Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living
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“I sold my dad’s nursery sometime in the 1930s and moved up east of Hiawassee on Route 76 and lived there from about 1934 up to 1960. I went up there and set out a small orchard. It was just for a pastime, a hobby of mine. That’s one of my main weaknesses. I like to see anything grow.
“Even now, apples from Rabun County, Towns County, and all those orchards back in towards Waynesville, North Carolina, have got the best flavor of any apples. A mountain apple will sell. If people ever eat any of them, they’ll always prefer to buy them.
“In these mountains, your orchards should face the north, northwest, or due west. You do not want to set out fruit trees in these mountains that are facing due east or south or southeast. If the trees are in bloom and there’s a big frost, when the sun comes up in the morning, it’ll bake that frost right into the bloom. It’ll kill the bloom. If they’re facing west or northwest, the frost will gradually thaw out as the sun is coming up. My orchard faces west, and I’ve never failed to have a crop there either. I’ve seen a few light crops, but we’ve always had a crop of apples.
“It’s better, if you can, to plant above the frost line. There can be frost, you know, lower down, but after you get above there, there won’t be any frost! The north wind, during the winter, won’t affect the trees very much.
“This day and time, they use different root systems to what they used to. Years ago, all people knew was old-time seedling rootstock, which they called a standard-sized tree. They made a great big tree. There are so many different rootstocks now that you graft onto. You’ve got 106, 111, and 7M. With the 7M rootstock, you have to tie the tree to a post. They won’t produce maybe over a peck of apples, but you know, they’re a real small dwarf tree. Semi-dwarf makes a medium-sized tree.
“Semi-dwarf rootstock doesn’t make such a large tree or take as long to come into production as a standard-sized tree. They’re more compact, you see, and don’t take as much spraying material and as much labor. Picking the apples is not a problem because the tree is smaller. Yet, you pretty well get the same amount of apples as you do with standard-sized trees. Of course, semi-dwarf and dwarf are going to bear young, but naturally, you don’t pick a whole lot of apples off them at first because you ain’t got very much bearing surface, you see. When they begin to get up pretty good size, I’d say around eight years, they’ll begin to pay you right along, and then by twelve years, you’ll begin to get a pretty good crop.
“I prune pretty well the same way as we did when I was young, but spray material and fertilizer have changed a great deal. All we could buy back then came in two-hundred-pound sacks. We got a 10-2-2 guana, and then we got a 20 percent acid phosphate. Eventually, we began to get nitrogen soda. And that’s what we fertilized with back when I was a kid. Me and my brother, we’d throw a two-hundred-pound sack on our back an’ carry it up in the orchard. We’d pour it in a bucket and spread it in a big band around the tree. I couldn’t even roll one of them big sacks up on my knee today.
“I fertilize about the middle of March. And then again around the first day of June. You don’t want to fertilize in the fall because, if it turns warm, you’re liable to stimulate the growth. That would injure the tree. If a tree set too heavy, grows too fast, you should go in about the middle of May and use some calcium nitrate. That way, you’re feeding the calcium and the nitrate at the very same time. Nitrogen soda and ammonium nitrate don’t have any calcium in them, and a tree needs the calcium. Use just a good-grade, completely balanced fertilizer. You’ve got to have your potash, phosphates, and nitrogen and your calcium-magnesium. I use a 8-24-24. I won’t go higher than a 8 percent nitrogen this spring, because in my experience, if you use too much plain nitrogen soda, it encourages fire blight to go to working on your fruit trees. You’ve seen fruit trees, especially pear trees, with dead twigs, dead limbs? That’s fire blight. You’ve got to fertilize the trees; you’ve got to take good care of them or you don’t get any returns off of them. An apple tree, if pruned and cared for, will last on and on.
“I’d advise anyone that’s going into the orchard business to start out with a few trees and just grow into it. You will learn by experience, by trial and error, and there’s a whole lot of errors in lots of things to do with apple growing.
