I liked the look of this operation, and they were inviting, so I wrote to them:
Greetings Carr Folk,
I am writing this in response to your general invitation regarding high-head orcharding, as I myself have an orchard of trees that I have trained to branch higher off the ground, as I have learned to do here in order to protect the trees without having to build a wall around Dogs Plot
I was very interested to read your introduction in the new Mother Earth; being particularly struck by your take on pruning, thinning, and the two year cycle; I never heard of the pest- avoidance justification for the alternating fruit. .
I have five acres of abandoned farmland In Cayuga County, New York. Our plot partly borders the state forest, and, in the last twenty years since being brush hogged has been taken over mostly by Asian Buckthorns ... but up through which is coming (as I discovered after a few years of planting pear trees) naturally seeded pear trees of all sizes from finger thick to thicker than my neck. Pears are not native in the US and weren't even much planted here until the late nineteenth century (Old Professor Cummins told me) but I live on a hill at the base of which - about two miles down hill on the Cayuga Lake shore - there was once a Cayuga Iroquois village which for a long while before English settlement, had been tended by French Jesuits who had a mission just up the lake. The Jesuits always brought their gardens with them to survive on and it was from them that the Cayuga got apples, pears, and peaches. The Cayuga had some extensive orchards, which were cut down by George Washington's troops when the Cayuga sided with the British; but a good thing about pear trees is that they come up very well from the stump.
0ver the years the pear sprouted and seeded and made their way into the hills all around the village. Most all the individuals have fruit that is round rather than pear shaped, so people like me can mistake them for apples. The edges of the woods are white with Pear blossoms here in May. I had planted pears because I learned that they could handle my thin, poorly drained - according the Cornell Cooperative Extensionl. And the eventual succession of the wild pears here proves, and improves upon their fitness for the location. After so many generations, I am sure that the root stock established here has evolved to be much better suited to where it is than the Jesuit stock.
So for the last ten or twelve years after discovering our pears, I have been high grafting onto this wild stock right in the field, at first using bought scions and increasingly, scions from my own trees... my preference being more and more got the Asian pear type, because they ripen on the tree like apples and don't require a long cooling off period, which in itself requires a cooling shed, more investment and so on.
My aim has for one thing, been to avoid big infrastructure and equipment expenses which would make it necessary for me to scale up the operation, specialize, and do well more than break even with it. Mostly we are a Homestead, with plenty going on and plenty left over, but not a lot of time for business. We give eggs ad garlic and pears to our mechanic and it probably saves us a lot of money.
Among other things, the low infrastructure requirement means NO FENCE. A deer fence needs to be eight of ten feet high.
And no fence in deer country means that everything a deer can reach has to be in a cage. I learned that very quickly, and was inclined to graft higher anyway because that allowed me to graft onto sevearal branches: so that one or two at least were likely to survive, and I used two or three varietes o a tree so that the various ones could prove their worth. Most of the trees were grafted at head height and protected until they got over deer range, some larger ones were top grafted from a ladder. I am tending maybe a couple hundred trees, some doomed, some of some value, some overbearing monsters....when they feel good.
With a scythe I mow lanes, paths, and alleys, so that I can keep track of and take care of the trees, but the paths also lead the deer to the trees ... which wouldn't matter much once the bud ends are out of reach, but the bucks can ruin a tree rubbing the velvet off their antlers. For that reason, I generally let the trees sprout down the trunk below the grafting. The deer can eat it if they care too, and the native growth is thorny so they won't do much rubbing.
Another reason for the low level stubble is that my volunteer trees grow where they will, sometimes in pairs, or up against the south side of a pine tree, in little groves, and most often well more than twenty feet from another.
So I can ... and do ... encourage them to spread into a vase form; partly by cutting out the center, also by weighting branches with stones or chunks of wood, but also by tying them down to the lower branches.
I do some clearing with loppers, some with a cordless reciprocating saw, and also with a cordless electric chainsaw. Litinum batteries have made it possible for me to do without gasoline power. I mow only with the scythe, using the rougher, short bladed ditch scythes, as I tend to break the other blades when I hit a stump or a rock I didn't see..
I leave many of the wild pears to grow big and tall and unprunned, inorder to pollinate...and produce what they will.
With the the wildings, plus the planted , and all those grafted pear trees, (and despite a series of climate disaster years) I will generally have more fruit on the trees than I can harvest or handle, and I don';t want to extend sales beyond the farm stand here, but I would dearly like to shake down some pears to make or get made, a lot of pear cider, even pear wine, which we have tried and like. I know I can spend a thousand bucks or so on a grinder and a press, or maybe rent equipment, or take it to a mill for a buck a gallon ... or maybe just let the deer the possums and my chickens feed on it. We can and dry as many as we can, and the dehydrator was one good investment.
