Looking back now, I realize with some amusement that I was predicting my future. I put little stock in financial institutions, have little time for IRAs, bonds and other esoteric financial concepts; I value earthly institutions, solid investments that I can see and touch: fruit trees. My vision was that when I am old and gray I will have very little cash in the bank; I never expect to be financially rich. But rather, I will have rows of fruit trees in their prime, producing lovely fruit. There I’ll be at eighty, sitting in the log house, enjoying fresh apricots, peaches, cherries, persimmons and all the rest. For me, wealth is having these luxuries.
I also enjoy working on Kurtwood Farms’ portfolio of trees. A quince that just isn’t performing as I would like will be pulled this winter to be replaced with another variety; the present one is simply too small and flavorless. A cherry tree that was grazed by an errant goat is long since gone. I have a long-term approach to the persimmon, which is years from producing even after a decade in the ground. The yield is worth the wait, however, as a tree full of fresh persimmons brings greater joy than the simple cherries that bear within a couple of years.
The greatest long shot is a loquat tree. Planted a decade ago, it is just now beginning to take off. Although I have seen loquat trees fruiting in Seattle, it is likely that there simply is not the warmth for this tree to thrive in this location. Loquats thrive in more southerly climes, producing an exotic fruit similar to a lychee. I stick with my tree, pruning it and feeding it and keeping it watered in the dry summer months. I’m not sure if Warren Buffett would believe in this system, but for me it’s as valid as any money market account, hedge fund or 401(k).
Above the house, kitchen and small orchard is the larger, main orchard. The area is flat, fully open to the sun and fenced in to keep the cows and sheep from nibbling on the leaves and breaking the overhanging branches; this orchard holds over 130 trees.
When I first bought the second parcel of land a decade ago, I needed to figure out a use for the new acreage. I decided to plant apple trees, hoping to produce apples for hard apple cider down the line. It seemed perfect at the time; the climate is perfect for apples here. Kingston Black, Ashmead’s Kernel, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Roxberry Russet. Every bit of good land on this island has an old apple tree on it, planted decades prior and still producing great apples.
The schedule of growing apples and making cider appealed to me as well. Pruning in the winter, thinning in the spring and picking in the fall. A few weeks of intense work and a lot of breaks in between. It sounded very patrician, very noble: the pruning of trees in the cool chill of winter, picking the fruit of that labor months later.
I had also heard about a bit of federal legislation that made producing hard apple cider even more appealing. A Vermont senator, Patrick Leahy, had introduced a bill that would make hard apple cider exempt from any federal laws if it only contained apples and no other ingredients. Designed to protect the small cider makers of his home state, it could never be taken advantage of by big producers because of the strictness and it appealed to me entirely; freedom from the oversight of the government. Perfect.
I set about researching the varieties of trees needed to make cider, the nurseries growing such trees and the methods of making the cider. I ordered 130 trees, mostly Kingston Blacks, and waited for them to arrive. I was confident that I would persevere. I had spent months planning this orchard, this business, on paper. I had read the books, read the nursery catalogues, made plans for ways to produce and sell the cider. I had never put my hands in the soil. It was a most ungrounded project.
When the trees arrived, I laid them out, pruned them a bit and warmed up the brand-new tractor. I used my shiny green tractor to dig the many holes, its first real test. The planting of the trees gave the tractor a reason for being; a function. The soil was mediocre at best, and no soil at all could be found in some of the spots. I puttered on, digging hole after hole, planting the young whips. At last all the trees were planted, and staked and labeled with their variety.
The weather changed from the cool days of winter when the trees were planted to the much more hospitable warmth of spring. The days grew longer and my young trees budded out. Although the trees grew slowly at first, my books had told me they would put on a foot of growth the first year. I kept them watered and kept the weeds at bay. Every couple of days I would venture out to the upper pasture to check on them. Summer had arrived and they looked like trees. Like small, barely growing trees, but still there was hope.
