An Apple A Day

Yellow Transparent ↑ “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” ~ Martin Luther

Well it has been a long time coming but after planting some of our first 3-4 year old semi-dwarf apple trees a few years back we are just now finally reaping the rewards of our first real apple harvest. It will be so nice to use some of our very own apples rather than having to rely on foraging the wild forgotten orchards for them...although we will be doing that again this year too.

We started planting apple trees in 2007 and every year thereafter have added more trees to our collection, all told we now have 18 different varieties of the semi dwarf, of which four produced fruits for us this year, and many other standard varieties that I have grown from seed.

If I could go back in time the very first thing I would do before even thinking of starting any type of garden is to first focus on the planting of fruit & nut trees and berry bushes as many of them take so very long to begin producing.

Akane - An excellent tart flavored dessert and juice apple that is supposed to store well.

Spitzenburg (I think, we might have mixed this one up with our Wagener apple?) - Very sweet, and a good eating apple. Some of these were falling off the tree ripe so we picked a few ripe and unripe ones and I canned up some deliciously tart apple sauce...and Mrs. H baked a few turnovers of course.:)

Someday, as and old man, perhaps good fortune will find me sitting under one of these same trees drinking a pint of hard cider and fondly reminiscing about the adventures of my youth.:)

Honeyberries

I am excited to see that our little honeyberry (edible blue honeysuckle) has finally developed a few fruits for us this season. Honeyberries, with their frost tolerant flowers, are known for their ability to fruit early, a couple weeks before strawberries, and with a little luck they will even produce on 1 year old bushes. Ours has taken quite a few more years than that but then again we have uprooted and moved the poor bushes on several occasions which no doubt has set them back a bit. From what I've read they will produce berries for well over 30 years so I am willing to be patient. Some varieties are supposed to produce anywhere from 3-5 lbs of fruit per bush when fully mature...ours has about 20 berries on it.

The plants require cross pollination so at least one other, preferably more, different and compatible varieties are necessary for fruit set. Although our other bush is very small, produced no flowers to speak of, yet we still have these berries on the larger plant so they are obviously able to self pollinate to some degree as the flowers are (I think) hermaphrodite (having both male and female organs). Life will find a way I suppose. If memory serves me, I believe our bushes are Berry Blue and Blue Belle. There are many varieties and not all are compatible with each other.

I'm excited to start taking cuttings for propagation and hope to have more than a few bushes in the near future. Theoretically, this Siberian honeysuckle should be a perfect addition to our berry patch as they are not at all picky about the type of soil they are grown in and can be hardy from zones 2-8 and -40°F.

So anyway, I hope to become more involved with this particular plant now that it's obvious they will indeed grow and produce for us. I plan on purchasing a few more varieties next spring and also hope to focus on propagating some of my own through cuttings and maybe even seed. The plants are not cheap so I had better start saving my pennies.:)

The berries have a sweet tart flavor that I really like.

Seed and Seedlings

We collected a bit of seed off wild asparagus a few weeks ago that we found along a river bank. Each asparagus "berry" contains six little seeds that germinate quite readily. They can be gathered off the ferny female plants in the fall or early spring and will store for many years. Also planted were the rest of my 2007 seed that was obtained from the ancestors of my own unruly plants, they had excellent germination. It will take a few years for the plants to become established well enough to produce large spears but time passes quickly when one is patient.

We have been planting apple, pear, apricot, plum, walnut, cherry, chestnut, currant, jostaberry, gooseberry, and raspberries. I must have planted over a hundred of these little starts in our woods and field this past week, all of which were grown from seeds and rooted cuttings started last year. I am hoping that some of the trees grown from seed in previous years will start to bear fruit this summer.

A few one year old apple and pear trees in transit to a new home.

Pots of Josta berries waiting to be planted in perminant locations.

Black raspberries will root anywhere that the stem touches the ground, these ones were tip rooted last fall.

The onion seedlings are only a week or two away from being transplanted...they can't wait to be free of their confines. There are also a few leeks and chives in this bunch but the majority are Yellow of Parma and Jaune Paille des Vertus onions. Both are excellent for storage.

We purchased a few dozen ramps a while back and are happy to see that they have been growing quickly...I'm glad they like the cold as it has been pretty nasty out of late.

Of Bark Splitting, Free Eggs, and Lessons Learned...

Last summer's heat was a bit challenging for a few of our smaller fruit trees, most being only 4-7 years old. Towards the end of the gardening season I noticed that two of our apricots and a pear tree had developed some pretty ghastly wounds in the form of bark that had split wide open in numerous places along both the trunk and limbs of the trees. This, having never happened before, was definitely a cause of concern for us and prompted me to dig up some information online that suggested perhaps the trees had suffered from sunscald...dang.

Our Chinese (Mormon) apricot tree is in pretty bad shape due to sunscald

Apparently sunscald is fairly common among younger thin-skinned fruit trees. Fortunately, it is often not fatal to the tree and I was very happy to see lots of new buds had developed on ours this winter signaling that the trees were still full of life. So from what I have been reading I will need to perform a bit of surgery on the trees and remove some of the curled bark thus helping the tree to recover and hopefully form calluses over the wounds. That and make sure that all of the trees get an adequate and steady supply of water to help prevent this issue in the future...lesson learned.

This young D'Anjou pear tree looks bad but is in better condition than the apricot


As for the free eggs, a few weeks back the grandson commented in a long forgotten conversation that the eggs he was eating were free. The free comment was not lost on me and this past weekend I shared with him a few of the secrets of life. I told the boy that now that he had grown into a strapping young five year old it was time he started earning his keep and proceeded to explain to him that the eggs he had partaken in were not really "free" at all. I shared with him the fact that caring for the chickens that laid those eggs required a bit of effort on our part and that they did not just magically appear in our refrigerator.


