Last week I wrote about Gaining Ground, the community farm and hunger-relief project out back of the Thoreau Farm house, and posted my interview with Michelle De Lima and Kayleigh Boyle, the farm’s co-managers. It turns out they wrote an item for Gaining Ground’s Spring newsletter about the new apple orchard they’re planting behind the house, on part of the Thoreau Farm Trust property. With their permission, I’m posting it here on The Roost. (You can download the full newsletter here in PDF format).
Growing Thoreau’s Apples
by Kayleigh Boyle and Michelle De Lima
“For I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance.” -Thoreau, “Wild Apples”
Want to try Thoreau’s favorite apple variety? Visit us on Virginia Road in a few years, and you can. Thoreau is said to have appreciated the Blue Pearmain apple for its tart flavor, which he thought was “almost as good as wild.” This spring, on land belonging to the Thoreau Farm Trust, we are planting an apple orchard designed with Concord history in mind. Growing alongside the Blue Pearmain will be Hunt Russet and Morse Late Sweet, two apples that originated in Concord in the mid-1700s.
We have access to these rare varieties because John Bunker, Fedco Trees’ apple expert and Concord native, has generously agreed to custom graft the trees for us. We look forward to joining other small orchards in the area in growing heirloom fruit on beautiful standard trees that will last for generations.
Apple trees are a new addition to the farm. We did not include any in our previous fruit tree plantings because they are a notoriously difficult crop to manage organically. In order to take on this challenging crop, we had to learn how to protect them from the many fungal diseases and insects that attack the fruit and trees.
We were inspired by New Hampshire grower Michael Phillips’s approach to holistic apple care. Phillips focuses on the orchard as an ecosystem, cultivating beneficial plants, insects, and fungi in the understory of the trees. Another aspect of his organic management is planting some disease-resistant, modern semi-dwarf varieties alongside the heirloom trees. These faster-maturing varieties will supply food pantries with apples within the next few years, while the heirloom trees will provide fruit for many years to come.
We are happy to collaborate with so many wonderful people and organizations, all of whom are interested in continuing the rich history of apple growing in Concord. We think Thoreau would approve.
No doubt he would.
By the way, here’s that quote from Thoreau’s essay “Wild Apples” in slightly expanded form:
By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen…. But still, if you are a skilful gleaner, you may get many a pocket-full even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone out-of-doors. I know a Blue-Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a swamp, almost as good as wild…. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance.
Of course, it’s also worth remembering that Thoreau’s essay wasn’t just a celebration of New England’s native fruit; it was also a lament for what he feared would soon be lost — the character of the wild. Here he is, in the essay’s almost elegiac conclusion:
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England. … I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know. Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see nobody planting trees to-day in such out-of-the-way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,–and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.
All the more reason, I’d say, to savor that Blue Pearmain.