We are not trying to make orcharding the gig that saves us or the farm, as we are growing a lot aside from pears, and have learned to get by on not much, which is mostly covered by social security, since we got old. I have several plots of Asparagus out in the orchard, a few salad garden plots, and half a dozen Garlic beds....our favorite crop, all of which I tend by hand and feed with compost form our chickens, from our kitchen, from our wood-chip cat litter, and from a few tons every year of cow manure compost mixed with wood chips, which we ourselves augment from a perpetual pile of sand, to help drain the clay soil. I was hoping that the asparagus would spread and go invasive in the orchard. I have turned an old drainage ditch on our border into a sometimes brook, with a series of dams and cisterns, and enough constant water to have developed a pretty good Watercress crop.
I don't think it will make our fortune though. We also are unlikely to make a fortune with our magazine at metaphysicaltimes.com, as we don't have a whole lot to sell there either, but you can find us there, and we will be eagerly following you on Facebook.
I hope you sensed that I was fishing for a suggestion for our cidermaking.
Thirty some years back I wrote a cover story for Mother Earth, about how I build a rough-sawed cottage on an island my brother bought in the Adirondacks. They edited out the most dramatic part .... where the rafters collapsed after we had them most all up (inadequate bracing) but we recovered, and had them all back up and braced, by the end of the day. That kind of cheapened the story I thought, but I understand they were trying to appeal to people on the fantasy level. They seem to have a more solid mag now days, and it is hard to keep something like that going, when you have to appeal to all levels all the time. You will be a good addition there.
My long time friend John Irving wrote the Cider House Rules, as you are likely to know. I recently explained to him the difference between seedling trees and cloned ones, which surprised him a lot,and it is impressive how few people understand the rudiments of sex, but I don't know that mattered for the book. The only Cider House Rule that I remember is "Do not sleep on the roof."
So Good to know of you.
Don't sleep on the roof,
Yrs Trly,
David Warren.
http://dogs-plot.blogspot.com/
http://www.metaphysicaltimes.com/
https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/natural-cidermakers-approach-to-sustainable-orcharding-zbcz1902?fbclid=IwAR3P0UDMg1lI6LZlZjWql8oXSq96poao8OsovLNNvky5byUxCC4PZ3LGkv8
Greetings Carr Folk,
I am writing this in response to your general invitation regarding high-head orcharding, as I myself have an orchard of trees that I have trained to branch higher off the ground, as I have learned to do here in order to protect the trees without having to build a wall around Dogs Plot
I was very interested to read your introduction in the new Mother Earth; being particularly struck by your take on pruning, thinning, and the two year cycle; I never heard of the pest- avoidance justification for the alternating fruit. .
I have five acres of abandoned farmland In Cayuga County, New York. Our plot partly borders the state forest, and, in the last twenty years since being brush hogged has been taken over mostly by Asian Buckthorns ... but up through which is coming (as I discovered after a few years of planting pear trees) naturally seeded pear trees of all sizes from finger thick to thicker than my neck. Pears are not native in the US and weren't even much planted here until the late nineteenth century (Old Professor Cummins told me) but I live on a hill at the base of which - about two miles down hill on the Cayuga Lake shore - there was once a Cayuga Iroquois village which for a long while before English settlement, had been tended by French Jesuits who had a mission just up the lake. The Jesuits always brought their gardens with them to survive on and it was from them that the Cayuga got apples, pears, and peaches. The Cayuga had some extensive orchards, which were cut down by George Washington's troops when the Cayuga sided with the British; but a good thing about pear trees is that they come up very well from the stump.
0ver the years the pear sprouted and seeded and made their way into the hills all around the village. Most all the individuals have fruit that is round rather than pear shaped, so people like me can mistake them for apples. The edges of the woods are white with Pear blossoms here in May. I had planted pears because I learned that they could handle my thin, poorly drained - according the Cornell Cooperative Extensionl. And the eventual succession of the wild pears here proves, and improves upon their fitness for the location. After so many generations, I am sure that the root stock established here has evolved to be much better suited to where it is than the Jesuit stock.
So for the last ten or twelve years after discovering our pears, I have been high grafting onto this wild stock right in the field, at first using bought scions and increasingly, scions from my own trees... my preference being more and more got the Asian pear type, because they ripen on the tree like apples and don't require a long cooling off period, which in itself requires a cooling shed, more investment and so on.
My aim has for one thing, been to avoid big infrastructure and equipment expenses which would make it necessary for me to scale up the operation, specialize, and do well more than break even with it. Mostly we are a Homestead, with plenty going on and plenty left over, but not a lot of time for business. We give eggs ad garlic and pears to our mechanic and it probably saves us a lot of money.