So, early the next morning we went out to the chicken house where I taught him how to perform his new duty, the monthly chore of cleaning the old straw out of the nesting boxes and replacing it with fresh, clean material. I explained to him one of my many theories, if the nesting boxes became too dirty the birds would begin to look for a better place in which to lay their eggs. I told him that as long as we kept the boxes cleaned at least once every month the birds did not seem to have this tendency and that the last thing we wanted was to wander around in the forest looking for stray eggs...he agreed that that would be quite a hassle. Under the hens strict supervision he did a pretty darn good job and will probably never refer to eggs as free again but might enjoy them all that much more as he now has a stake in the whole affair. Again, lesson learned.

Squawk! "Get to work boy, I'll be supervising this operation today."

"Good job, that's right, just dump the old straw on the ground. Hustle up now I've got eggs to lay."

Natural Process

There is an old apple grove not too far from where we live. Every year around this time we take our backpacks, hike into that old orchard, and almost always find our fill of these special fruits. They are special to us because in this long forgotten orchard there happens to be over twenty different varieties of apples and even a few pears scattered throughout the meadows. I'm sure that others must know of this place but we have never once run across anyone else picking apples. Nor does it appear that any apples have ever been picked by anyone other than the few black bears that inhabit this area. We have been gathering fruit here for over 10 years now.

These particular apples have an almost perfumy flavor to them, so very unusual.


Unfortunately, a family of beavers has set up camp in the meadows and has managed to flood the grounds around almost a third of the fruit trees so far, many of these are now dying. I suppose the good news would be that I have been saving seeds off these trees for several years now and have many of their offspring growing on my own property. Perhaps some of those trees will compliment our regular fruit trees and eventually produce delicious apples and pears similar to the ones in the flooded orchard.

Small, tart, golden crab apples. We had to wade through almost a foot of water to get to this tree.

Most of the apples we picked are being made into apple sauce as we can't help but bruise them. Between trying to get them out of sometimes 30-40' tall trees and hauling them around on our backs they never do make it home in the best condition. The huge variety of large, crab, green, gold, red, tart, and sweet apples make some of the best sauce. I will happily share this area with the beavers even if it means all the trees will be lost, anything would be better then losing it to another housing development, as we have many of our old stomping grounds. Progress, right?


Fully loaded and heading home with packs full of soon to be bruised apples.


So, for now, we will continue to enjoy these apples and this private place, perhaps we will need to search out new apple picking grounds while patiently waiting for our own little orchard to start producing. Nothing good lasts forever I suppose, we sometimes feel like the animals must, slowly being pushed farther and farther out as we attempt gather wild edibles.

This pear tree is almost 40' tall, and very thorny. I wonder how old it is?

The pears almost look like little apples, very small and very tart. I'll be planting a few of their seeds this fall.

Delectable Wild Cherries

A trip to the foothills around lake Coeur d'Alene last week not only provided us with a sampling of wild cherries but a place for the boy to burn off some energy.


I am not exactly sure what kind of cherries these are, some of the trees had black cherries and others were red. Mostly I am interested in the stone of this fruit as I have successfully grown a number of these trees from seed in the past. Some of the trees we came across were at least 50 or 60" tall making cherry picking interesting to say the least. The trees grow extremely fast and the one in the below pictures background is four years old and may give us a cherry or two this year.


We simply plant the seeds, mark the spot, and let mother nature take it's course. In the spring, if we are lucky, there will be a few cherry trees popping up. The cherry do not germinate as readily as apple seeds so we made sure to plant enough.

Our Food Garden Realized

Most of the gardens are finally planted and burgeoning with new growth. The sod I removed from the newest addition is a distant memory making way for a diverse variety of new plants.

Plants like tomatillos, ground cherries,

and even a few litchi tomatoes.

The sage is all abuzz with nectar seeking insects.

Valerian reaches towards the heavens with lilac scented blooms.

Volunteer tomatoes and sunflowers thrive alongside the onions and flax.

The heirloom Umpqua broccoli plants, whose seeds I am attempting to save, are flowering just as the Russian kale has finished and is now podding up... perfect timing. I was worried about keeping both from flowering at the same time, although crossing these two might prove interesting... perhaps another time.

Thick stalked purple podded peas are standing tall with a little support.

The last two years have brought a plethora of predatory insects, frogs, and salamanders into our gardens to help defend against the bad. I have never seen so many ladybugs like this one gracing some of last years parsnips just beginning flower.


I'm not sure whether our grandson or the robins like the strawberries better. We divided and transplanted over 1,500 ever-bearing plants early this spring and did not expect to get berries this soon, if at all this year. Almost every one has fruit in various stages of development... lucky us.


The tiny English walnut trees seem happy, I planted 50 nuts last fall and ended up with 46 trees in the making.

Purple carrot flowers are most intriguing,

but these Egyptian walking onions have got to be the strangest alliums I have ever seen, tentacle upon tentacle sending feelers in every direction. They arrived this spring all the way from Michigan via my gardening and greenhouse hero and master of all that is allium, El, of fast grow the weeds ... thank you, thank you!


A pox upon my house if I dare forget to mention the vibrant growth taking place with these prodigious tomatoes, some of whose seed I received from Dan & Val of Grunt and Grungy's Garden.


The hard work out of the way, I now look forward to strolling through our little food gardens enjoying the wondrous selection that we are privileged to partake in. Who am I to be blessed with such fortunes while so many go hungry? The world's inequities are hard to understand.