Blow on the Embers

Fire is sacred. Fire burns. Fire transforms.

The poet, Rumi, says:

            Love is the fire and we are the wood.

Blase, my partner, adds:

            And therein lies our freedom.

On Wednesday our fire blazed. Our household quintet, Blase, my partner, Ariel, my daughter, Ethan, her boyfriend, and Holly our housemate gathered, and burned heaps of apple prunings.

The prunings fall from the orchard trees in February. They’re lopped, snipped, and sawn off the trees over two weeks. We prune to vitalize the trees, direct their shape, remove dead and diseased wood, and most importantly, to let in light. We open up windows for sunlight to penetrate the tree, making sure all branches have a sky view. When one them doesn’t get enough light, they start to shrivel, even more shaded, become smaller, until they die back.

The pruned apple branches winter on the ground under the trees, providing healthy food for voles and mice who chew the bark. Then, when the snow is gone, and the small creatures have plenty of other foodstuff, we collect all the prunings and burn them. Fire blight, a bacterial infection is dormant in winter, and hides in the branches. Burning all the pruned wood help keep fire blight out of the orchard.

Holly and I gathered the tools, throwing them in the back of Blase’s old pickup truck—rakes, a shovel, a box of newspaper, kindling, matches, a portable gas water pump, and long hose. We also grabbed the canister of kerosene. Ariel and Ethan hopped into the bed of the truck. 

Around this mountain of prunings we made small fires with newspaper and kindling. We had a Christmas tree dropped off by a friend. Ariel jammed it into the pile above my small fire. It took. Whoomm! Whoosh!

Ethan and Ariel lighting the fire.

The flames licked through the tree, disappearing the needles and small branches. Then there was quiet. We tried to whisper our small fires into blaze until Blase arrived. He took the container of kerosene and started pouring throughout. With his blazing instincts, the fire caught.

The apple wood is green so you need a hot fire to really get them to take. But they did and the fire burned. More wood caught, whirring and snapping, and the flames grew. Menorahs of little flames on sticks, candles on an altar, a pyre. Fire warming our hearts.

With the forks attached to the bucket of the tractor, I rumbled along the apple rows. Our bonfire contained only a small portion of the orchard prunings. Holly had piled the rest at the end of each row. I teased the forks under a pile at the far end of the orchard, lifted, and scooped, held the massive tangle high up in the air and drove back to the fire. Blase and Ethan were tending with pitchforks. Putting the tractor in low gear, I pulled as close to the flames as I dared. With the bucket held high, Blase signaled, and the bucket dumped. Flames leapt, Blase and Ethan teased out the caught stragglers, and I reversed, to circle back to the next row for another pile pick up.

Meanwhile Holly and Ariel gathered blueberry prunings and white pine branches from across the road in the berry patch. We had little traffic jams on the cart road, but everyone has more patience these days: we’re in no hurry, we’re just here.

In only a few hours, we managed to burn what we needed to. As the fire ebbed, we listened to the last cracklings, and stared into the black sea of charred wood. Some embers transformed into white ash. With the breath of wind, snowflakes rose and fell.

In the final lines in Archibald MacLeish’s play, JB, his retelling of the story of Job, Sarah says to her husband,

Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling,
It’s all the light now.
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in the churches are out.
The lights have gone out of the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by . . .

Strength, even in darkest times, can be found in a whisper. The dark and the light, the suffering and joy, have always been and will always be the human condition. We can choose to kindle the fires, to breathe love through it all. The photo below is from a women’s Full Moon Fire we had on March 7, 2020. It’s hard to believe our world has changed so much in less than a month. When we can be physically close to each other again, we will celebrate with a great bonfire. You are all invited!