And then one day I got to the first row of trees and realized that they looked a bit different than they had. All the leaves were missing; simply gone. The young, tender branches were also absent. I thought this was an isolated problem, until I began frantically running from tree to tree, realizing that most of the trees had been chewed on, their tender growth fodder for the deer of the island.
Over the course of the next few days almost all of the trees would be chewed to their small stems. I felt despair, anger toward the deer, and utter disbelief that my trees were essentially ruined and all my work for naught. I had not understood the damage that deer could inflict on young fruit trees, the height of which is ideal for young deer to feed upon. The leaves were perfect for them: tender, easy to access and far enough from my house to escape detection until the light of the morning when the deer would return to the woods. I had thought, naïvely, that the deer would ignore my fruit trees because I was a nice guy; because I had planted old French heirloom cider varieties to make into cider.
In my less-than-scientific approach, I believed that if I did good work—by reclaiming old tired land that had been disrespected by the prior stewards and planting trees—the animals of the kingdom would somehow be privy to that knowledge; that nature would allow good things to happen.
The deer debacle of the apple orchard quickly taught me my first lesson as a farmer: Nature is cruel. It is neither fair nor equitable. Animals die, the weather does not always cooperate and everyone is out for themselves. The deer did not care that I was planting apple trees. To them, food was available for them to eat and their only responsibility was to feed themselves and their young.
The deer destroyed most of the trees, but left a few here and there. The survivors continued to grow and branch out. The next fall, I placed another order with the fruit tree nursery and in the winter replaced the trees most unlikely to recover. This pattern continued, and, well, it continues to this day.
I began a series of projects aimed at restricting deer access to the orchard. All were successful on some level; none were completely successful. Small battery-operated motion sensors that turned on powerful sprinklers to spray the deer when they walked through the orchard was the most ridiculous project. Although the sprinklers did startle the deer, they learned quickly to simply walk to other trees that were just outside the radius of the spray.
A large, expansive fence surrounding the orchard proved difficult to erect, time-consuming to maintain, unsightly and impossible to keep free of weeds and brambles. One small breach and the deer would find their way in. At this point it seemed personal. One of us, either myself or the deer, was going to win. To get all the apples. To outwit the other. To be the master of this land. I was determined to win. At least on a good year, I was determined to win. Some years I was simply too discouraged to believe that I could triumph. Three or four years after the initial setback, I stopped walking past the orchard. Simply couldn’t look at it. I denied it existed, walked another way to get to the sheep pastures beyond the apple orchard. I had pinned my hopes on this orchard, this business plan, and I had failed. Again.
Large fences, short fences, portable fences, all were tried. Oddly, benign neglect has been the most successful. There are two blocks of apple trees here. The first has one hundred trees, the second thirty. I concentrated on the large block and ignored the smaller. The smaller filled with blackberries, Scotch broom and tall grasses. The deer could not find the apple trees in the midst of these invasive plants. On
e day I gained the fortitude to take a machete to the block and see what had occurred in the preceding half decade. To my amazement, the trees were still there, and had grown though not exactly prospered, but they had found enough sunlight to persevere. I was thrilled. I spent a day hacking through the brush to find the trees. One stick looks very much like every other stick, so it had the feeling of looking for thin needles in a large haystack of nearly identical needles, but eventually they were all found. What made it possible was I knew how they had been planted. Not randomly, but in a laid-out grid, five deep and six across. I would sight the lines of the grid and then thrash about until I found a stray leaf that looked like an apple leaf and begin to excavate from there.
The small block was restored and has done well; a few trees have matured to produce apples. The majority are slowly growing thanks to an increase of sunlight and water after the removal of encroaching plants. A couple have been replaced.
The larger block has followed a similar pattern. Simply by the volume of trees, the odd tree would be neglected by the deer and prosper. Once the tree obtained a height above the reach of the deer, it could escape the attention of the grazing deer. Many have been replaced, some more than once. If all of the trees would die or be badly damaged, I could move on, plow the ground and plant a nice bit of pasture for the cows. I have been kept on the hook, unwilling to give up on the trees that have done well, committed to replacing the trees that have been damaged. It is a long-term commitment, with an outcome expected of a full 130 cider apple trees mature and producing fruit. Potentially in my lifetime, but there is no certainty with apples.
