While our apple trees are holding off blossoming for a few more days, our other fruit trees - plum, cherry, peach, pear - are all in full bloom. We are supposed to get frosts in the next few days, though not so cold as to endanger the blossoms. Let’s hope the forecasts are correct. We are relieved to have gotten a few inches of rain in the last number of days. It had not rained since we planted all our new trees, and no matter how well you water plants, real rain does a better job. Nothing makes you attentive to weather like farming! We are thrilled to have really precise weather information with our new weather station. We find the temperatures are really different than those recorded by the Clark Orchard weather station, which is only a few miles away but hundreds of feet lower in elevation. Now we can track our own degree days and wetting periods.
We got labels approved and printed for the sparkling and hopped ciders, and we are now close to contacting retailers to start selling cider. We plan to be at the Ashfield farmer’s market Memorial Day weekend with those two varieties of hard cider. That market is on the town common in the village of Ashfield Saturdays 9-1. We won’t be there every week (unless Ashfield residents turn out to be really thirsty for cider), but expect to attend once a month during the spring and summer. Once the maple, farmhouse, and ice ciders are ready we will add them to the selection.

We have been so hard at work we have not taken the time to share what we’ve been doing, hence the length of this entry. We pruned all the trees in the orchard, some on top of snow that let us reach high in the trees, some on snowshoes, and some on the ground. The trees are continuing on their path to proper shape, as each year we allow some branches to grow out and eventually can cut the overhanging branches that grow at weird angles. We also grafted new varieties onto rootstock that we collected from our trees or those of neighbors and friends, which are currently in our refrigerator but will soon be in the nursery bed to grow into young trees. We ordered a few new apple varieties from Fedco Trees, namely Redfield, Campfield, Reine de Pomme, as well as a few more peach trees, grape vines, and blueberry bushes, and all but the blueberries are now in the ground. We are also moving all the trees we grafted two years ago into the orchard, filling in areas where trees died and starting to plant in new areas as well. It feels great to have the orchard filled in at last, though these new trees will not fruit for some time to come. Remaining orchard work, before we see blossoms, include planting the apple trees that remain in the nursery bed and the blueberry bushes, pruning of a few of our giant standard sized trees, removing all the big tree trimmings from the orchard, and flail mowing the smaller branches to return them to the soil. It’s amazing how those chopped up branches disappear.

On the hard cider side, we have also been busy. We ordered new bottles, and bottled most of the 2012 cider as Sparkling and Hop hard cider, with the still, Farmhouse hard cider, Maple hard cider, and the Ice cider continuing to age for a bit longer. We decided to bottle-condition the sparkling and hop ciders by adding just a few ml of maple syrup when we fill the bottles. This adds some bubbles as the maple syrup ferments. We also worked with our artist friend Jeff Grader to design some labels for the new varieties, and we are now working through the bureaucracy of getting them approved by the organic certifier and the federal government so we can get them printed. Nothing is quick and easy when dealing with alcohol! We are looking forward to making the hard cider available at a few local retailers in the next month or so. Updates on that as soon as we have them.

This spring has been nice and gradual, with no weird heat waves in March like we had last year. We see no vole damage on any trees this year, perhaps due to the long cold period before we had snow this winter. Hopefully pest insects were knocked down by that cold as well; we are looking forward to seeing whether cold, dry winter periods reduce pest insect pressure. Every year is a new adventure, we’ll have to wait to see what this one will bring.

So we have had the solar panels for almost one year, and it’s official - we made enough power to cover all of our electrical use, plus the 480 kWh we needed to cover the $6/month customer fee for being grid tied. We head into the sunny part of the year with a $9 credit remaining. Thanks Northeast Solar, you did a great job sizing the system!

On this snowy day, when pruning is not an option, I have been thinking about the orchard as a component of our local habitat. The Northeast Organic Farming Association spring publication focused on the role of organic farms in supporting the biodiversity of our local communities, noting that one goal of the organic standards is to promote biodiversity and ecosystem health beyond the farm.
The notion that our farm is part of the local ecosystem is one of our prime directives as orchard managers. We foster elements of the ecosystem within and around our orchard to integrate our non-native fruit trees into their ecological community, both to gain benefits from that community, and to provide resources in return. For instance, we encourage a healthy soil ecosystem by maintaining a diverse understory, feeding the creatures in the soil with compost and tree trimmings, and avoiding use of materials that might harm those soil inhabitants. Those creatures in turn make nutrients available to our trees, aerate the soil, and keep conditions such as water retention and pH in balance. We also are thrilled to host predators of all shapes and sizes, from the mind-boggling diversity of spiders in and around the orchard, to the mink that spent much of this winter hunting little mammals on our property, to the hundreds of birds that feed their babies with insects from our orchard each spring and summer. Without these helpers we would be overrun with pests that would kill our trees and damage our fruit. And while our property is just a small piece within a large area of forest and other open land, the mix of pasture, orchard, forest, wetlands, and gardens offer resources to a broader range of creatures than one habitat could provide. So, we hope our management strategy is mutually beneficial, to us and every other creature we share space with.
This strategy does sometimes come with costs. That mink killed a chicken before we tightened up the coop. Rodent populations can spike, leaving us with girdled, dead trees. Various insect pests have gotten out of balance, damaging substantial numbers of apples. An orchard is not an intact ecosystem, after all, so we do need to intervene to a degree. But we hope to always improve our capacity to manage the orchard in a way that will improve the health of our trees, the quality of our apples, and the value of our property to everyone else living here.

Our hard cider has been fermenting very slowly this season, but it was finally ready to be transferred into new vessels this past week. We spent a day moving cider from one vessel to another, with a bit of product testing. A productive day. It is amazing how different cider can be from year to year using the same apple varieties. One year we made a lot of cider with Freedom apples, and it was all pretty high acid. We only made a little cider from Freedoms this year, and the acid level is much, much lower - it tasted really good, actually. Hard to say why. So our cider is going to be quite different every year, given differences in the apples and the yeast from year to year. Every batch is a new experience!
The cider will age for another few months before we bottle it this spring, and then it conditions in the bottle for a while. We expect to start selling cider in May this year. Stay tuned for where it will be available.