The Apple Orchard - Mowers Behaving Badly

Long time readers may remember our Apple Orchard.  The orchard used to be overgrown and unkempt which we remedied with several day's hard work.  And we have been trying to keep on a mowing schedule so that level of disaster never happens again.  With this in mind, we have collected a fleet of farming equipment for maintaining the orchard.

The Orchard in it's previous disheveled state 2011

In the past, Tim had been driving his tractor over 8 miles and back whenever we needed to do work on the farm.  Or, my step-father, always helpful, would take time out of his busy schedule to run through with his brush hog.  This winter we bought a Ford Jubilee tractor, old Oliver brush hog and acquired, through charitable swapping with a neighbor, a pretty good 24hp lawn mower which had been used and abused to the point that it no longer either started or mowed but was quickly resurrected in Tim's Tractor Triage.

Then we cleared out space in the family barn across the road, brought a selection of tools and equipment to store there, and set about to farm on a regular schedule.  The idea is we have a free afternoon with nice weather, and we just show up and have all the equipment we need all ready to go: shovels, rakes, pruners.... metal detector.  Booze. You will understand why in a minute.

Shiny New Radiator (and gas cap chain)

 It hasn't been easy.  We've mowed the heavy spring grass in the orchard twice this year and it's taken us about.... six weeks.  There seems to be some sort of mower curse over the property.  I know my uncle always seems to be having lawn mower breakdowns, and now I think - it's not entirely his fault.  The only piece of equipment that is behaving herself up there is the little dump trailer Tim picked up at a Tuesday auction.  Everyone else has been behaving badly.  Very badly indeed.

The tractor liked to boil over whenever you shut her off, and has cast off her gas cap.  The day after we gave her a whole brandy new cooling system (yesterday), she promptly sprung a serious oil leak (today).  The brush hog pooped out it's blades one day.  Just dropped them right off - KaBLAM!  Tim went back with the metal detector two days later and found the main castle nut three circuits of the field back.  How that 75(?) pound disc and blade assembly managed to stay on, and cutting, for about 15 minutes, with nothing but sticky old grease and centripetal force to hold it up, is anybody's guess.  And the next important question was:  How is one man supposed to lift the blades back up on the nut and screw it back on under there?  Well, it takes an engineering mind, some determination and not a little bit of BamBam

Gas cap #1 is still MIA and evading the metal detector (gas cap #2, also rattley, has been chained to her post like a prisoner).  The weekend after that, the lawn mower picked up a rose root, jammed the blades, bent a spindle, smoked the belt and then vibrated the main engine pulley right the heck out.  Tim reinstalled the pulley, and replaced the spindle, but the battered blades are just going to have to do their job as best they can,

The Oliver bush hog with blades safely contained.... for now

It's just one thing after another.  And these venerate old gals have been gone over, sweet talked, adjusted, greased and pampered. There is no reason for them to be shedding parts and fluids, like dirty underwear, all over the orchard!   We have not gotten through a complete mowing without some sort of problem or annoyance.  When we do finish we can't even admire our accomplishment, we're too busy making a list of parts we need.  And the parts....  after you figure out what you need (it was very helpful to find that old worn out castle nut so we could hold it up and say "I need one of these") ...after you figure out what you need, you can be sure that the new parts, even OEM parts, won't be exactly the same as 60 year old parts.  And if they are, they still won't fit right or the threads will be worn, or the nut will be in an impossible spot.

Tim says that's the risk you run when you're using old equipment,  Quite frankly, the orchard isn't something you would subject new equipment to.  It's hillocky and rolling.  There are hidden rocks and roots and fallen limbs in the grass and woodchuck holes big enough to swallow a wheel (a big one).  The bottom quarter is wet and the upper quarter is rutted.  It's not your typical lawn mowing job.  It's a bit of a challenge.