“The main drawback is real estate. It’s getting so high that people just can’t go out here and buy up enough land for a big orchard. You’ve got to put in a right smart of time before you begin to get any returns out of it. It’s regular work, all right. There’s so much to orchard work! That’s the reason most people don’t stay in it very long. The younger generations are just not interested in all that work. They can go to work for wages and punch a time clock and draw a check every week. There’s a lot of difference in that and living up here on a farm and starting a orchard. There are no returns for a long time, and they’re liable to throw up their hands and leave out.
PLATE 43 Ross Brown’s apple orchard
“Now, I think apple growing is worth it. I don’t make a decent living at it. If I’d a-took [to] making a living at it, I’d have starved to death. I just grow apples for a hobby. I have apples for a lot of my friends. I give a lot of apples away, and I make some cider and a little vinegar. I just enjoy working at it.”
The love Ross Brown has for apple growing is undoubtedly a large part of what made him a successful orchard owner. Another such man, one who is respected and successful because he not only loves his business but is very educated in his field, is Bob Massee. The youngest child of a farm family who lived through several disasters, Mr. Massee is familiar with the hazards of commercial farming and knows how to start over. In fact, his family came to Rabun County to grow apples because of a disaster in Florida just before he was born.
“In 1929, one year before I was born, the Massee family moved here. My mother and daddy were farmers in South Florida in 1926, and a hurricane wiped out everything they had. So they went back, rebuilt, farmed, and were doing great in 1927. In 1928 a hurricane blew them away. They got on a barge, barely, with their lives and their children. I wasn’t born, but twelve hundred people were killed in the 1928 hurricane. My dad decided to go back and help bury the dead—which he did—and then came back to get my mother to go back and rebuild. She said, ‘Not with me.’ She said, ‘I’m not going back.’ My uncle [who was a doctor] had a patient who was president of the Southern Bell Telephone Company, and he said, ‘By the way, I just bought a farm in Tiger, and I need somebody to go in with me—to run it.’ And my dad said, I believe I’ll take that.’ So that’s how I got here; that’s how they got here.
“When my family got started in the apple business, the apples were already here. The orchard started with my dad and a man named Ben Read in 1929. There was a small orchard here then. My dad bought another orchard in 1933 on Glassy Mountain. He bought one hundred thirty acres there, and then, in 1939, we bought an orchard on Seed Tick Road.”
After graduating from high school, Mr. Massee attended Clemson College and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and later served in the Army during the Korean War. “[In college, I was a] horticulture major. Horticulture consists of a lot of things; I’m a pomology major. Horticulture covers leafy culture, which is vegetable production; food processing, which is canning; landscaping, which I’m not; and pomology, which is fruit production. I basically took pomology, but I had to take all those other courses, and, amazingly, I took a lot of chemistry.
“I was born in the apple business. I didn’t know anything else, and I love it! I’ve got a son right up there who’s just as bad as I am; he loves it too. I’ve got lots of children—Jim, Gigi, Emme, Robin, Melody, and Sterling. Sterling is thirty years old and runs the apple business. He is the manager and my partner.
“We have about seventy-five acres now. We’re down to about seventy-five. I think you can get too big. At one time, I bought one hundred fifty acres and that was just too much. It’s down to where my son and I can handle most of it ourselves except during harvest. We’ve got a coupl
e of boys working for us right now. They just came and started helping us last week. I try to keep [it] just down to family business. When you hire a lot of labor, you’re getting in trouble right then.
“I also produce raspberries, blackberries, grapes, tomatoes, and sweet corn. We ship apples primarily. We don’t do much shipping of those others—we don’t really have enough production. We may this year. We’re getting kind of heavy in the grapes; we may ship some of those. Commercially, we do apples; we do have peaches, nectarines, and sweet cherries too, but it’s mostly a small operation.
“A lot of this is pick-your-own. It’s people who come in, and they pick. We just leave a money box down there with a sign that says this pint is so much or a quarter of a gallon is so much. We don’t see a lot of these people. They just come, pick their stuff, and leave. What they don’t pick, we pick and put in the freezer. I have a lady in Highlands, North Carolina, who buys all the frozen fruit.
