Today in the orchard
Today central Maine attempted to dry out a bit. Nearly all the snow is gone (again!) and won’t be back for at least another day or two. Today’s task was cleaning out a winter’s worth of straw bedding from the duck house, located in the BRC. (As readers of this orchard report will recall, there have been many suggestions for what “BRC” stands for. Our friend Bill who lives in the Boston area and regularly comes up to escape the city refers to it as “Bill’s Recovery Center.”) The ducks reside there, although this time of year they wander far and wide across the farm taking dips in all our ponds. While they were off on an extended swim, Cammy cleaned the duck house. I provided tractor support, moving the bedding into the compost heaps. Once it breaks down it goes back into the gardens and round and round. (Will the circle be unbroken?)
Pruning Curt and Deena’s tree
Late in the day I traveled south to prune an ancient apple tree owned by Deena and Curt Ball. Although the tree has been DNA profiled, it remains unnamed, suggesting it could be a local historic variety that we have not been able to identify. Curt and Alyssa Gavlik provided back-up support while I did the climbing and cutting. The old tree should still have at least a few more seasons of apples yet to come.
Afterwards, we visited an old orchard site by a salt marsh at the suggestion of Curt and Deena where we found a very large and equally ancient apple tree that someone had admirably excavated from the bittersweet and multiflora rose. There were multiple small seedling apples growing only a few feet from the high tide line. Those amazing apple trees.
On the way home I stopped at the A1 diner in Gardiner and, to my surprise, there was a truck parked in front of mine also adorned with two apple ladders. It was Laura Sieger en route home from a pruning job. Tis the season.