The Apple-Shaped Earth

My last blog post was about the threat of one million square feet of warehouses being built not far from our orchard. With the concerned opposition of many citizens of Boxborough, we held back the tidal wave of development — at least for the moment. The planning board pulled their zoning articles from the upcoming town meeting warrant. There will be no vote on re-zoning until the fall. That change will give everyone time for regrouping and envisioning. The property at 1414 Massachusetts Avenue is still owned by Lincoln Properties, and warehouses are the most lucrative way for them to develop their land. The website of the Boxborough community group, Save Our Town Character says, “The potential for Zoning changes to allow warehouses as described below is still very high.” The need to protect the land and the character of the neighborhood is ongoing, but spring has officially arrived, and farm work has begun.

On our first day, Blase, Holly, our new farm worker, John, and I enjoyed the yearly ritual of burning the apple prunings. Ignited by a dry Christmas tree, crumbled newspaper, and kindling, the fire of prunings swayed in the wind. Sparks rose, and apple smoke filled a cloudless sky. Mallards, great blue herons, a woodpecker, and red-winged blackbirds chirped melodies.

I staked for the planting of fifty-three new trees from the apple rootstock we grafted one year ago. Blase attached the back hoe and has begun digging the holes. He is as much devoted to this farm and the orchard as I am.

It will be a marathon of planting. In each hole, the tap root will lead to the north. We’ll mix a little compost and our own bio-char from the burn, a great amendment for the soil, made by dousing the fire before it burns to ash. A cedar stake will go in each hole to support the tree as it grows, and we’ll back fill by hand, removing the large rocks, our most reliable crop. Trees will be watered, blessed, and mulched to suppress the competition with tough orchard grasses. We’d gladly welcome volunteers!

Next the airblast orchard sprayer needs to be tested and calibrated for the season. And oh, the hardest part for me, what are we going to spray? There are more options now for organic growers, and one tendency is to want to try everything. Another approach is to allow the trees to fend for themselves, building up their own immune system like a child must do who goes to preschool. I prefer the middle way, doing what we can to help build the immune system of the trees by improving the soil and spraying nutrients.

Last weekend we visited our grandchildren. Both girls had runny noses, and Blase came home with a nasty cold. As a friend remarked, “Young children are like Petri dishes.” Some might say apple leaves are similar. Every leaf is an incubator where good and bad bacteria and fungi duke it out, and the strongest wins and colonizes the leaf. We want to do what we can to encourage the good guys rather than spraying to get rid of the bad. And, once in a while, we will spray an organic pesticide for a particularly destructive pest, rather than lose the crop.

A mid-June apple hidden behind a leaf with spots of cedar apple rust.

The next two months will be the most crucial for the orchard. Will we have blossoms? Pollinators? Fruit set? A crop? Today, with the added pressures brought on by climate change, these are real questions.  Orchards, like lands protected for conservation, keep us alive emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Our country was founded on the promises of agriculture, of self-sufficiency, of everyone growing food and fruit. The fruit orchard was a symbol of this belief in hard work, community, and opportunity for all.  We are now far from this ideal as we destroy forests, oceans, and even the air.

Sculpture LH

But the apple remains a fruitful inspiration, as it was in the nineteenth century when Walt Whitman wrote in A Song of Occupations, decades before space ship photographs,

The sun and the stars that float in open air,

the apple-shaped earth and we upon it,

surely the drift of them is something grand.

You Don’t Know What You Have Till It’s Gone

Our farmhouse is in Harvard, but many people don’t know that our apple orchard is in Boxborough. We were recently told by a neighbor about a proposed zoning overlay district in Boxborough that would change the zoning of our farm as well as adversely affect our neighbors in Harvard, Boxborough and surrounding towns.

The proposed overlay district comprises 371 acres and will enable the Lincoln Property Company to build four warehouses, 1,020,000 square feet. These four giant ‘cubes’ would cover twenty-three acres of formerly forested land within several thousand feet of our property.

Elizabeth Brook feeds the large wetlands area that flows around our orchard, and into the 500+ acres of Delaney Conservation area. In the last two weeks we have had two sightings of a bald eagle flying over the orchard and Elizabeth Brook wetlands. This proposed development would massively disturb this fragile ecosystem and threaten the aquifer that feeds our wells.