Among other things, the low infrastructure requirement means NO FENCE. A deer fence needs to be eight of ten feet high.
And no fence in deer country means that everything a deer can reach has to be in a cage. I learned that very quickly, and was inclined to graft higher anyway because that allowed me to graft onto sevearal branches: so that one or two at least were likely to survive, and I used two or three varietes o a tree so that the various ones could prove their worth. Most of the trees were grafted at head height and protected until they got over deer range, some larger ones were top grafted from a ladder. I am tending maybe a couple hundred trees, some doomed, some of some value, some overbearing monsters....when they feel good.
With a scythe I mow lanes, paths, and alleys, so that I can keep track of and take care of the trees, but the paths also lead the deer to the trees ... which wouldn't matter much once the bud ends are out of reach, but the bucks can ruin a tree rubbing the velvet off their antlers. For that reason, I generally let the trees sprout down the trunk below the grafting. The deer can eat it if they care too, and the native growth is thorny so they won't do much rubbing.
Another reason for the low level stubble is that my volunteer trees grow where they will, sometimes in pairs, or up against the south side of a pine tree, in little groves, and most often well more than twenty feet from another.
So I can ... and do ... encourage them to spread into a vase form; partly by cutting out the center, also by weighting branches with stones or chunks of wood, but also by tying them down to the lower branches.
I do some clearing with loppers, some with a cordless reciprocating saw, and also with a cordless electric chainsaw. Litinum batteries have made it possible for me to do without gasoline power. I mow only with the scythe, using the rougher, short bladed ditch scythes, as I tend to break the other blades when I hit a stump or a rock I didn't see..
I leave many of the wild pears to grow big and tall and unprunned, inorder to pollinate...and produce what they will.
With the the wildings, plus the planted , and all those grafted pear trees, (and despite a series of climate disaster years) I will generally have more fruit on the trees than I can harvest or handle, and I don';t want to extend sales beyond the farm stand here, but I would dearly like to shake down some pears to make or get made, a lot of pear cider, even pear wine, which we have tried and like. I know I can spend a thousand bucks or so on a grinder and a press, or maybe rent equipment, or take it to a mill for a buck a gallon ... or maybe just let the deer the possums and my chickens feed on it. We can and dry as many as we can, and the dehydrator was one good investment.
We are not trying to make orcharding the gig that saves us or the farm, as we are growing a lot aside from pears, and have learned to get by on not much, which is mostly covered by social security, since we got old. I have several plots of Asparagus out in the orchard, a few salad garden plots, and half a dozen Garlic beds....our favorite crop, all of which I tend by hand and feed with compost form our chickens, from our kitchen, from our wood-chip cat litter, and from a few tons every year of cow manure compost mixed with wood chips, which we ourselves augment from a perpetual pile of sand, to help drain the clay soil. I was hoping that the asparagus would spread and go invasive in the orchard. I have turned an old drainage ditch on our border into a sometimes brook, with a series of dams and cisterns, and enough constant water to have developed a pretty good Watercress crop.
I don't think it will make our fortune though. We also are unlikely to make a fortune with our magazine at metaphysicaltimes.com, as we don't have a whole lot to sell there either, but you can find us there, and we will be eagerly following you on Facebook.
I hope you sensed that I was fishing for a suggestion for our cidermaking.
Thirty some years back I wrote a cover story for Mother Earth, about how I build a rough-sawed cottage on an island my brother bought in the Adirondacks. They edited out the most dramatic part .... where the rafters collapsed after we had them most all up (inadequate bracing) but we recovered, and had them all back up and braced, by the end of the day. That kind of cheapened the story I thought, but I understand they were trying to appeal to people on the fantasy level. They seem to have a more solid mag now days, and it is hard to keep something like that going, when you have to appeal to all levels all the time. You will be a good addition there.
My long time friend John Irving wrote the Cider House Rules, as you are likely to know. I recently explained to him the difference between seedling trees and cloned ones, which surprised him a lot,and it is impressive how few people understand the rudiments of sex, but I don't know that mattered for the book. The only Cider House Rule that I remember is "Do not sleep on the roof."
So Good to know of you.
Don't sleep on the roof,
Yrs Trly,
David Warren.
http://dogs-plot.blogspot.com/
http://www.metaphysicaltimes.com/
https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/natural-cidermakers-approach-to-sustainable-orcharding-zbcz1902?fbclid=IwAR3P0UDMg1lI6LZlZjWql8oXSq96poao8OsovLNNvky5byUxCC4PZ3LGkv8