Still, when the mower fleet is running well, things are great.  And half of the orchard is flat and wide open, a pleasure to mow.  There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than mowing in the shady, bucolic countryside.  I start with the mower under the low limbs of the healthy Cortland and Spy trees while Tim takes the Jubilee and brush hog up and down the long rows. Then I criss-cross in a grid two mower widths beside each tree to catch the grass left by the slalomming path of the wide hog.  I finish up with a trip round of weed whacking and get the golden rods that are hugging the trunks, fearing for their lives.  The orchard grass is heavy and thick, and the golden rod and multiflora rose are in abeyance.  The orchard looks cared for.

The orchard after it's first serious haircut in decades 2013.
It looks even better now, but we're too busy meckanicking to take pictures.

There are a few trees that need to be cut.  I planted 4 new ones last year and they all survived the winter.  More are on order for this fall.  When the apples start to ripen I'm going to mark the trees that need to be taken out and that will be another weekend project.  In the mean time I'm collecting fallen limbs and taking them to the burn pile.  I don't even need to use a chainsaw.  There are dead limbs 8 inches or more thick that I can pull down by hand.  There are really many more than a half dozen really productive trees.  The rest are sort of  there for atmosphere.  But it's a nice atmosphere... apart from this whole mower curse thing.

King David Apples

This was a good year for our apple orchard which was a rewarding outcome seeing as how we put so much work into it.  We spent two full days attacking the rose bushes.  My stepfather mowed it a couple of times afterwards.  My uncle lit the bonfires, and those piles had to be tended and worked with several times after. 

The reward was that the grass and brush was kept to a minimum making it possible to gather apples.  Since the trees are so tall and the productive branches are mostly younger growth at the top, there is very little picking and a lot of picking-up.  I picked at least three bushels myself.  The Amish picked five bushels and my mother and step father picked several bushes.  There were eating apples, pies, applesauce and cider enough for everyone.  Five bushels were taken to the mill yielding an astonishing 21 gallons.  The mill told us that generally you get three gallons a bushel but ours averaged over four gallons a bushel.

We also removed several old trunks making way for new trees.  I’ve made my list for replacement trees.  The first on the list was the Yellow Transparent.  We have a nice tree in our backyard but it is within jumping distance of the woods and the squirrels take every apple before they fully ripen.  And what the squirrels don’t get, the crows and the deer eat.  By locating it in the orchard with its lower wildlife population we have a much better chance of defending a tree.  Second on the list is the Chenango Strawberry.  There is a grafted limb on one orchard tree.  My mother and her father did this decades ago with a scion from my great grandmother’s tree.  We get half a dozen apples each year and long for more.

Another obvious choice is a Red Astrachan.  Since I spent four years assuming the grafted tree in the garden was an Astrachan, and hearing such glowing reports from friends who know the variety,  I am curious to sample one.  I also would like an Esopus Spitzenburg which was the favorite apple of Thomas Jefferson.  It does well in a cold climate and keeps well.

And finally, my two favorite apples, the Golden Delicious and the Honey Crisp.  My uncle says there are or were Golden Delicious trees in the center of the orchard, but if they are still standing they are one of the trees that haven’t been producing.  The Honey Crisp is a new variety, but is popular enough that even Big Horse Creek Farms, who dedicates themselves to preserving the old varieties, carries it.

King David

The star of the orchard this year was again the “King” tree.  This is a nicely shaped, healthy tree which is consistently the biggest producer in the orchard.  And everyone enjoys the apples.  They are dark red, yellow fleshed and keep well.  I asked my mother if she remembered which King variety it was and she said they always “just called it the King tree”.  So I set out to narrow the options and identify it.  The most common apple with a name containing King was the Tompkins King, but it did not fit our description at all. 