Great Blue Returned on the Spring Equinox

Many of you who have been reading my blog know of the struggle I have faced in growing organic apples over the last few years. Climate change is one factor, but I recently learned of another issue when I attended the Holistic Apple Grower’s Meeting in Western Massachusetts earlier this year. A new fungus, Marssonina Leaf Blotch, causes apple leaf defoliation in apples when a fungicide is not sprayed throughout the growing season. Arriving in this country from Asia, it first appeared in the western part of the country, defoliating thousands of acres of aspens in Utah, but is now in New England. Orchards spray fungicides for scab, the fungal disease most serious for apple growers in New England where the summer weather is often warm and wet. Organic growers have less choice in sprays to control this disease, so I made the hard decision a year ago to remove our Macintosh trees, known to growers as scab magnets. Right after the trees came down, friends joined me to graft one hundred rootstocks with scab resistant apples. These one-year-old saplings grew well in our hoop house for the year and are ready to be planted.

The disappearance of the gnarly Macintosh trees in the first few rows of the orchard caused neighbors to wonder if we were cutting down the entire orchard. I assured people we were not giving up. I have shared my lessons and strivings in growing organic apples, but none-the-less have continued to remain faithful to the trees and the land that have nourished me since I moved here in 2001.

Giving up on the earth, our government, or any issue that is challenging doesn’t solve anything. We have to do the work and stand by our convictions. Liberty Property Company’s build might take ten years, and who is to say that in twenty years, these warehouses won’t be obsolete as everything will be drop-shipped. Tax revenue is an important consideration for all of our communities, but in preserving our towns’ rural nature, its conservation lands, farmland, wildlife, clean water and night sky we make sure that our town remains a desirable place to live and that our property values stay high. Warehouses will not serve the local community, and in fact will cause a serious disruption to our way of life.

Many Boxborough residents heard for the first time about the proposed changes to their bylaw only recently. It seems that there has been a quiet, but legal effort to slip this bylaw change through Town Meeting by highlighting the ‘gifts’ to the town, but not mentioning the warehouses. If you know anyone in Boxborough, please make sure they know about this change in their bylaws coming up for a vote at Town Meeting in May.

I look at the wetlands and the orchard now with a new set of eyes. The runoff into the wetlands might mean we can no longer irrigate. Boxborough neighbors say that with the twenty-acre solar panel array, phase one of Liberty Realty’s development plans, they hear Route 495 in their homes even with the windows closed. More traffic sound reflecting off twenty-three acres of roofs will certainly eclipse the twangs of red-winged blackbirds, chirps of robins and bluebirds, honks of geese, and squawks of herons. And it will be impossible to hear the apple trees. “They can speak, trees . . .” says the 14th century poet, Hafiz in his poem, An Apple Tree Was Concerned.

An apple tree was concerned 
about a late frost and losing its gifts 
that would help feed a poor family close by. 

Can't the clouds be generous with what falls from them? 
Can't the sun ration itself with precision? 

They can speak, trees, 
they can say the sweetest things

but it takes special ears to hear them,
ears that have listened to people
with great care. 

My daughter, Ariel, picking Honey Crisp Apples in 2017

We face choices everyday about how we use the earth’s limited resources.

Let us choose wisely.

What Are We Doing to the Earth, John Chapman?

John Chapman (1774–1845) is familiar to most grade school students in the United States as Johnny Appleseed, the man who planted apple seeds. The irony is that John Chapman might have been sorely disappointed with this epitaph. John Chapman established nurseries of apple trees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and as far west as Indiana, but these orchards were not his true raison d’etre. Selling apple trees for his livelihood gave him the possibility of travel where and when he wanted—and the freedom to practice and spread his religion of choice.

 John followed the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a Swedish mystic, scientist, and theologian who influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe and was praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Swedenborg believed we live in both the world of spirit and the material world, but that our eyes are often closed to the former. He was a Christian who formed a new religious movement, the Swedenborgian denomination, to advance the idea that God revealed himself in the world, in the earth, in all sentient life. Based on his own significant mystical experiences, he wrote that love is the “basic unit of reality.” He seemed determined to show people that there is more than what they see with their eyes and hear with their ears: There is a mystical world that everyone has access to.

