Fruits Galore, But Not Apples

Check out www.youtube.com/leereichfarmden, a new video is up about me and my cat pruning kiwi vines.

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Growing fruits is one of my specialties but, sad to admit, I may be the worst apple grower I know. What’s worse is all the time and effort I put into growing my apples, even way before they begin to fruit.

Mine are all super-dwarf trees, planted because these small trees yield more from a given land area than large trees and they eliminate the need for ladders. Usually, dwarf trees are made by grafting the

desired variety onto special dwarfing rootstocks. Mine are M.27, M.9, and Bud.9. But dwarfing rootstocks have weak root systems that barely support the trees and cannot forage far for nutrients and water. So the trees need staking and the best of soil conditions.

My super-dwarfs are special. They are interstem trees, each of which I made by grafting a desired variety onto a foot-long stem from a dwarfing rootstock variety (the stem piece itself can confer dwarfing) which, in turn, I grafted atop a seedling rootstock. The roots, then, are of seedling apples (made by planting any apple seed). Seedling apple roots forage well and make sturdy trees.

Despite the robust root systems, I still provided excellent soil conditions. The trees grow in a mulched strip 8 feet wide and drip irrigation automatically ministers to their water needs.

With all this, the trees began the season well, a few sprays and some traps keeping insects and diseases at bay followed by careful thinning out of the swelling fruit so that the trees’ energies could be channeled into fewer and, hence, better fruits.  Beautiful fruits hung from the branches going into early summer. And then, the bane of my apples struck. Summer diseases, such as white rot and black rot, started to erode away fruits with telltale rotted areas. By August, whatever fruits were still on the plants were mostly rotting.

Why my repeated failures with apples? Everyone else seems to have decent enough apple crops this year, although one’s sense of decency for their own backyard fruits is sometimes shaded through rose-colored lenses. How about blaming the weather, the wet June? No, everybody around here had it. I blame my site: It’s backed by 6000 acres of woods (not mine) in which lurks plum curculio and other pests. Also, all summer, cooler air collects in this low-lying valley; moisture condensing out of cooling air promotes pest problems.

Moving to an upland site, ideally on sloping land bathed in full sun, would go far to spelling apple success for me. Still, pests make apples among the most challenging of fruits to grow almost everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains.

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By right, I should just abandon apple growing. But I don’t.

Perhaps it is the eternal optimism of a fruit grower. Next year . . . I’ll prune more carefully trying to rid my trees of overwintering innoculum for summer diseases. I’ll try out a new, organic fungicide, such as Regalia, safe to use and extracted from -- of all things -- that fierce weed Japanese knotweed. Perhaps I’ll be lucky.At the very least, growing apples gives me some failures to write about.

The other reason I persist is for taste. There are over 5,000 varieties of apples and knowing how to graft makes it relatively easy to create a tree of virtually any of them. Or to lop off the top of what was

My Hudson's Golden Gem this year

thought to have been a promising tree to quickly create a tree of a new variety. Buying apples limits you to the dozen or so varieties selected, in large part, for good shipping, good looks, and other commercial qualities.

Which brings me to Hudson’s Golden Gem, a golden apple, not yellow, like Golden Delicious, but truly golden, its russeted skin bouncing off light as if coated with flecks of gold metal. Inside, the flesh has a coarse, chewy texture and sweet, rich flavor that hints of pears and walnut. This variety seems to bear a bit more reliably than many others.

Hudson’s Golden Gem is one of a dozen varieties that I grow for their outstanding flavor -- when I get fruit.

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When people talk of planting “fruit,” they usually mean planting apples. But apples are not the only fruit.

Notwithstanding my poor luck with apples, I am inundated with other fruits. Right now, baskets are

overflowing with the likes of American persimmons, pawpaws, and kiwiberries, and there are plenty of grape bunches and figs to be plucked and pears waiting to be ripened and eaten.

People often ask me what I do with all the fruit that I grow. I eat it! Not right now, of course, so much of it has to be stored.

No refrigerator could accommodate all my fruit, so enter CoolBot (http://www.storeitcold.com). CoolBot makes it possible to use a room air conditioner to cool an insulated storage room to the near-freezing temperatures suitable for storing fruits.

