We are just over halfway to our Fruit n Fencelifitng goal, help us Fall into Success this Season
With fall, comes reflection, shifting seasons, birds in flight, chanaging colors on the landscape, settling in with warm socks and tea. So its fitting that thoughts shift to t-posts and apples. The first fruit trees we planted at the farm were apples. We like them, they grew well in Wisconsin and Alar was the commercial food scare of the moment. Rob and his father picked up a couple at a local nursery, brought them back home and plopped them in the ground. Thirty years later, we're still enjoying being perched up in an apple tree (one of our favorite varieties for baking that my grandma's mother planted) harvesting the all-purpose floral fruit. Nonetheless, when Rob and I set out to turn an acre of the front pasture into an orchard apples didn't make the long list. For what we envisioned as a sustainable orchard, apples were in small doses at least here in the buggy humid upper midwest.
So we worked from our first principals in our design. Observing and working with nature and utilizing different niches in the landscape and season to find fruits that are well adapted to the climate and would be relatively unhampered by pests and diseases. Having had good successes thus far with pears, hardy kiwi, currants, and yes even a malus or two, our orchard has started to take shape. We've had lot of fun with over 740 people along the way, started to harvest a substantial amount of currants, are celebrating our first quince harvest and bemoaning our first bout of growing pains. In farming, as in life, there are always wildcards. For our farm, the Queen of Spades are deer and woodchucks.
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