Apple Bloom at Old Frog Pond Farm in 2017

John Chapman certainly seemed to want to have, or perhaps did have, his own mystical experiences—we will never know. But he did he carry the words of Swedenborg across the American frontier. Visiting homesteads, he would pull out his Bible and read passages with an ardor that calls to mind the approach of television evangelists today. Sometimes he would tear out a few pages and leave them, only to exchange them for new ones the next time he passed through. He was a vegetarian, wore no leather, and would never even cut down a tree.

Of course, on these journeys, he always had apple trees to sell. Fruit trees, often a requirement for anyone wanting to establish a land claim, provided the fruit to make applejack—hard cider—the drink of choice for the settlers at all three meals. From apple cider, settlers could make apple cider vinegar, a cleaning agent, as well as a preservative and medicinal drink. Even if the apples Chapman’s seedling produced were bitter and hard, ‘spitters’ I’ve heard them called, it didn’t matter, for they all mixed well in the grinder. 

Chapman would travel into a new territory ahead of the homesteaders and establish a small nursery with seeds he picked up annually from a cider mill in Pennsylvania. He chose a protected spot near a river or stream, secured it with brambles, and traveled on. The following year he would return, dig up his one-year-old seedlings. Apple seedlings with the right conditions can grow five feet or more in a year.   

My friend, Eric Schultz, who generously let me read his chapter on John Chapman in his book, Nation of Entrepreneurs, to be published by Greenleaf Publishing this fall wrote, “John Chapman was the oddest of evangelists, bringing gifts of heaven and alcohol in equal parts to the American frontier and running a business model that supported both.” There are not many followers of the Swedenborg religion today, but Chapman’s apples spread far and wide, and are certainly part of the proliferation of varieties of apples we now grow not only in America but all over the world.  It’s interesting how one’s passion does not always create one’s legacy.

I think about John Chapman when I read that we have experienced the five warmest years in history. We will soon be planting Southern apples here in New England, for in not too many years, our older heirloom varieties will not have enough chill hours to produce buds. Much of this heating up of the earth is because of our selfishness and blindness to the interconnection of everything we do, build, use, and desire. Chapman was a minimalist, even during a time when there was not much to spare. His potato sack shirt had armholes cut for sleeves and probably did little to protect him from the elements, but apparently, he never complained. What would we think if we saw this man walking along our streets, barefoot with “horny” toes, wearing a tin can cap, bearded and hairy?  We appreciate true iconoclasts often only after the person has died.

I came upon an interesting post, A Theology of Wild Apples, in the blog, American Orchard, Historical perspectives on food, farming and landscape.

 Yet well-off travelers in the late 17th and throughout the 18th century frequently cast harsh moral judgments on the subsistence-minded farmer and his wild, disorderly orchards. And by the 1820s, many moralists found another reason to condemn the seedling orchard: most of its apples were destined to be converted to demon alcohol. Temperance societies called for the destruction of wild apple trees as an essential step toward sobering up the nation.

Chapman, born in 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts, died in 1854 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Fortunately, a few decades later, his younger compatriot, Henry David Thoreau, born in Concord in 1887, celebrated wilderness, wildness, and, thank goodness, wild apple trees, writing the long essay, Wild Apples, in celebration of them. There is room for both: the domesticated apple and the wild apple.

Which brings me to our orchard of ordered rows. Last Monday, we finished winter pruning, and now the twisting rhythms of branches play the ground between the trees. We pruned on those days of coldest cold stamping our feet to keep warm, and finished last Monday, a 50 degree day with honey bees out flying. Here’s to a bountiful year of apples, those planted by crow and deer, and the straight rows of nursery stock.

Pruned Row February, 2019

And to you, John Chapman, thank you! May we be inspired by your life to care more deeply for every apple, and to appreciate the miracle of every seed.