This electronic device, when paired to an air conditioner, “fools” the air conditioner into thinking that it has not yet reached 60°, which is the

lowest temperature those units normally wants to go. All you do is set the CoolBot for the temperature to which you want the room to cool. CoolBot also uses less energy than a standard, walk-in, cooler compressor.

My storage room consists of a trailer the inside panelling of which I removed, added foam insulation, and replaced. Right now it’s stacked high with boxes of fruit.

Perhaps one year, some of those boxes will be filled with apples. 

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A Moon Landing?

Anyone visiting my garden a few days ago might have thought they happened upon a moon landing or extraplanetary explorer. A two-legged creature was wandering around in bright blue pants and a bright blue, hooded jacket (actually, rain gear) with goggles and a respirator and 4 gallon tank strapped to its back. Periodically, an engine whine was accompanied by a cloud of mist (a jetpack)?

The creature was me and I was doing what was necessary to put myself on the road to a harvest of delicious apples (especially the variety Hudson’s Golden Gem) and plums (especially the variety Imperial Épineuse). I was dolled up for what looked like a moon landing because I was spraying pesticides on my

trees. In this part of the world, sad to say, that’s generally what’s necessary to get a decent -- sometimes any -- crop of apples or plums.

Some years I grow these fruits organically; some years I grow them, as some commercial growers say, ecologically or biologically. My organic approach is to spray a special formulation of kaolin clay, called ‘Surround’, and sulfur, a naturally occurring mineral. ‘Surround’ keeps insects at bay; sulfur does the same for some diseases. To be effective, ‘Surround’ must be maintained as a dust-like, white coating on the trees. This laid-back Mediterranean look to the trees necessitates a not very laid-back 3 sprays, before bloom, to build up a base layer, and followup sprays every week or following as little as 1/4 inch of rainfall. Even then, in my experience, control is marginal.

My ecological/biological approach is to spray the horrible sounding material, Imidan, with, again, sulfur. Imidan is a chemical pesticide, but one that has a relatively low toxicity both to humans and to beneficial insects. A perfect year would require only 2 to 3 sprays, the first right after petals drop and the others before mid-June. Re-spraying is usually not needed until after an inch of rainfall. Between rainfall washing off spray, sunlight degrading it, and dilution due to fruit growth,

'Surround' on apples

fruits are essentially squeaky clean by harvest time. (After the end of June, approaches other than sprays thwart remaining major pests.)

Back to my moon suit . . . The suit is necessary no matter what I spray. Getting doused with, or breathing, even something as benign as kaolin clay is not good.

And the jetpack? That’s my backpack sprayer. Spraying anything is no fun. Fortunately, except for the apples and the plums, spraying is almost never needed here on the farmden. Also fortunately, my sprayer makes easy work of the job. It’s a Stihl, gasoline-powered backpack sprayer that always starts right up, gives good coverage, and lets me, in less than a half an hour, mix the spray, apply it to about 2 dozen trees, and thoroughly clean it.

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Spraying pesticides, organic or otherwise, is not the only approach to keeping plants healthy. Any insect or disease problem can gain a toehold only when there’s a plant susceptible to the problem, an organism that can cause the problem, and a suitable environment in which the problem can develop. So, I beef up my plants’ defenses by paying special attention to the soil, making sure drainage is perfect, and by applying

Good soil, organic matter added from the top down

mulches of compost, wood chips, hay, and other organic materials. The mulches feed the plants as well as worms, fungi, and other “good guys” in the soil. Above ground, pruning lets branches bathe in sunlight and air, both of which make for better fruit and conditions less conducive to insect and disease problems. If my plants are thirsty, they get water.

What I do not do to make my plants healthy is apply compost tea, biochar, or any other potions, or, along the same lines, click my heels together three times and repeat, “There’ll be no pest problems.”

For apples and plums in this part of the world, all three requirements for pest problems -- pest presence, susceptible host plant, and environment suitable for the problem to develop -- are generally fulfilled. Hence, the necessity of sprays. Still, using a minimum of carefully selected sprays and needing to “ship” my fruit no more than 200 feet from the trees to my mouth (or kitchen) makes for a minimum affront to the environment.

People too often equate “fruit growing” with growing apples. That should not be the case because there are plenty of other fruits, and plenty of them can be grown with hardly a thought to pest control. Pears, for instance. I have about 20 pear trees; none require spraying. The same could be said for blueberries, raspberries, persimmons, cornelian cherries, blackberries, pawpaws, hardy kiwifruits, gooseberries, currants . . . I could go on. In some cases, such as grapes, choosing a disease-resistant variety is the way to avoid having to spray.

