I profess to have dreams of walking out my back door in the morning, strolling along a merry path just feet from our home, and picking strawberries, cherries, and raspberries. Or, if its later in the season, there are peaches, blackberries, and blueberries. Later, there are cantaloupe, apples, and pears.
Anyone that grows fruit knows this is a worthy pursuit, but one that requires time, patience, perseverance, money, vision, more money, more time, and even more patience. In our previous garden, I really could pick fruit for about half the year, owing mostly to prolific blackberries, and raspberries that bore in the Spring and the Fall.
We’ve not been quite so blessed with climate and season here at Horseshoe Hill (though we are surrounded by a lot more producers for whatever we lack and there are always great events and places to go). However, I do possess the patience and perseverance in greater doses than I did ten years ago. And vision. And so, in our second year here, with the knowledge heavy on our heads of the recent and seemingly un-abating drought, we sought to make the most of every drop of water that fell here to help establish our fruit. It stood to reason that native and naturalized fruit trees would hold up better to lack of moisture, would grow well, and bear sooner.
This aligned well with our bank account, too: about all we could afford were the value packs of native trees offered by our State Forestry Department. In Virginia, you could buy ten fruit or nut trees for $8, but the catch was they were small, and they were suited more to Virginia, but not necessarily a commercial enterprise.
For instance, one of our choices was Virginia Persimmon (Diospyrus virginiana); its fruits appear like sudden early orange Christmas ornaments once Fall blows their leaves away, leaving you with a creamy apricot-like but seed-ridden fruit. The domesticated Oriental Persimmon definitely ops the native variety for sizable fruit, but the price was nice. We also liked that our family and the trees were both Virginian.
Additionally, we chose hazelnut. It has an unfriendly catkin outer-covering, ensuring that no one, not even the tenacious Virginia squirrels, will be stealing OUR nuts. Along with this, we ordered Black Walnut, because, as fans of fruit and walnut bread, we know one we will reap eventual awards in our lifetimes. I’ve also used the hulls of walnuts for their dye. The main reason we ordered was apparently for the prized lumber that we will be too old to witness the harvesting of. I highly doubt I will be able to sanction its cutting if I am still alive when that happens, but we’ll see. There are twelve, they stuck a few extra in the pack, and they now line our second driveway to the little barn we are building.
We also planted crabapples and “common apples,” so described in the Forestry catalog, which was noted as “very unhelpfully-named” by our agroforester friend Andy. The crabapples are a universal pollinator for all apples, and really are the size of cherry tomatoes at best. Perhaps one year we will make jam with them, but for now, the birds appreciate our efforts.
Last Fall, three and a half years after planting (its now been 9 years, Ed.) ten or more of each of these species, we began to see the first fruits (and nuts) of our labor. First to bear were the hazelnuts, which were okay raw but better steeped in vodka to make a sort of hazelnut extract for our coffee.
We missed many in our harvests before Fall passed us by, but before we knew it, Spring had arrived early, too…and our apples were resplendent in their pinkish-white blooms. It was a truly glorious sight, and we had no way of knowing that when we left for Pennsylvania on April 3rd that we’d see snow not only in Pennsylvania but in Virginia as well which is six hours to the south The precipitation and front brought a hard freeze and every last bloom was dead upon our arrival home a few days later. Ahh, the travails of growing things in a Central Virginia frost pocket.
I knew (after I planted them) that apples have no business being set down on a southern slope; they tend to bloom early unless they are planted on a northern-facing slope. In that location, they were (and still are) subject to exactly what we experienced, which was an uncharacteristic late frost. I could not bear to transplant them, and soon enough, they were too big to do that anyway. So, they remain.
The persimmons and walnuts have been the last to show real ambition. The Persimmons grew tall despite being planted in a dry spot on a dry hill when they’d like us to all know they really prefer being in a moist spot at the wood’s edge. The walnuts were planted along the second driveway to be out of the way of the other plants that may not mix well with Juglans nigra’s juglone hormone, one that inhibits the growth of many nearby green things to reduce competition. Instead, we located them so that one day they might provide a shade-lined drive until they drop nuts onto the cars. Then, the plan is to put down a tarp and drive over them to make their hulling easier.
While the tallest persimmon is now over 20′ tall, the walnuts (which were the tallest seedlings at the time of planting of all the trees) have barely grown a foot a year, and are now maybe 6′ tall. (They are now, 10-12′, still growing at a rate of about a foot a year. Ed.) They are in no hurry, it seems, and my mom’s oft-repeated adage “first they sleep, then they creep, then they leap,” is not applying to them, yet. They are locked in the creeping stage, it seems.
This summer’s drought took a toll on our first persimmon to bear; it is the smallest tree, and though it held ten fine but small orange fruits on it, at the commencement of Autumn, it lost all its leaves and it appears to be dead. Maybe it just has stage fright and doe snot like to be the center of attention, I don’t know. We’ll have to wait until Spring again to know if it was one of the casualties (the first of the orchard planted in 2003) of the 2007 Drought. I hope not. (It survives in 2012! Ed. )
Therein lies the beauty of the native orchard; though we’ve attempted growing several pecan, blueberry, Nanking cherry, camellia, Russian Olive, and other species, they either died or barely hang on, compared to the 52 fruit and nut trees from our area. Only the persimmon appears to have died, and not until after offering almost a dozen tiny and tasty fruits and their seeds which are now drying by our sink for later planting. (And, it didn’t die! Ed.)
I attribute most of the trees’ successes so far to the fact that they were from “round these parts,” being native species and also propagated and grown out within an hour of here. They know what it’s like to live in Virginia, and they are already well-prepared for the challenge.
But it should be noted that we also planted them on bermed swales, along the contour of the hill, and that helped with their watering and establishment. The shallowly-dug swales captured the water; the berms moderated any moisture, and then we ran chickens between the rows for a few years while the plants continued to grow. The rains would was the chicken manure into the swales so it could subtly and slowly provide natural fertilization.
I was a little concerned the trees would get over-fertilized, but the grass never seemed to get entirely burnt, and the trees’ leaves never turned yellow until they should have in the Fall, so I think those worries were unfounded. But still we herded the chickens to the adjacent coop to give the trees periodic rests, just in case.
Last year (or was it the year before?) we extended the rows and added a few elderberries (Sambuca canadensis) and they have survived and bore this year (2007). They are medicinal, but we don’t eat the berries straight off the bush; they are employed for making cough syrup, and the bees also enjoy their flowers.
One day, I imagine we’ll either have sheep running about merrily in the shade of all these happy thriving trees, or we’ll get really intensive, and plant under and around their growing canopies a la Forest Garden: mint, comfrey, kiwi, hops, and grapes climbing their trunks and hanging from their branches. With the eggs from the hens down the hill, and all the apples uphill, someone will enjoy their breakfast, some day soon. (Currently, there are grapes, hops, figs and mountain mint next to the house, but transcribing this reminds me that I have a few grape vines that I could move further out so they can grow more freely…its always something, Ed.)