There are enough trees producing in the large apple orchard on the upper pasture, together with a few producing trees in the smaller, mixed orchards near the log house and old trees planted decades ago on the property, to realize a large volume of apples in the late fall. When summer comes to a close, I go from tree to tree picking the apples, thinking little of their value as table fruit, but only of their juice. They are scrappy fruit—bruised, scabbed, small, bug-eaten—but they are tasty, juicy and full of sugars.
The apples are brought down to the kitchen bucket by bucket and piled on the back porch, waiting for a sunny, dry day to press the fruit. The large old wooden apple press is rolled out from the farm shed and rinsed of the spiders that make it their home over the winter.
With a friend’s help, I rinse the apples of any errant dirt and begin to load them into the wooden hopper, as the more energetic of the pair mans the hand-cranked grinder. The whirling wooden spool with sharp knives pulverizes the apples into a slurry of skins and pulp and cores, juice flowing out all the while. Positioned below the grinder is a slatted wooden basket to hold the pulp as it flies out from the whirling blades. The basket is lined with a loosely woven bag that will hold the pulp during the pressing, allowing the juice to pass through.
When full, the basket is slid out from under the grinder and placed beneath the large screw that will slowly wind down to press the apples. With a bit of muscle, the screw turns and the platen pushes down on the bundled apple pulp and the juice begins to flow freely into an awaiting bucket. It is miraculous. The juice is fresh and sweet and golden. It is alchemy, this transformation of knobby, warted fruit to golden, clear, sweet juice. To stand and look at the remaining apples piled on the concrete, the grinder chewing the apples into bits, and at the old, wooden, much-used and not the least bit hygienic press, and then to pick up the bucket of apple juice and fill my mouth with this juice: it doesn’t add up. The juice is far greater than its parts.
My pressing partner and I will greedily drink as much fresh apple juice as possible, keeping in mind that the lion’s share must be saved to be preserved. Part will be saved for vinegar and the rest for apple redux, which is made simply by boiling fresh apple juice. A large kettle is placed on the range and filled with as much apple juice as I can budget to the endeavor. The three uses of the juice—fresh, vinegar and redux—are all worthy. It is hard not to favor one over the other two. I want so much of each and yet there is a limited amount of apples to press; a finite volume of juice. My original goal of growing apples to make hard cider never panned out; the apples are now in demand for the new uses.
With luck, at least ten gallons of fresh juice are poured into the hefty caldron and the juice is brought to a boil. The juice will boil through the afternoon. If the apples were picked early, the weather will still be warm and the windows of the kitchen full open. If fall has already arrived, the kitchen will be sealed against the chill and the windowpanes will quickly fog over from the constant boiling; soon the sills will be puddled with water as it condenses on the cold glass and drips down.
The juice is kept on the stove for hours. Slowly the level will drop in the kettle, although the apple juice will appear to be essentially the same as when it came out of the press earlier that day. I keep an eye on it as it gets lower and lower, fearful that I will miss the point when it has reached the desired viscosity. Once the majority of the water in the apple juice has boiled off, what will remain are the sugars, the apple flavors and a deep caramel color. I pull a spoonful out from time to time and dribble it on a clean plate, letting it cool and observing the juice as it sets. At first it will simply run off the plate with little or no thickness. With time, however, the juice will stick to the plate, yet maintain a liquidity. The kettle is then shut off, the apple juice gently poured into half-gallon jars and stored away for the winter months when we are hungry for sweetness and the depth of flavor that the redux contains.