Jonathan

 After much googling and reading I noticed a variety called King David.  This is thought to be a cross between the Jonathan and the Arkansas Black and descriptions and photos I found matched our King apple exactly.  There was even an old trade card from Stark Brothers Nursery available on eBay.  Hmmm…  I wonder if that is where these trees came from.  Certainly during that time period Stark Brothers was shipping a whole lot of trees.  There was a district office in New York.  One way to find out.  I know the orchard was planted in 1938.  I began looking for a 1938 Stark Brothers catalog and it didn’t take too long to find one.  The test would be, were all the other known varieties we had also available from Stark Brothers in 1938?  If so, it would be likely that one of their most touted trademarked varieties, the Stark King David, would be in our orchard.

Arkansas Black

 The known list of apple varieties that are still here or are remembered to be here are:

The King apple

Greening

Northern Spy (Double Red)

Double Red Delicious

Cortland

Golden Delicious

Snow

Yellow Transparent

When I received my 1938 salesman's plate book I anxiously opened it and went down the list.  The Stark King David had a large spread as did the Golden Delicious.  Northern Spy: check.  Double Red Delicious: check.  Cortland: check .  Yellow Transparent: check.  I searched the fine print.  Greening … Rhode Island Greening and Northwestern Greening both available...hmm.  Well, check.  Snow: sold under the name Fameuse check.  Yes, they were all there.  Bingo!

So, my conclusion is:  Great Uncle Doug ordered most or all of our trees from Stark Brothers Nursery.  One of them was our now venerate King David tree.  As I looked through the glossy color plates and enticing descriptions I wondered “Uncle Doug, why didn’t you order one of these?”  Well maybe he did.  Maybe this is the key to some of the mystery trees in the back.  Maybe they were not as hardy and resistant as the remaining varieties and are among the many blank spaces on the north side which are now going to be filled with new trees.  The orchard goes on…

Stark Bros Plate

Five..Six..Pick Up Sticks

Seven...Eight... Lay them Straight
Nine... Ten .......... Do it all over again.

Back in July we spent a day clearing most of my apple orchard.  We did about 80% of the two acres, leaving the heavily overgrown back 75 feet or so. We worked until about 4 pm and then we moved on to other work on the land, in particular, cutting up and stacking a huge cherry tree that had been struck by lightening and peeled like a banana making it difficult for the farmer who rents the pasture to mow around.  When my uncle got home that day, he saw what we had accomplished but he asked   "I wonder why they didn't finish the whole orchard."  Well.  Because we were bushed.  So to speak.

This unfinished business has been wearing on Tim.  He wants the rose bushes gone once and for all.  And so, today, we set out to finish what we'd started.  We had a beautiful day to do it.  As we prepared to leave the house Tim said "This is going to be fun."  After all, he's always up for some bull dozing with the promise of some recreational back hoeing in the form of stump plucking.  These are 75 year old mostly dead trees.  This ought to be easy.  Or at least "fun".

When faced with the wall of thorns, he was undaunted.  That is 75 feet of solid rose bush from the apple tree back to the row of evergreens which shelter the orchard from the prevailing west wind.  No Problem.  A person cannot even walk through it.  

After checking with me that there were no ravines or boulders (Nope, just a third of an acre of solid brush with some apple trees buried here and there... have at it) he dozed into the fray.

This was no neat mowing job with islands of rose bushes.  This was a giant undertaking.  My stepfather Richard had already done his part neatly mowing the cleared portion of the orchard which will make picking up apples for cider so much easier.

The above video shows a typical scene.  Imagine that... for eight hours. A less blurry, non-bloggerized version can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHW9Ju7aPB8
 Sometimes all there was to see was a wall of green, a flash or orange and some movement.  Often there was swearing.  Once there was a gleeful report "I see Daylight!"

This is the pile we collected.  It was larger than the last one and Tim was disappointed in the photo.  He says he should have parked his tractor next to it.  Well.  See that apple tree just behind it, sort of in the middle of the horizon?  That's about 25 feet tall.  And there are sections of evergreen trunk over two feet thick perched on the top.