As I emphasize in my recent book, Grow Fruit Naturally, choosing plants adapted to your site is a very important part of growing fruit naturally, as is providing optimum growing conditions. 

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Simplify, Simplify

People are funny. Take, for instance, a fellow gardener who, a couple of months ago, shared with me her excitement about a biochar workshop she had attended. “I can’t wait to get back into my garden and start making and using biochar,” she said. Biochar, one of gardening’s new wunderkind, is what remains after you burn wood with insufficient air -- charcoal, that is. Stirred into the soil, its myriad nooks and crannies provide an expansive adsorptive surface for microbes and chemicals, natural and otherwise. Biochar, being black, darkens the soil, and dark soil is generally associated with fertility, although that’s not always the case. Because biochar is mostly elementary carbon, it resists microbial decomposition, so it’s carbon is less apt to end up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

But raw wood, as opposed to biochar, added to soil feeds microbes and then plants as it decomposes, eventually turning to organic matter, or humus, which is a witch’s brew of compounds with positive effect on soil’s nutritional, biological, and physical properties. So is cooking up a batch of biochar and digging it into your soil really worth the effort? The same might be asked of aerated compost tea, another “rare and wondrous” product touted for everything from preventing plant diseases to breaking up impermeable soil layers. Or “nutrient dense farming,” which, with its questionable assessments of plants’ nutrient status and even more questionable soil additives, aims to reverse the drop in mineral concentrations noted in our vegetables over the past few decades. (Even though the drop has been shown to be simply a dilution effect from increased yields due to breeding, fertilizers, and water.)

Thoreau wrote, “Simplify, simplify.” But people are funny; they want to complicate, complicate. Something about using some apparatus, whether it’s a biochar burner or a compost tea aerator, or a measuring device, such as the refractometers used by nutrient dense farmers, that draws people in. People are wowed by numbers, dials, and other bells and whistles of science.

Bells and whistles do not science make. Or good gardening. Some of the most elegant experiments in the science of gardening involved not much more than a human mind and some pea seeds: the 19th century discoveries of heritable traits by Gregor Mendel, which became the foundation of modern genetics, and the elucidation of why plants bend towards light by Charles Darwin, as examples.

Ninety percent of good gardening could be summed up in two words: organic matter. Enrich your soil with plenty of compost, the Cadillac of organic matter, and/or other organic materials, such as leaves, straw, and wood chips, and you’re well on the way to plants that are healthy, healthful, and productive. I wish I could offer some gimmick or catch-phrase. No need.

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I finally cut enough hay to snuggle down along my row of dwarf apple trees. Right now, it looks like a billowing, beige blanket. By spring, snow and rain will have compressed it to ground level. By this time next year, it will be mostly gone. That’s okay.

During it’s tenure, the mulch will smother weeds and insulate the soil against winter cold and summer heat. Bacteria, fungi, and other soil organisms are what will make it vanish, but in so doing nutrients within those stems and leaves will move into the soil for plant use and what’ll be left behind is humus, which makes the soil dark and, in this case, is an indicator of good soil.

Some garden faddists would fault me for using hay beneath my apple trees, alleging that the trees would prefer a mulch of wood chips. And not just any old wood chips, but those from branches less than two and a half inches across (“ramial” wood chips). Devotees cite Laval University Publication N 83, “Regenerating Soils with Ramial Wood Chips” as providing evidence for the benefits of ramial wood chips but this publication is actually very weak on evidence and very strong on boosterism. Perhaps they are correct, although there’s no evidence for benefits one way or another. Depending on availability, I’ll sometimes use wood chips, any kind. Simplify, simplify.

GROW FRUIT NATURALLY

Every time I go near my apple and plum trees, I feel like my Nanking cherry, mulberry, pawpaw, and persimmon plants are laughing and flaunting their fruits at me. Nanking cherry and company are just a few of the fruits that I grow that require virtually no care.

Apples, on the other hand: If you wanted to come up with the most difficult fruit to grow east of the Rocky Mountains, it would be apple. Or plum, or apricot, peach, nectarine, or sweet cherry. The plants actually grow fine; getting fruit is another story. Organically grown fruit, that is.

