Tuesday, April 29, 2008

A hard rain

The NOAA weather alerts were ominous: up to four inches of rain was forecast, with winds gusting to fifty miles per hour. After seemingly storing up rain all during this warm, dry April, the skies opened last night and by this afternoon a couple of inches of rain had fallen. Puddles in the lawn, puddles on either side of the car and the truck, but in the garden no puddles, seeds not washing away, not yet anyway. Here on the island, thin topsoil conspires with rocky ledge near the ground's surface to make it hard to absorb so much water in so short a time; yet so far the garden soil has absorbed it. A healthy garden soil of good tilth with plenty of organic matter will be more absorbent than the soil beneath a lawn. How much longer before puddling I can't say, but the rain is supposed to stop tonight and I will see tomorrow. If I could order rain, it would come gently at night, and not every night: just enough for what's growing, and a little more as the peas fill out in the pods. 

Monday, April 28, 2008

Apple Report: 1

Today I removed the tree wraps from the lower trunks of the younger trees, and checked out the buds, which are just beginning to swell in the later-blooming varieties, and which have broken out in the early ones. Although it's too early to tell how good a blossom year this will be, it appears as if the early trees will have some blossoms. How full they will be is still impossible to determine. Last year was one of the best for blossoms since 1997. Of course, many things about the weather have to go right from now until October for a large apple crop. Apple trees tend toward blossoming every other year, so I'm not expecting many this year. But we shall see.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Onions, Beets, Chard, and Greens

The spinach and peas I planted two weeks ago are up. I side-dressed the spinach with compost this morning. The unusual warm, dry spell that allowed peas to go in two weeks ago has continued, making it possible to till the soil and plant onions, beets, chard, and greens today. I don't have good luck with carrots and so I've stopped planting them. In a couple of days I will cut any large potato seeds and leave them out in a dark place to harden off before planting them in a week or two. Rain is forecast in the coming week. Soil preparation included fish meal spread over the wood ashes in the garden by the barn, worked in with a rototiller. Using a wheel hoe I next made six rows each about 25' long and three inches deep. I dropped compost into the bottom inch of each row, then planted a row of red onion sets, another row of yellow Stuttgarter (these store till the following June), a row of swiss chard, a row of three varieties of beets (some for greens), and a row of lettuce and arugula. I left the sixth row open. Using a regular hoe I spread soil over the tops of the seeds, and sets, leaving about an inch and a half of depression in each row. This will fill in gradually as the year goes on, while for now the effect is to keep the seedlings from spilling out of the rows in case of a hard rain. I also rototilled in the large garden down the road, a second pass to till in some of the buckwheat straw I never got around to tilling in last fall; and in the small garden out toward the orchard, the one that a former owner of this property had used as a garden spot. Each year at this time I promise to haul seaweed from the causeway to use as mulch between the rows, but it's been more than a few years since I got some. The seaweed has about as much nitrogen as manure, as well as trace minerals, and it's very good for the tilth of the soil once it breaks down. Over the years I've worked out thru trial and error a routine for keeping the soil healthy and planting with a minimum of time and labor. In the early years I put a lot of seaweed into the soil, and no, it doesn't turn the vegetables salty. More recently I've been purchasing soil amendments and working them in. 

Pilgrimage to FEDCO

Yesterday I took my annual trip to Clinton, Maine to get potatoes, onions, soil supplements, and late-season seeds at FEDCO, the gardening supplies co-op that has been around for some 30 years now. Like the trip to the Common Ground Fair in September, this has become a kind of pilgrimage, where it's good to see like-minded people going seriously about organic gardening and the path it puts one on. It's good, always, to see a young generation of co-op workers, not only the children but now even some grandchildren of the counterculture folks who came to Maine in the 1960s and 1970s and established, among other things, MOFGA (the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association), FEDCO, and Johnny's Selected Seeds, the other major organic gardening institution in the state of Maine. It feels good to see the old faces, talk with founders like CR Lawn (his actual name), give them some heirloom seeds to trial, and bring back a carload of bulk fertilizers, potatoes, and onions. FEDCO has always been primarily a distribution co-op for farmers; their prices are wholesale. Over the years they've increasingly enlisted Maine growers and honed their offerings to varieties that do well in northern New England. Johnny's founder Rob Johnston always viewed his seed company as part retail establishment, part research, and so down through the years they've developed many excellent varieties of vegetables on their own farm, some attaining All-America status, while trialing and testing the others that they offer, constantly improving their selection. Rob retired a few years ago, selling the company to the employees. They seek a national market with a glossy catalog and a friendly web presence; their prices are retail, and the quality of their products is outstanding. If you're a backyard gardener, you can't do better than Johnny's. FEDCO, on the other hand, is not market-oriented; commercialism is counter to their habit. If you want good, cheap seeds, potatoes, fruit trees, greensand, and various other stuff for organic farming and gardening, FEDCO is for you. The FEDCO catalog, on newsprint paper, filled with wonderful drawings and terrible puns, is a relic from generations past. 