Now the whole apple orchard is all tidy again.  You can even see through to the pasture beyond.  Any tree that had so much as a dozen apples on it was saved.  The rule was "knock all the dead off it and if the trunk is still standing, leave her alone".  We have been trying to map out all the varieties, but before now, some of the trees were completely inaccessible.  Another challenge is that our commercialized pallets are only able to distinguish the more common varieties such as MacIntosh, Cortland, Empire etc.  There are varieties in this orchard we have forgotten the names of.  All the more reason to preserve as many as we can.  Next year I am going to plant half a dozen or so new trees in one area.  I am going to order them from Big Horse Creek Apple Farm so we get to choose from the good old varieties.  

So, let cider season begin!  There are a lot of apples.  They are small but there are plenty of them.  We will gather the fallen ones for cider, and there will be plenty for making apple pies.  Tim has earned them.

Apple Orchard Aftermath or Applemath

Sometimes you just need to start fresh.  Last weekend Tim, and I and my uncle removed the old barb wire fence from the orchard frontage.  The wire was still good, as were most of the posts, but there were rose bushes and other brush growing in it and we decided to make a clean sweep.  If we decide to put livestock in there (goats would be useful for eating the roses) then we can put in a new, sturdy fence.

My stepfather Richard brush hogged the fence lines.  It looks so wide open I keep thinking the trees are going to wander into the road!

And were are to expect some harvest this year.  This is the Greening tree next to the gate.  Well, where the gate was.

 And it looks like we will have a fair amount of plums again this year.

We will have apples at the house too.  The three older trees are full and need selective pruning.  My little sapling has held on to 3 of its 6 apples which is about the right amount for it to support.

I am working on shaping my second sapling using limb spreaders.   These get the limbs spaced properly when they are young and flexible providing a nice shape and eliminating cross branching and crowding.  You can make the same sort of tool with scrap wood if you are handy.

The War of the Roses

I beg your pardon...

I never promised you a rose garden....

You may remember my apple orchard from an earlier blog entry. This year would be it's 75th birthday. Happy Birthday Apple Orchard!  It was planted by my grandfather's brother and takes up 2 acres or so on my farmland on the other side of town.  We don't do too much with it.  Sometimes I ride my horse through there.  A horse can make an apple sound so luscious.   Every couple of years the orchard pulls out all the the stops and gives us a marvelous crop of apples. But mostly, I look at it and think of all the work to be done in there. 

Apple orchards are difficult to mow.  The branches are not pruned and its hard to get a tractor under there.  If a limb falls, you either mow around it, or get out the chain saw and have a bonfire.  If you mow around it, eventually a Multiflora rose will take hold in that spot and engulf the tree.  When the tree dies and falls, you will have a brittle tree carcass in the middle of an eight foot high wall of impenetrable angry thorns, and then you have a real problem.  

Before Number 1

And that is what we had.  A real problem.  We talked about it for a few years.  We knew what had to be done.  We just hadn't worked up the gumption to do it.  My uncle or step father have gone in there and made a few passes with the brush hog so we could at least get to the producing trees.  What we needed was an all out war.

Before Number 2

It has been at least a decade since any cattle were grazed in there and in that amount of time the Multiflora Roses took off.  

Multiflora Rose History

In 1866 the rose bushes were imported as root stock for ornamental roses.  Then, someone got the idea that they would make great hedges for livestock fencing.  Yeah, well...  bad idea.  They are now a VERY invasive species throughout the eastern US.  Once they get started its hard to stop them.  Luckily, they probably do make excellent hedge row fencing for livestock, because once they take over your fence row, there ain't no way you're gettin' to the fence to fix it.  The roses owe you.  They had better keep the cows in.

Before Number 3

Above is the main gateway to the orchard.  The gate would be that large dark mound in the lower left and beyond that is an invisible drainage ditch four feet deep by twelve feet wide with a barbed wire fence on the other side of it.

