![]() Twenty years ago I planted my apple orchard with dwarf varieties. It was a summer of no rain, and I had cracks in my clay down more than a foot. Most of those trees survived, but they really didn't start thriving until I started rotating my pigs and chickens through the orchard. The animals provided the needed phosphorus for abundant fruit production and the orchard took off. Whether it was the animals nosing about or the fact that I live in a frost pocket on the shore of Lake Superior, I have never seen Plum Curculio or Codling Moth in my orchard: two of the banes of Organic production. There is a little apple maggot on the field edges, and occasional scale. Small apples go into fruit preserves and fresh cider, while the rest go to my summer and winter CSAs. Fast forward 20 years and those dwarf trees are at the end of their life cycle. Many of those varieties proved themselves over the years but I have some new design goals for the replant. All the new trees are standard rootstock, which should better withstand our now regular droughts, plus the increasingly intense winds we get over the summer and fall. I am going from about 16 varieties to 40: as a solo farmer, I need a small amount to pick every week for as long a season as I can get. My CSA members love the diversity of apples, and the more varieties I have, the more likely it is that some of them might get through the increasing late spring freezes. My orchard is set up so that fruit ripens sequentially from one end of the field to the other, which gives me some management advantages. I have not mowed the understory in years... the pigs do that in the early season, before they move on to their summer pastures, and they come back in the fall to clean up and mow the pasture down again, and pick up the rare dropped apple. So, I have apples that ripen from late August until November, and the last of the apples are storage varieties that will keep until February in my passively cooled root cellar for the winter CSA. Other than the legacy farmstead Duchess, I don't have many baking apples. Most are heirlooms known for their flavor. Replanting into the same land is like brain surgery: some of the old trees are still producing, so I need to add trees around the old ones, even as I get ready to replace those. It's been a process of several years, but I am coming to the end of it, and it gives me a thrill that the trees I am planting now will start to come into full production about the time I am ready to retire.... and they should outlive me by at least a century.
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AuthorDr. Clare Hintz has a B.S. Degree in Biology and Writing, a M.S. in Sustainable Systems with an emphasis in Agroecology, and a Ph.D. in Sustainability Education with a focus on Regenerative Agriculture. She currently teaches agroecological design from her regenerative agriculture farm in northern Wisconsin. She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Sustainability Education, and the board president of Marbleseed, the midwest farmers association. In her spare time she knits, reads feminist science fiction and cooks really good food for friends. Archives
February 2025
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