When the apple trees have long lost their leaves and there is no chance of leaving the windows open, I love to pour a generous serving of the redux on hot, steaming pancakes fresh from the pan. This syrup is our local version of maple syrup: brown, thick, sweet and of the land. A half gallon left on the kitchen counter is often picked up by a weekend cook and used to sweeten a pork braise, or mixed with apple cider vinegar for a taste of agrodolce—known to me as sweet ’n sour, from my years of eating mediocre Asian food.
The apple juice that is not boiled down for this winter syrup is destined to be transformed into apple cider vinegar, changing the sweet, light, simple summer beverage of fresh apple juice into a complex, acidic vinegar; preserved.
Off to the side in the kitchen are three large barrels. Made of French oak, they vary in size: three gallons, four gallons and fifteen gallons. Each is filled with vinegar. One, red wine vinegar; the second, apple cider vinegar; and the last, an attempt at apple “balsamic” vinegar.
Vinegar is essential. Acid is a most necessary part of cooking. Without acid, food is flat, simple and lacking depth. Ample salt and seasoning are always needed, but acid makes good food great. Inadequate-quality vinegar—store-bought vinegar—makes for less-than-fabulous cooking. We have collectively come to rely on commercially prepared vinegar, while vinegar is such a simple product to create.
Vinegar comes from alcohol. Alcohol is the by-product of the fermentation of a sugar-based liquid. Generally that sweet liquid is grape juice. That juice is fermented by yeast added to the sweet fruit juice. The yeasts eat the sugars and produces alcohol. Wine is created.
When that wine is given a vinegar culture—a mother—the alcohol is transformed to acid. The higher the alcohol level, the greater the acidity. The mother, the culture that is added, is a strange beast. It is thick, gelatinous and appears to be a living thing. I am fascinated by it. It isn’t pretty, neither clean nor tidy. It is slimy, slippery and unclean-looking. It does, however, produce lovely results. I often pull a glob of mother from the barrel, place it in a canning jar and pass it off to someone who wants to start their own vinegar. My first mother came to the farm in this same way: a friend gave me a start.
I started barrels of vinegar because of one man. I never met him and he has recently passed away. Richard Olney, the editor in chief of the Time-Life Good Cook books during the late seventies, kept vinegar in barrels on the mantel of his fireplace in Provence. I was completely captiva
ted by this and couldn’t wait to try it myself. I now have such barrels some thirty years later. The mother lives on the bottom of the casks, transforming the alcohol into acid. The bung that seals the barrels is left ajar to allow fresh air to circulate. Unlike wine making, in which the goal is to seal off the vessels, vinegar needs air to live. Sadly, fruit flies love this vinegar as much as I. The constant struggle to keep them away from the fruity juice makes for a challenge, the opening often kept covered with a linen napkin, a towel, some screen.
When the apples have all been pressed, the press hosed down and rolled back to the shed, the fruit juice that I manage to keep aside and not drink is poured into five-gallon glass carboys. A bit of juice is set aside in a small glass and a packet of fresh wine yeast is pitched into it. When the yeast has proofed—shown that it is alive and bubbling—the yeast-juice mixture is poured into the carboys, which have been filled not quite full with sweet fresh apple juice. An air lock is attached to keep stray strains of yeasts away and the large heavy glass jug is stored away to allow the mixture to ferment for a few weeks.
Slowly the juice will begin to bubble, in a couple of days it will foment, a week later the juice will bubble rapidly. The air lock will be active, bubble after bubble of air let off from inside the glass jug. The apple juice will have begun to ferment.
Once the bubbles have ceased—the sugars in the sweet cider have been fully eaten by the yeast—the hard cider is drawn out of each carboy. The clear upper portions of the hard cider are transferred with a siphon and a hose to the awaiting barrel. The lees, the dredges, the dead yeast cells are left in the bottom of the glass jug. If it is a new barrel, a mother is brought in; if it is an active vinegar barrel, the mother is kept on the bottom, always waiting for the new year’s fresh hard cider. In a few weeks it is ready once again, full of flavor, tasting of the apples of the cold fall, sharp with acid.
Growing a Farmer Page 7