been convoluted. National certification standards for organic agricul-ture do indeed reflect good tenets but there are also dubious rules and outright hedging that miss the mark. One can meet the standards for organic fruit growing and yet be way out of touch with holistic understanding. The true goals of the grassroots or-ganic movement have never changed: Healthy food from healthy soil; Local farms feeding local folks. Importing an “organic apple” from thousands of miles away is not environmental awareness in ac-tion—burning petroleum to get that piece of fruit to your door is as “earth allopathic” as organophos-phate sprays are in the orchard ecosystem. Which isn’t to say we don’t make compromises in going about our daily lives.

This network uses the word “holistic” to describe health-building orchard practices that bring about wholesome fruit. We recognize that there are ex-tremely well-intentioned growers who may not yet be in an economic position to forego a certain chemical application. These are growers who sup-port the living soil, abate fungal problems with good sanitation practice, minimize the use of fungicides in favor of boosting tree immunity with deep nutri-tion, abet microorganism allies, and approach insect pest situations with life-cycle understanding and bold biodiversity. Very discerning chemical use may be a one-shot directed at overwhelming curculio pressure, or extended fruit rots due to high humidity in the Southeast, or organized borers lurking behind every tree trunk. And yet we need such folks to pro-vide nutrient-dense food in the communities where we live. We encourage growers to trial holistic tech-niques that others have successfully employed. This is a nudging process. We’re getting here from there, to paraphrase an old New England adage.

Golden Apple Pledge DrivesThis vast undertaking requires fundraising to sup-port the progress taking place. Creativity keeps this fun, as our Golden Apples saga of Hercules will reveal to those who check out those top menu bar buttons. Supporting memberships from growers and businesses are at the core of this effort. Those of you who listen to NPR will recognize a familiar pitch here:

All of us are working hard to grow apples that impart health to our families and friends in the communities where we live. Having a grower’s network where we can exchange ideas, propose solutions, and basically accelerate our mutual learning curve is a good way of tapping into holis-tic knowledge. Apple lovers — our dear custom-ers — might consider financially supporting these efforts as well. Everyone benefits from making community orcharding a viable proposition. You’ve been enjoying these web pages. Now it’s time to consider lending your financial support to this mutual work. $5, $10, $25, $40. You decide a pledge amount that works for you. The time and direct costs that go into setting up each and every web page found here amounts to $200 per page. Frankly, we need your help defraying these expenses if we are to keep putting this informa-tion up and making it freely accessible. If enough growers and apple lovers deem this work worth supporting, well then, ladies and gents, there’s plenty more we can plan on doing. From a Europe-an research tour to enabling grants that make soil food web testing possible in coordinated orchard trials. Full-fledged membership in the Holistic Orchard Network unleashes all sorts of organic potential!

T h e N a t u r a l F a r m e rS p r i n g , 2 0 1 1 �1B-

Our intentions are to keep all aspects of this site open to everyone. From the free newsletter to the discussion forum to perusing cutting edge articles to research participation. Slowly but surely we are gaining ground here, the biggest challenge of all.

Holistic ResearchGrowers get to hobnob with brilliant nuance on our research pages. Individual topics are handled in their own right, plus you will see additional inten-tions that await a financial shot in the arm. The big-gest goal of all is establishing coordinated trials in healthy ecosystems on actual farms... which most university specialists just seem incapable of com-prehending.Useful research for holistic orchardists will always depend on the integration of several factors. Tree health counts, air drainage counts, birds count, mi-crobes count, beneficial insects count, and when it comes to inputs, synergy counts. The organic context is best seen as a holistic integration of ev-erything we do. Nor will an organic solution neces-sarily seem worthy if we insist on the same stan-dards of “chemical perfection”. The mythical 95% packout ties into a cheap food system that requires large-scale growers, mega-packing houses, and Wal-Greed super stores to set out the insipid results of the harvest. A sensible local economy that provides locally-grown food is one of the factors integral to the methods we seek to develop. We always need to think “integration” in our research approaches even though combined ramifications are much harder to discern.

Social Networking… sort ofOur discussion forum is set up to keep insightful conversations about fruit growing organized by top-ic. Here’s where experienced orchardists ask ques-tions and delve into the nuts and bolts of ecosystem dynamics. More than a few categories have been established for topic threads. The beauty here is that growers can completely review any orchard topic and add their own observations months later.

Signing up for the Community Orchardist newsletter gets you on our bona fide mailing list. We currently have close to 1500 folks from across North America

interested, intrigued, and appreciative of what’s be-ing undertaken by the Holistic Orchard Network.

And yes, you betcha, we’re on Facebook! One en-tices apple lovers wherever they can be found, or so the thinking goes. The Happenings page on the website is dedicated to restoring apple culture once again in this country.

Community Orchard ListingsMember growers get listed on our “community or-chard search engine” based on accepting the core principles. This evolving listing by regions across this continent will someday reach hundredth mon-key momentum—and then we all had better hold on to our hats!Growers with a listing as a community orchard deal with specific orcharding challenges in numerous ways. First and foremost, we are people who em-phasize health in our farming practices in order to bring our friends and neighbors healthy fruit. Please read our Holistic Core Values to fully understand the scope of what’s involved in making wise orchard-ing decisions. And do feel free to ask each grower

about his or her need to employ specific means.The success of this network—through the grower-inspired research we’re undertaking and everything else—will help us improve diversified farm systems and thus make the “natural apple” all the more at-tainable in every community. Farmers are among the local heroes who can help this messed-up material world get back on a sustainable track. Orchardists work hard at high cost subject to the vagaries of the weather. Accordingly, nutrient-dense fruit costs what it takes to grow it. Farmers should be paid fairly for investing in holistic practices that produce healthier food. Quite a few chemicals are applied for aesthetic purpose. “Fruit without flaw” is a misno-mer when we begin to understand how nutritionally empty the products of industrial agriculture have become. Lighten up, folks. Trust your local farmer. A little fungal spotting on the occasional apple is not a worm.

Thank you for letting me introduce you to some of what it takes to grow healthy fruit. Go and embrace your own community orchardist, whoever she or he may be. We are indeed making this world better, one tree at a time.

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A motley crew, indeed, but these are the tree fruit growers who met in 200� for the Farmer-to-Farmer Roundtable in the Berkshires. This year marks the 20th anniversary for this no-

holds-barred effort to grow healthy fruit in all the places we call home.

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Non-Profit OrganizationU. S. Postage PaidBarre, MA 01005

Permit No. 2� NOFA Education Fund411 Sheldon Rd.Barre, MA 01005

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