FARM NEWS

The rain is coming down steadily as I write this March newsletter. It's officially mud season at Root & Sky Farm, but we were shorted snow this winter, so I try not to get frustrated as I watch the cows slop around the winter pasture. We have a "sacrifice" area that the sheep and cows have near the barn where they spend winter and early spring. We do give them enough land so they can get out of the worst of it, but it's pretty soupy near the high traffic water area. In a future newsletter I'll go into more detail about when we decide it is time to start moving animals to our grazing system, but there are plenty more pertinent updates as we approach April! Oh, and if you have come exclusively for meat talk, scroll to the bottom for the page for pricing and delivery info.

The thing that has been on my mind the most is our permaculture orchard that we will have (hopefully) installed by the time you get the April newsletter. Don't worry, the tasty meats are here to stay, but I also LOVE fruit. I'm very excited to get this project under way. Next week I will be putting on the finishing touches of laying out the orchard:

35 Apple Trees

6 Pear

3 Asian Pear

2 Apricot

2 Peach

2 Nectarine

4 Plum

3 Sweet Cherry

1 Sour Cherry

5 Pawpaw

35 Honeylocust

Why honeylocust? Because their roots fix nitrogen in the soil around them. We expect the honeylocust to help fertilize the trees adjacent to them.

We are not planting trees that are best for mechanical harvesting or how the fruit holds up to shipping, we are planting for taste and disease resistance. Some varieties are heirloom while some are newer cultivars that we hope will grow well in our micro-climate in Marengo. For example, we are planting a Bramley Seedling apple tree. Orangepippin.com writes, " Bramley's Seedling is without doubt the definitive English cooking apple, and in terms of flavor ranks as one of the world's great culinary apples...They are also notably long-lived. 2009 was the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Bramley's Seedling, and - remarkably - the original tree was still alive in the same garden in Nottinghhamshire, England, where it was planted as a pip by a young girl, Mary Ann Brailsford, 200 years before. It takes its name from a subsequent owner of the house, a Mr Bramley who allowed a local nurseryman to propagate it in the 1850s on condition that it was given his name." A tree that grows well in England might not grow as well here, so we are planting so many varieties we hope to strike gold - a few times! There are thousands of apple tree cultivars, and I do love reading the history of where they came from. If you drop a Gala apple seed in the ground, that new tree will not give you a true Gala apple. You might have similar traits to your parents, but we are each still very different. Dan Busse wrote a multi-volume book that included 16,000 apple varieties! Article here if you'd like to learn more: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-apples .

Each tree will have its place marked in the orchard. There are shrubs that mature in June and trees that mature in early November, so I've built a detailed spreadsheet to help sort which plantings should be in which rows to make the picking easier. We are also planting in trios so no tree of the same species is touching. For example, going down a row we could have: apple honeylocust, peach, apple, honeylocust, plum, apple, honeylocust, cherry. The idea is that if a pest has a favorite species of tree in an orchard, it has to work harder to find the next one that is similar. No, this probably won't stop all plum curculio pests from finding a fruit it wants to destroy, but we hope building habitats for birds (bluebirds) and predatory insects (parasitic wasps), proper grazing of sheep and chickens eating fallen fruit, and other methods that we can minimize the damage to an acceptable level. Let's check back in a few years and see how it's going.