Charlotte and Bea help Julie and Chris cover their garden plot with newspaper and straw.

Spring weekends are never quite long enough–by Monday morning, we’ve begun as many new projects as we’ve completed, and we wish we could keep riding the momentum of two solid days, all of us together, on the farm. Our weekend began with the first flavors of the garden: Saturday breakfast of poached eggs on homemade toast with lightly sautéed asparagus and a drizzle of mustard whisked with olive oil. It was a fortifying meal for a rainy day with a big project at hand–after tending the saplings in buckets packed with wet sawdust for a week, we finally put in the latest additions to the orchard! In addition to our ten (eleven?) established apple trees, we now have two new heirloom apples, three pears, and four high bush blueberries.  In an effort to extend the growing season of the farm, the new apples are winter producers, Frostbite and Black Oxford, and the pears will fruit in succession: Seckel in summer, Bosc in autumn, and Sheldon in winter. The Sheldon is especially exciting because it’s a good keeper, and is said to taste even better after mellowing in the root cellar for a couple of months. We chose heavy producers for the blueberries, to round out our existing patch of wild and high bush plants: Elliot, Bluecrop, and Earliblue.

On Mothers’ Day, we had the treat of picking out a few new plants (Charlotte saved her allowance to buy Margaret a geranium for the front porch), and helping our friends Julie, Chris, and Ada in their garden. Julie and Chris are in the process of looking for land to farm, and one of the most exciting developments at Ten Apple this year is being able to offer them a plot to experiment with in our orchard as they start their farm journey. We all celebrated our hard work with a Sunday supper that included volunteer mustard greens that reseeded themselves from last year and rhubarb cobbler.

-

Poached egg with asparagus on toast

Read more…

Farming, Food, Garden apple trees, asparagus, farm, Food, pea shoots, pear trees, poached egg, saplings

Dave Homa demonstrates some tree pruning skills during our Tree Pruning Workshop on Sunday

As Margaret mentioned in the previous post, I spent my birthday pruning our apple trees, or I should say learning how to prune our apple trees. Dave Homa from the Lakes Region Permaculture Group held a skill share here on Sunday — it was a great experience, and everyone who attended got a tremendous amount out of it. I knew some of the basics already such as removing suckers and water sprouts, and although our long neglected trees need some dramatic pruning– “big cuts” as I think Dave might have said — it was the little techniques that Dave showed us that made me the most excited to get back out there this weekend with my hand pruners to finish the job. Here are 6 quick reminders from the beautiful handout that Dave put together:

1. Remove water sprouts and suckers first

2. Remove dead wood

3. Trees should have space and be open

4. Prune for “heaven and hell” (branches pointing up or down)

5. Do stiffening cuts to help the tree handle the weight of the fruit

6. Prune back to a terminal bud

Workshops apple trees, Dave Homa, permaculture, skill share, tree pruning