Apple fruit, already damaged by plum curculio

The reason these common tree fruits are so difficult to grow around here is because of insect and disease problems (and, in the case of apricot, peach, and nectarine, winter cold and late spring frosts). For an insect or disease to cause a problem, three conditions need fulfillment: The presence of the insect or disease, a susceptible host plant, and an environment congenial to the insect or disease. I mulch my apples and plums with wood chips, prune away diseased stems, grow nectar-producing flowers to attract beneficial insects, spray organic concoctions such as kaolin clay, let chickens run loose beneath the plants, blah, blah, blah; and for all that effort, still often reap little or nothing. 

Problem is that the northeast is home to some serious insect and disease problems of apples and company and the environment is much to these pests’ liking, as are the plants. Resistant varieties might be resistant to diseases but not insects or to one disease but not another. No variety is resistant to all the insect and disease pests lurking in forest and field.

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Nanking cherries, no need to spray or even prune!

Still, most people, when they consider growing fruit, think first of apples, and then plums, peaches, and other tree fruits familiar on supermarket shelves. In fact, though, there are a slew of other fruits, many of them, like Nanking cherry and company, very easy to grow. As I point out in my new book, GROW FRUIT NATURALLY (Taunton Press, 2011), the first step in growing fruits naturally/organically/holistically is to select those that are naturally well-adapted to the local climate and insect and disease pressures.

This all-important planning step does not preclude growing many common fruits. Pears, for example, both European and Asian varieties, are relatively easy to grow around here. The trees do need pruning but usually can be grown without the need for any sprays, organic or otherwise. With thousands of varieties, pears alone could round out your larder. I grow about 20 varieties.

Berries are also relatively easy to grow. Pruning is important both for good production and to help keep diseases and insects in check. My berry plantings include raspberries, blackberries, black raspberries, gooseberries (more than a dozen varieties!), red currants, black currants, clove currants, elderberries gumis, seaberries, lingonberries, lowbush blueberries, and, my favorite, highbush blueberries. Pest control? I spray insecticidal soap on my gooseberries once, just as the leaves unfold to kill any imported currantworms that may be starting their leafy feast. I mulch my blueberries late each fall to bury any infected berries that could spread mummy berry disease the following spring. And that’s about it for pest control on all my berries.

Still not enough fruit? Well, there are the mulberries. Not run-of-the-mill mulberries, such as grow wild all over the place. But named varieties -- Illinois Everbearing, Oscar, and Geraldi Dwarf -- selected for their high quality fruits. And cornelian cherries, an excellent stand-in for tart cherries, except much, much easier to grow. They bloom around the first day of spring yet never fail to set a good crop of fruit. The same can be said for Nanking cherries, a hedge of which lines my driveway and is now yielding many more sweet-tart cherries than I, birds, squirrels, and chipmunks could possibly eat. Total effort involved for all these fruits? None.

And the list goes on: pawpaws, persimmons, hardy kiwifruits, juneberries, grapes . . . so many fruits, so little space. The grapes get bagged to keep insects, diseases, and birds and bay.

(Actually, in my microenvironment, juneberries do not bear well because of various insect and disease problems. The solution? I don’t grow them. But as I wrote, that still leaves plenty of fruits that can be grown easily and without any significant pest problems.)

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So why do I grow apples and plums? I grow them because I frequently write about fruit growing. I grow them to supplement my “book learning” with what I observe “in the field” (in other people’s “fields” also). I grow them because when I apply all the right sprays at just the right time and the weather cooperates and insect and disease pressures aren’t too, too bad and all the stars align just right, I harvest some very tasty apples.

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My pawpaws and hardy kiwifruits

Would I suggest others to plant apples, plums, or possibly peaches, apricots, nectarines, or sweet cherries? Probably not, unless said person was interested in learning a lot about fruit pests, spending a lot of time and no small amount of money dealing with them, and then was willing to accept the fact, as Charles Dudley Warner wrote, tongue-in-cheek and over a hundred years ago in MY SUMMER IN THE GARDEN, that “the principle value of the garden . . . is to teach . . . patience and philosophy, and the higher virtue – hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation. The garden thus becomes a moral agent, a test of character, as it was in the beginning.” All well and good if that’s what you want from planting fruit.

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