“The amount we ship out per year is very variable. Like this year, I doubt we’ll ship—at least I won’t ship—two thousand bushels. Normally, we’ll ship anywhere from ten to fifteen thousand bushels, and years ago you shipped thirty to thirty-five thousand bushels. That’s been a long time ago.
“We used to have a big packing house. There was a big packing shed there in 1962. I was living in the brick house right here that I built, and we heard all kinds of commotion at two o’clock in the morning. The packing house was on fire. Now, you don’t think that’s a frightening feeling? You know, I could just see all our boxes, all our equipment, everything we had, going up in flames. We didn’t have much insurance on it. My dad and I were still in business together then. He said, Okay, we’ve got fifteen thousand dollars.’ He said, ‘Build us a new packing house and put some equipment in it.’ Fifteen thousand. Well, I built the packing house down here for five thousand, started on the Fourth of July, and had it ready to go by picking time in August. I spent ten thousand on the equipment, and that’s how we got back in business. It was cheap equipment and a cheap-built packing house, but it got us back in there.
“It is very interesting to see the bins being dumped up, twenty bushels a lick, and the machine polishing them, taking out the little apples; then the graders take out the defects. Then I have a machine that takes out a certain size that goes in the plastic bags and go to the supermarket. Then I have another machine that the rest of the apples run down, and it weighs each one. It has eight different sizes. In other words, one size would have one hundred thirty-eight apples in the box, in another would be one hundred twenty-five in a box, and on down to one hundred thirteen, one hundred, eighty-eight, eighty, seventy-two, and sixty-four in a box. Each bin has that particular size; it’ll put them in trays and put them in a bushel box and mark them. It’s an interesting operation. Everybody is more than welcome to come and see us. This year we’ll probably work a little bit at night, and that’s about all. So we don’t have enough to really warrant hiring a lot of people.
“I don’t do any canning or processing. I’ll tell you what we do. We have a lot of processing and canning apples—normally, mostly juice apples, which go to the processor for juice. We load them and send them to Lincoln, North Carolina, or to Hendersonville, North Carolina, or Seneca, South Carolina; sometimes they go to another outfit up in Pennsylvania. Last year I sent some up to Newcomerstown, Ohio—all for juice. We load them in twenty-two-bushel bins, so we put about one thousand bushels on a truck just in open bins. We get very little for them. We might get two dollars a bushel, something like that. It will cost you about a dollar to get them picked. So you’re losing money. On anything, if you can make at least eight dollars on about a bushel of apples, that’s about a break-even price. That’s about all we’ve been doing the last few years.
“One struggle of being self-employed is we don’t have any income except, you know, that period of time when we sell. I enjoy being self-employed, but there are a lot of pitfalls, a lot of hard things. When you come home at night, you’re not through with your work. If you’re working on a public job, you try to forget that job when you get home at night. We never forget it. It’s twenty-four hours with me. But I like it, you know. That’s okay.
“One risk is, if you’re in the apple business and the fruit business, you risk getting hit by spring frost. Then if you make it through spring frost, hail can wipe you out, and right now the drought is hurting us real bad, the dry weather. Then you have a disease problem, insect problems, labor problems, getting it picked, and wind. A strong wind can blow them off about the time you get ready to pick them. Hail is the most damaging. There are a lot of bad things that can happen.
