Today in the orchard
Today I went for a long, brisk, windy walk along the choppy waters of East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn with Benford Lepley, an apple-forager, grower and cidermaker from Long Island. We’d met a few times over the years, and it seemed as though it was about time to actually spend a couple hours together. Benford—or Ben—makes “Floral Terranes Cider” with Erik Longabardi, primarily from foraged wild apples in the New York city area. He’s grafted a collection of his favorite discoveries and planted an orchard out in eastern Long Island. I was pleased to hear that he’s already grafted “Screen Shot,” one of our own nastiest favorites. We’ll trade scionwood this winter and trial some of his up north at Finley Lane.
He brought us a bottle of his “Trees are Filters” cider. The name got me instantly inspired. The word “filter” definitely got a bad rep (and a bad rap) during the cigarette days. The “filter” was supposed to eliminate the unhealthy stuff from the tobacco that nearly everyone smoked. If you were health conscious (or a wimp), you’d smoke filtered cigarettes. How well did that work? But on the farm, filter is the good word. Even essential. We filter the oil that lubricates the tractor that powers the sprayer that filters the sprays that we spray on the apple trees that filter our air and filter our water and filter the nutrients that rise through the xylem’s filter to feed the flowers that produce the apples that we grind and press and filter through a special cloth into a screened funnel (another filter) and into the barrel. No filters, no cider.