Thursday, April 17, 2008

What's in a Name?

I should say something about the name of this blog: apples from the island. Settlers who built homes on the island until World War II as a rule planted a few apple trees in their back yards, and others elsewhere on their property, for a good supply of apple cider as well as for cooking and eating. This was a common practice most everywhere in rural New England. Today the island is filled with old apple trees, some behind houses still standing, others in the woods where old cellar holes may be found. Still other trees may be found, "volunteers" that grew from apple seeds which birds and deer and other animals spread from their droppings after eating. The apple tree does not grow true to variety from seed; seed-grown trees are hybrids from cross-pollination. Named varieties are always grafted: a scion (twig) from the tree of a named variety is attached to a hardy apple rootstock. The island settlers usually planted named varieties obtained as nursery stock, but over the years the identity of most of the old trees has been lost and has to be guessed at from the tree habit and the qualities of the fruit. Apples from the island has a literal meaning for me, as I make cider wine from the apples here; also, the habits of the apple serve as a rich metaphor. Apple specialists (pomologists) have walked this property and attempted to identify some of the trees that are more than fifty or a hundred years old and still bearing, but they don't agree on the varieties; and I have my own opinions.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Spinach time

After dropping off my tax returns yesterday, at the very local post office on the island, I asked the postmistress, who is an avid enough gardener to keep her own greenhouse, how her seedlings were coming along. She replied, and then asked me if I'd gotten my spinach in yet. Spinach requires longer cool weather than I usually get after the ground has dried to workability, so I'd forgotten completely that in this unusual dry spring I could plant spinach now. So after doing a few chores I got spinach seeds out planted about ten feet of row. As a child I never cared for the taste. My mother religiously purchased it, and prepared it for the family, along with liver and onions, another food I wrinkled my nose at. I came to find out, as an adult, that she didn't like the taste either; but she had read in a nutrition guide that these were good for health. Well, she lived until 92, so she must have known something. But I was convinced that Popeye was a plot to convince youngsters to eat spinach. Today I enjoy the taste, raw in salads or steamed lightly. There's something almost human in the shape of the spinach plant, with its upright stem and many long arms. Cut and come again.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Get Your Peas In

Unlike most years, the ground was dry enough to plant peas when I got to the island yesterday. Today I spread wood ashes from the woodstove on a 30'x10' part of the garden by the old store, followed by a light spread of limestone, then tilled it and the surface plant debris from last year into the soil. I made four double rows two feet apart, shook fish meal fertilizer into the rows, and then using an earthway seeder planted two double rows of Sugar Ann dwarf snap peas and two double rows of Progress #9 podded peas. They are two feet high, support each other, and I do not stake them lest they attract deer. Instead, they flop over, some supporting each other, attracting mildew, and making picking harder. But the alternative is to find them eaten by deer. Gardening on the island isn't easy. The land is mostly a spruce forest, with clearings where ledge is close to the surface; drainage there is poor. Other trees are alder, poplar ("popple"), birch, a few pine and some ash. In one small part of this 20-acre property is a small, old stand of beech. The soil is naturally acidic and clayey; it is good for blueberries. Deer are plentiful on the island and they will eat growing vegetables, so the gardens have to be fenced. The deer could jump my fences but I use human hair bags that I make from cut hair I get from a barber shop, enclosed in cheesecloth and hung strategically from the fence. Hair bags against the deer is local folklore, and it has worked for me for nearly 30 years, so long as I don't grow anything that is taller than a couple of feet. Pole beans or staked tomatoes have proved too tempting for the deer, hair bags or none.  In 1980, the first summer after I bought the place, I started an organic vegetable garden to feed the household. Gradually it expanded to four vegetable garden spots. The one by the old store is about 30' x 50'; another by the barn is about 12' x 20'; another down the road is about 20' x 60'; and the last, which served the first owner of this property as a garden, is up the road to the orchard, and about 15' x 20'. It is the worst of the four, and despite my attempts to improve it with tons of seaweed from the causeway by the ocean and with various manures and fertilizers, it remains unproductive. The others have become decent to good, depending on the year. But I did not choose this spot because it had any natural advantages for gardening. When I spoke with Fedco apple guru John Bunker about my attempts to grow apples and make cider wine here, he asked me where I lived; when I told him, his words were, "You must like a challenge." I do. But I also like to have gardens that produce, and so this year, unlike last, may give me a crop of snap peas and another of sweet peas which I will eat in season and freeze for the rest of the year.  Today was warm (50 degrees) and dry, but rain is predicted for the next few days. Too much rain or cold and the peas will rot in the gound, feeding pessimism; but with any luck at all they will emerge in a few weeks and be ready by July 4th, the benchmark in local folklore.