+30F last night, but it could have been way worse. Thirty isn’t bad. The apple flowers should be fine.
“full of dreams to come true.” Fedco, May 22, 2026
Today is Sun Ra’s birthday. He would have been 112. One of his songs says, “Magic is the future, full of dreams to come true.” The orchard is certainly one of the most magical places on Earth; it’s definitely full of dreams. I think Sun Ra would have agree that today was a day especially full of magic and dreams of the future. In the morning I returned for the first time since 2019 to the Fedco Tree Sale where a massive crowd of cheerful, excited Mainers from every walk of life appeared seemingly out of nowhere and bought shopping carts-full of overstock-bargain-fruit trees, including hundreds of apples. It was wild. Visible swarms of dreams of orchards and pies and cider, of climbing ladders and picking fruit filled the air in the warehouse. The dreams were so dense it was almost hard to read the tags on the trees. The dreams pretty much blotted out every bad vibe in the Universe. It was hard to remember we were actually in Clinton, Maine. For a few minutes I could have sworn that we were all on a spaceship heading to Saturn.
The crowd began to thin out about noon, and I slipped away to spend the afternoon alone attempting to perform my own apple magic by hand-pollinating Black Oxford and Wealthy flowers with pollen from the red-fleshed Redfield. Three of my favorite apples and all three, excellent pie apples. If the magic of hand-pollination does its thing, someday the world just might have a fantastic, new red-fleshed pie apple with a clever, catchy name, a super-interesting flavor (a little tart, a little sweet, no spices or sugar required), and the perfect soft but firm texture. By then the world will be a whole new place - gardens and orchards in every yard, Mainers eating home-made, home-grown meals featuring lots of pies. Grocery stores and parking lots will be just a vague, distant memory. Magic is the future...