“To handle spring frost, what you really need to do is plant up on the side of a hill high enough so that the cold air always flows to the bottom. If you go to school some morning, look down in the pastures. You know when you see all the frost down in the bottomland? Now, what happens, during the day all the hot air is being formed down in the bottom, but at night it reverses, and the warm air moves from the bottom beside the hill because of the specific density of air. Cold air is heavier than hot air. It’s like water. If you leave water in the bathtub a long time, you can put a thermometer down in it, and you can feel it’s cooler, or you’ve been swimming in the lake or something—you feel the water’s colder down below. It’s the same way with air. Cold air will shove down to the bottom, displace the hot air, and push it up the side of the hill. A year ago, right over here at the orchard, we checked the thermometer, and we lost a lot of apples. It got down to twenty-seven degrees, twenty-six degrees in places. In one place, it got down to twenty-five degrees. Up on this hill right here, I had a couple hundred trees up on top of the mountain. I went up there to check the temperature; it was forty-two degrees. So you can see, there’s fifteen degrees difference in about three hundred feet elevation. So plant up on the side of a hill. If you’ll notice most orchards, all of them are planted on a hillside for that reason.
“I can’t protect them from the frost. They do have wind machines. I used to have an oil system. I had one hundred sixty smoke heaters, smudge pots that were pressurized and used fuel oil. I had it rigged so I could just drive by and throw a match at them, and finally I had it rigged on the front bumper of a truck so I could put a torch out there and drive by them and they’d light. But fuel oil costs over a dollar a gallon. When I put my system in in the 1960s, it was fifteen cents a gallon, and I would burn something like five or six hundred gallons of fuel a night, which, you know, wasn’t bad; it was less than a hundred bucks. Now you burn seven or eight hours, and you’ve burned a thousand dollars’ worth. If you do that two or three nights, the apples aren’t worth it. So we just took it out. I let the junkman haul it away.
“A real cold winter normally is good. What happened this year was it got real warm for a few days in February, and then it got down to four degrees—in some places zero. The trees and the plants and things (the chemical makeup is such that everything is weather-related), as the temperature goes up, they start getting ready for spring. Well, then, the shock of that four degrees put them out of business just about, and it did kill. Normally, it doesn’t hurt apples, but this year it was a little freak thing. What happens with apples is they put out in the spring, and normally they get blooms and then it gets cold. They get killed during the bloom. They can’t stand it—just before opening, the bloom can stand about twenty-five degrees or twenty-four degrees. As they skip into pink, they can stand about twenty-six and twenty-seven degrees, but when they get wide-open blooms, they’re exposed to the world during about twenty-eight degrees for an extended period. They can stand a tornado for two or three hours, but they can’t stand twenty-eight degrees from eleven o’clock at night to seven the next morning. It’s timewise.
“It’s also related to the amount of moisture in that tree. Most people think, well, the wind’s blowing; it has dried them out. They won’t freeze. That’s wrong. The wetter the apple, the wetter the bloom is, the harder it is for the
bloom to freeze. In physics, there’s a thing called kinetic energy, and it takes more kinetic energy to convert water to ice. The drier that fruit is, the easier it freezes. The wetter it is, the harder it is for it to freeze. With that in mind, a lot of people—I’m not able to do it, couldn’t afford to—have overhead sprinkler systems that mist the trees during the spring of the year if it starts to freeze. They know that thirty-two degrees does not hurt that apple. So they mist it over, and when it freezes, it protects them; it’s just like a blanket, a blanket of ice. They look like Christmas trees covered with ice, and they keep that sprinkler system going until the weather warms back up above thirty-two degrees. So ice, amazingly, protects them from freezing.
“During the winter, we prune, basically. We spend most of the winter pruning, getting our orchard ready for the spring, spraying, and getting it cleaned up. Pruning is an all-winter job; we never get through.
“We don’t sell anything during the winter. Our income is limited just to summer and fall months, mostly just in the months of August, September, and early October. I don’t have any income except for a few weeks. All the rest of the time, it’s outgo.
“Primarily, I grow Red Delicious and Golden Delicious apples. We also have Fuji, Gala, Jonigo, Arkansas Black, Yates, Ginger Gold, and I can go on and on. We have about twenty different varieties. There are just a lot of different varieties that we carry, but basically Red and Golden Delicious. That’s our ‘bread and butter.’
“There are something like six thousand known varieties of apples. Only about fifteen or twenty are really grown commercially. There are a lot of old apples that if people knew about them, we’d still be planting them probably.