ORGANIC ORCHARDING

A GROVE OF TREES TO LIVE IN

GENE LOGSDON

RODALE PRESS     1981

PART II

 

PART I

ESTABLISHING AND MAINTAINING A HOMESTEAD ORCHARD

 

Chapter 1: Life in a Grove of Trees: An Overview

Even those who know little about the complex and intrinsically beautiful world of the orchard like the sound of the word. It echoes the essence of the good old days and the timeless solidity of supposed rural virtue in American tradition even as the reality disappears sentimentally into the names of roads and subdivisions: Old Orchard Lane; Peach Orchard Hills; Crab Orchard Park. Like windmills and smoke houses, sitting porches, and well pumps, the old home orchard exists as an anachronism only. The trees have all marched off to join the armies commanded by commercial fruit growers.

Or so it seems. Actually, the home orchard is not really disappearing but has only changed its appearance. Nurserymen are selling more fruit and nut trees to homeowners than ever before. But the backyard gardener does not always have the space for the formal orchard of yesterday’s family farm. Instead of a prim, white-fenced block of apple and peach trees along the road, handy to barn and house, today’s home-food producer scatters food trees of many varieties around his property wherever he can find room, to serve double duty as food and for landscaping beauty, not to mention as shade, fuel, or protection from the wind. His orchard becomes something more than the orchard that we are accustomed to thinking of – it becomes an orchard in the oldest and truest sense, a grove of trees not only to eat from but to live in.

• It is this broad view of the “orchard” that I take in this book – a grove of food trees that provides a natural and healthful habitat for man.
• This view – perhaps I should call it a vision – is quite different from the conventional notion of an orchard.

So specialized is the culture of some fruits and nuts that during many parts of the growing season the orchard habitat is distinctly inhospitable to man, rendered so by the toxicity of chemicals used in an effort to exclude forms of life that threaten the profits from the fruit crop. Man, bird, animal, bees, and countless other beneficial forms of life come to the orchard in the summer spraying-time at their own risk.

• The result is not a grove of trees to live in. After listening to orchardists complain, I’m not sure it provides a grove of trees that one can make a good living from, either.

The home orchardist, on the other hand, does not have to look at his tree grove with bankers’ eyes. He plants his trees to establish a healthy living environment. He sees the totality of that environment, not money, as his profit. The fleshy fruits provide fiber, vitamins, and carbohydrates in his diet; the nut fruits provide protein and energy. His “orchard” includes both kinds of food. Variety is his objective. A mulberry tree is as legitimate as a plum; a wild papaw as appropriate as an apple; a hickory nut as practical as a walnut, or maybe more so.

Home processing uses of the fruits and nuts are as important as fresh uses. Less than perfect apples make for applesauce, butter, pie, and cider just as good as perfect ones. Secondary uses of the trees are also important to the grove-owners scheme. Hickory nuts are delicious; hickory wood is an excellent firewood.

The home grove owner sees his “orchard” as a community of interrelated living things. He has an idea and a vision of how varied and complex that community should be if it is to interact correctly in the maintenance of an environment healthy for him. That is his goal, not just the production of fruit and nuts. He knows that if he can promote ecological completeness in his grove, then the foods and fibers he needs will come as a fringe benefit.

His apple blossoms herald another fruit crop but also another honey crop – the honey indeed a much surer proposition than the fruit. The sod floor of his grove may be graze for sheep, hens, or hogs, who by keeping the fallen fruit cleaned up help control harmful insects, too. He expects to find aphids in his trees, but, to help control them, he’ll also find ladybugs. If damaging mites are present, he knows that predator mites will also come to prevent serious crop losses.

• The home grove-owner does everything in his power to bring not only a variety of insects to his orchard but every bird as well.
• Owls, especially the screech owl, may be the grove-owner’s best friends, patrolling the orchard for mice, which often are more damaging to trees than bugs.
• To have enough of nature’s variety to effect some semblance of balance in the grove, naturalists know that areas of wild habitat near the fruit and other food trees are necessary.
• Just as he seeks diversity in the animal and insect populations in his grove, the home orchardist endeavors to increase the variety of plant life.
• Although weeds and grasses occasionally may rob trees of some nutrients, the grove-owner is not too worried to see them grow up among the trees.
• He seldom cultivates around his trees because of erosion problems or because mulching or grazing animals is better.
• Since the backyard grove-owner continually seeks more diversity in his grove plant life, he is not afraid to test old and seemingly unscientific practices such as companion planting.
• He may plant nasturtiums under apple trees to keep away aphids. If the ploy doesn’t work, the nasturtiums are still pretty to look at, and the leaves are good to eat.
• The grove-owner’s concern – to restore the pristine diversity of life natural to a grove of trees – is a never-ending and lifelong challenge.

This chain of events is but a very short segment – and a very oversimplified short segment at that – of the interconnected dining table of the tree grove. Into this infinitely complex and fragile relationship blunders man, the only creature capable of intentionally altering the biological linkage holding all life together. And he has the temerity to say, in the face of millions of years of proof to the contrary, that the “only” way food can be grown from trees for human sustenance is by altering the natural environment with laboratory chemicals.

Living in a grove of trees does not mean a grueling schedule of work. The secret is embedded in the diversity of life you establish in your grove. If you plant 50 apple trees of the same variety, then you are going to have to work to care for them properly and dispose of all those apples ripening at the same time. But if, instead, you plant one or two of each fruit and nut tree that you like, you will find that the bit of work you do on each variety or each type is finished before it gets tiring. For example, rather than trying to harvest cherries from five trees, be content with one, and when that is finished go on to the plum tree, and then to the peach, and then to a couple of apples. You spread out the work load, and you do not put all your fruit in one basket.

Variety is more than the spice of life. It is the key to life.

Chapter 2: What to Plant Where