My Friday day off dawned bright and early.  The first day of Summer.  A beautiful day to work outside.    Temperatures in the mid eighties and sunny skies were forecasted.  I put on a long sleeve denim shirt, some heavy leather gloves, nearly ruined blue jeans and some stiff leather boots.  Ahhh...  summertime.   My stepdad started early in the morning and mowed the high grass up to the worst of it so Tim could get in close and assess the situation.  Assessment:  The rose bushes dwarfed the tractor.  Where would we ever start?  Was this a futile effort?  What were we thinking?

Tim lowered the front end loader and began driving at the wall o' roses from various directions, pushing and crushing the fallen apple trees in their midst.  Within half an hour he had a 50 foot long angry windrow of thorns aimed at a break in the fence out to a small field we had designated for the burn pile.

We were going to win this war.

Some of the roses were three or more inches thick at the roots.  Tim took the time to backhoe these spots out along with what was left of the tree stumps to make the area mowable in the future.

An hour and a half later the front corner was cleared.  in the meantime, Stepdad Richard was mowing.  When the worst of that was done, they both attacked the rose bushes.  They would drive up along a tree trunk and scoop the roots of the rose bush out and then mash it into a ball to be pushed to the pile.  Dead  limbs were chainsawed into manageable pieces and pushed along with.

The white blossoms in this tree are NOT apple blossoms.  They are roses.

In some cases, the rose vines reached 30 feet or more into the trees.  It was my job to pull any of these out by hand.  It was then I discovered a rose pollen allergy that kept me sneezing all afternoon.

After Number 1
The 10 foot wall of roses is history!

After Number 2
Note the dark pink roses along the bank which are leftover from a house that stood here before our family came to the farm over a hundred years ago.  We call them the "Stoddard Roses" after the housewife who likely planted them,

After Number 3  The gate has been pulled out and the deep drainage ditch uncovered.

Halfway through the day we attacked the gateway.  It didn't take long for me to decided that a weak pipe gate, an undermined gatepost, and three decent strands of barbed wire were not worth the hassle to salvage.  I wrenched the gate off it's hinges, Tim reached in with the back hoe and scooped out a grand daddy rose bush, gate, gatepost, wire and all.  Some things are just not worth the trouble.  We can put all that back later after the roses are gone.

Seven hours later, we had an orchard again.  A neighbor on her way to feed calves at the dairy next door stopped and came walking out grinning from ear to ear "Now that's what I call a good day's work!"

The Part We Saved for Later

We did stop about a hundred feet short of the back fence leaving about a fifth of the orchard untouched. We told ourselves we were leaving "habitat" for the birds and the rabbits, but really, we were just darn tired.  And we have enough fuel for a pretty good bonfire, the pile is almost 30 feet square and 10 feet high without adding the large limbs we set aside to cut for campfire wood..  We can always come back and have another go.

Neither Tim nor I, nor my Stepdad want to see any rose bushes for a long time.  

After Apple Picking

This is going to be a banner year for apples in our neck of the woods. Every wild apple tree you pass on the side of the road is loaded with apples. We have a Yellow Transparent, a Cortland, and a Macintosh in our backyard, but the crows and the squirrels stripped all but a couple of dozen apples off the trees. Not to worry, on my farmland we have an Orchard, and I was pleased to discover that there were much more than enough apples for us.

My Great Uncle Doug planted the orchard in 1938. When Great Grandpa Fred came on the farm in 1905, there were old orchards (as was common on farms then) on both "upper" and "lower" farms. Some farmers in the 19th century and turn of the century grew a lot of apples. Some were sent to apple driers in nearby Ashville and put in barrels and exported to Germany.


Photo of the Apple Drier in Asheville from "Chautauqua County - A Pictoral History"

The orchard on my farm was across the cow lane from where it is now, on a two acre field. The severe winters of the 1930's and age killed off the old orchards. Some winters were so cold the trunks of trees would freeze and burst and that sounded "like rifle shots" according to my Grandfather.

Uncle Doug planted the new orchard with more modern varieties. It was one of very few, if not the only orchard in Busti planted that late. He ordered the trees from the Stark Brothers  mail order nursery. My uncle Norman used to have to count the trees and report the number along with how many bushels of apples he saved and how many he took in for cider to the government.

