Refuge

Last night a friend said, “When I visit the farm it feels like a prayer.” Early this morning I walked through the raspberry patch and picked a pint of nature’s jewels. Each one a gift in the midst of so much uncertainty and suffering.

The farm season is changing. We are preparing to open for visitors. After laboring in the long hot days of summer, the fruits and vegetables, as well as the farmers, are breathing with more ease. The ripening is here, the bounty of nature. Vines are growing upwards heavy with heirloom tomatoes, others are sprawling across the open field landing here and there with juicy melons, while still others, the underground tubers of banana fingerling potatoes, wiggle in the soil.

The earth is alive and producing.

We will open for pick-you-own raspberries in week or so. All details will be posted on our website along with instructions for visiting to insure the safety of visitors and our farmers. Please check before you come. We will use our website opening page to let you know of daily changes.

The Ripening Begins!

Artists also offer sustenance. Old Frog Pond Farm artists have created new sculptures on the theme of Refuge and our annual outdoor exhibit, Around the Pond and Through the Woods, will be open Thursdays through Sundays, 11-4 pm, beginning on September 3.

Monk, Madeleine Lord, welded steel

We’ve also created a few shady groves along the trails where you can take refuge.

Twenty-six poets have written eloquent poems inspired by the farm on the theme of Refuge. We will not host a ‘live’ plein air poetry event this year: the event draws too many people. Instead, we are publishing an online journal and will host a zoom reading with the poets on Sunday, September 20 at 3 pm. Photographer, Brent Mathison is taking photos of the sites that inspired the poets and these will be pinned at the zoom event. More details will follow, but save the date!

Photo for Cattail Blues, Brent Mathison

Cattail Blues
—Didi Chadran

A cool, astringent wind interrupts
A late Spring heatwave, wafting the cattails,
Which sway, shimmer, sway again, resilient.

Graceful, they bend like blue notes picked, plaintive
On a hollow-bodied guitar. They tremolo and
Sustain in an ostinato whisper.

The call-and-response of Schlieren heat and
Tonic gusts croons of heartbreak and new love,
Release and reinvention, poetry

And commerce. The plants’ lot is to shelter,
Protect, and nourish the reeds’ seedlings and
Model resolve against wind, drought, and flood.

Wafting like fingers apoise on the strings
To bend to the future. It brings what it brings.

Our self-serve farm stand will continue to be open seven days a week through October. Kohlrabi, kale, broccoli, and other fall plants are going in the ground. Long-awaited, albeit brief rains, are finally falling and the earth is a little less parched. The weather beings hear our prayers!

Be well and come visit us!

Can you find the one small worm among all these organically grown tomatoes?

After Applepicking

On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. One runs from tree to tree . . .  picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples. 
                                                                        ― Sherwood Anderson

Applepicking is over. It’s early this year because two of our most plentiful varieties were hit by weather issues. We’ll pick and press those that remain for cider, cook and freeze applesauce, and store the Blushing Golden apples (they are good keepers), but otherwise it will be time to put the orchard to bed. We have nutrients to spread, mowing to do under the trees, and vole protection to install — actually quite a lot of work to do. It’s been a long year of preparation for such a short, and not very profitable, season.

The trees look sad with their limbs bare and their leaves fading and falling. It’s been a fall with summer temperatures, and the trees prefer it cooler. I can imagine the trees speaking among themselves these lines from Robert Frost’s poem, “After Apple-Picking,”

Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired. 

The trees do their best. They fight the wars with pests, they take up nourishment and water as they can, and they stand amidst the winds and hail. Their world is changing more quickly than they can adapt to. I visited a friend a few weeks ago, and the line of maples around her house were all brown. “Maple die back,” he said. I nodded. Whatever that means. For we don’t really know what is happening.

Mike Biltonen is a New York State orchard consultant who writes a newsletter at Knowyourroots.com about the pressing seasonal issues in his orchard world. In July he wrote:

But most importantly, the effects of climate change and apple tree decline are not avoiding any one. I am seeing orchards with many different problems and manifestations of sudden apple decline (SAD). Orchard management for climate resilience is the defining issue today.

One commonality – regardless of how you grow your trees and fruit – is that no farmers are going to escape the impacts of climate change. For some the consequences may be dire resulting in complete orchard collapse. 

When I first read this in the newsletter, I put my head in the sand. It sounded so ominous. But reading his newsletter again, and with the season for applepicking over, I am looking at the reality in our orchard. The new trees, the trees I have planted from 2006 onward, produced a beautiful crop. The fruit was unblemished and tasty and their production was bountiful. The trees that succumbed to weather issues were the three varieties that were already in the orchard, Macintosh, Blushing Golden, and Golden Delicious, trees that are now over 35 to 40 years old. Is it that these trees are feeling the weight of their years? They are not standard size trees—these can live 100 years—but semi-dwarf, which have a considerably shorter life expectancy for optimum production. Maybe they are reaching that time in their lives, and I am expecting too much?

With climate change, an aging orchard, and, oh, yes, my own aging — I am conflicted about the prospect of continuing to make the orchard a viable place for pick-your-own organic fruit. Fall 2016 we had no fruit because of the spring freeze, and now this year we had only about 50 percent apple production. I want to jump ship, but as the captain I will stay on board. There is something about the orchard that demands this fidelity. We’re discussing a rejuvenation plan. We’ll take down some of the oldest trees and the two rows of Macintosh apples, the scab magnets, and plant more scab-resistant varieties.

The orchard has given me so much. Its branches have spread over the pages of my writing and its roots grown into my art.

From One Seed, Apple prunings and bronze figure, Linda Hoffman & Gabriele White

But, now, I can understand how the prior owners left the orchard on its own for years before they moved away. It can be just too much effort. I have learned so much from working intimately with the trees. We have had some great years of bumper crops, the orchard a ravishing vision of color and scent that delighted countless apple pickers. But fall is in the air.  Both the trees and I need a rest. I turn to Mary Oliver’s words for repose.

            Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.