By studying an aerial photo I’ve determined there may have originally been as many as 84 trees, and fewer than 30 remain alive. My Grandfather never trimmed or sprayed it. One year neighbors with a cider mill rented it and trimmed it up and tried to put it in commercial condition for a year or two. I believe my Great Grandfather used to graze sheep in there to keep the grass down, and I remember my Grandfather keeping a couple of hives of honey bees in the back. Other than that, the orchard has been left to it's own devices and is in need of some clean up.

My uncle tells that in the 1970's they used to bag up many bushels of apples and have cider made in several batches. They brought it home in milk cans but put it in big 20 gallon earthenware crocks and kept it out in the snow to have cider into December. I remember them laying tarps under the trees to catch the windfall apples.

My Grandmother also canned and froze cider in gallon jugs: glass for canning and plastic for freezing. We drank a lot of cider! We also had applesauce made from the Yellow Transparents, and dried apples dried on cookie sheets beside the wood stove. My sister and I learned to make apple dumplings, and that was all the rage for a year or two.

They stored apples in baskets in the root cellar. A few times in the winter someone would have to go through the remaining apples in the cellar and cull the rotten ones. I remember the cellar smelling of dried leaves and the faint smuttiness of rotting apples.

The past few weeks I have been keeping an eye on the trees, and have been tormented by loads of ripe apples falling to the ground to be enjoyed by the deer and woodchucks. There are McIntosh, Cortland, a Greening for cooking, Double Red Delicious which are still starchy and hard, Red Spies, Northern Spies and one King tree which is covered with large pale apples.

These are BIG trees. You can only reach a few from the ground, and my attempts at picking them from the back of my horse (who knew I was picking apples and therefore wanted to help) were frustrating at best. Around here, if you want to get to something up high, you grab a Kubota!

I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall,
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised, or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
~Robert Frost

All this bounty makes us greedy. We hate to see it go to waste. But of course, there are only so many apples you can eat or cook in a week. So Tim immediately began to think of cider. He doesn't even drink cider! I drink plenty of cider in the fall. I began by warming it and adding a shot of Captain Morgan Rum for a spicy drink. There is a restaurant that we frequent who has put me on to a few other combinations. Add Butterscotch Schnapps for a drink that tastes like warm apple pie. Add Peach Schnapps and the peach almost totally takes over for a wonderful zingy peach drink.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
And I keep hearing from the cellar-bin
That rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking;

~Robert Frost

I actually do have an antique orchard ladder (they are narrow at the top) but that would have been useless in this situation. Mom's apple picker DID come in very handy. Although I knocked off quite a few, sending them pelting down on Tim and Mom's heads.

Apple Orchard Gothic
Mom and I pose with our bountiful harvest.

There's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now
~Robert Frost

I talked to my dad the next day and at Tim's insistence I asked him what had become of PaPaw's cider press in Kentucky. He didn't know, but he said he had one in the garage that had followed him home from a garage sale. It needed a new drum, but I told him I would stop by and see it because I know you can buy the new drums online.

How long do you think it takes a guy to load something very heavy into his truck and drive 7 miles? Before I knew it, my father was hollering my name through the screen door, and this....

....was sitting in our driveway. Never balk at a chance to get rid of some junk.

The mechanics of it are clean, well oiled, and crank with ease. It has a grinder which Tim didn't think would do much in the way of chopping an apple, until we dropped a couple in and were rewarded with a pile of apple shards on the driveway. An efficient grinder it certainly is!

But this will probably be next year's project. Tim naturally wants to sand blast it and pretty it up, and we still need a replacement drum, a pusher (for lack of a better word) for the top, and I'll be sewing some sacks to go in the drum.

After all that excitement, I began to cook apples. I made both applesauce and apple butter (more on that another time). And this is just the beginning! There are more apples ripening every day!