This post is about pigs, not apples. 

Often times in the pastured pig world, you’ll hear people refer to their pig’s butcher day as their “one bad day.” This is because these pigs have lived on grass, rooting and running and generally being happy pigs for their entire life, rather than confined indoors in crates the size of a coffins in CAFO-style situations (contained animal feeding operations). The only bad day for my pigs is the one where they go to the butcher. This essay is NOT about all that. This essay is about MY one bad day this year. Yesterday, September 10th, 2019.

For those of you who follow me on social media, you might have gotten a chuckle out of how hard last year was for me to keep pigs contained within their paddocks (which I move regularly). They got out a half-dozen times, with the majority of those escapes happening when trying to load them out of the fields and into a trailer for their butcher date.

The most story-worthy scenario happened when the pigs ignored my attempts to load them and busted out of the fence, nearly making it into a 10,000 square foot wedding tent across the street. I chased behind them in the dark early morning, freshly electrocuted from getting tangled in the electric netting that I did not see and only wearing one boot because the other got stuck in the mud (it was pouring down rain). It took everything I had to sprint and get in front of them, ultimately turning them around and getting them back on the farm.

The memories of not getting pigs loaded out of the fields and missing butcher dates has stuck with me to the point of anxiety for this year’s butcher date. That day was yesterday, and this is the story of my one [really] bad day…

A few days ago, I backed the trailer up to the pig paddock, reorganized the fencing (creating hard walls for loading rather than the normal poultry-style netting) and started feeding them in the trailer. When the day came to load these pigs, I rallied a few friends and used my friend Sara’s truck instead of mine because it has 4 wheel drive and the loaded trailer would need to go across several hundred yards of cow pasture. All went amazing well and the pigs were loaded within 20 minutes, a personal record! We hooked the trailer to Sara’s truck and headed back to the road, where I noticed that some cables had been eaten and the lights were no more. Because of this, we decided to delay taking the pigs that night and instead take the pigs to the butcher in the morning, after I had gotten some temporary lights on the trailer.

Fast forward to yesterday morning with lights that work and a trailer full of pigs.  I got up early, sang to the dogs that I’d be back in a couple hours for a nice long walk, and skipped out the door. Sara had suggested I use her truck to take them to the butcher since it already had the trailer hitched to it, and I thanked her for the suggestion. Off I went…

8 miles away from the butcher, on Interstate 70 in Maryland, the truck started to lose power. I thought to myself: If I could just get to the butcher and unload these pigs, all will be much more easily handled. 3 miles from the butcher, and 30 minutes from the deadline to bring in the pigs, the engine light came on and I pulled over as much as I could, cars whizzing by at 80 miles an hour only inches away. The electronics on the dash read: TRANSMISSION.

I screamed a string of curse words, watching my happy productive day flash before my eyes, and called GEICO.

The GEICO lady, whose name I do not remember,  should get an award for best performance “out of her comfort zone.” Pigs in a trailer attached to a truck that doesn’t belong to me that won’t move. She worked really hard to finally break it to me that, turns out (she must have called 15 tow companies), it is near impossible to get a tow company to tow a trailer full of livestock anywhere. Even if it’s 3 miles away. She could, however, tow the truck back to it’s home location. Deal.

I then texted farmer friends Andrew and MK of Open Book Farm to see if they knew of anyone who could help me in the area. Andrew, a wonderful man and livestock farmer, told me that he had invisioned this for himself before and it was his worst nightmare.  He would come get me and the trailer full of pigs.

Meanwhile, the tow truck had showed up and the tow guy was in a bad mood. He pointed out the trailer had a recent flat (probably from driving on the side of the road and hitting glass) and when I asked for him to help me fix it, he started in on how that was not part of the protocol. I warned him that I was about to start crying and his attitude got a little better, no doubt to avoid having to console me in some way.

Soon thereafter, Andrew showed up and we decided to try limping along for the remaining 3 miles with only one good tire on the right side of the trailer. We hitched up and made it, 3 hours after I first had to pull over. The butcher accepted my more-than-late deposit of pigs and they unloaded like champs. I left the trailer at the butcher’s shop because there was no way I could get it 40 miles back home.

Andrew brought me back to his and Mk’s farm and Sara then came to pick me up and take me home. On our ride back, the mechanic called. He had gotten a chance to take a look at the truck and the transmission was blown. $3500-$3700 in repair costs.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Folks, we are in need of some meat sales in order to afford these truck repairs/another truck that can host a snow plow.

Beef: <— Click Here for Sara’s website

Sara is an amazing beef cattle farmer who is the 10th generation to reside on her family land in Northern VA, Oakland Green Farm. She has 4 cows going to the butcher next month and needs to sell some sides to help pay for the blown transmission. If you are in the Northern Virginia area, or en route from Northern VA to Hampton Roads, I can deliver beef to you: A whole side or by the cut (cut minimum is $100). More info about her cuts and sides can be found HERE.  Beef sides are $4.50 a pound hanging weight plus processing and Hagerstown is where you’d pick it up (unless you contract me to deliver to you)

Pork: <— Click here to buy salami on HogTree.com

Salami: Price: $17.50 for 6 ounces of dry-cured goodness. Use promo code TRANSMISSION for free shipping on 2 or more. This stuff is delicious, no lie. Now that the weather is cooling off and I’ve blown a friend’s transmission, I’m ready to ship these cured salamis to your door. My HogTree salamis are ‘Cacciatore’- a traditionally cured American-made Italian recipe. It is nitrate free and the ingredient list is as follows:

HogTree Pastured Non-gmo Pork. Salt. Dried Milk Powder. Celery Powder. Dextrose. Vitamin C. White Pepper. Garlic Powder. Fermentation Starter Culture. Natural Pork Casing.

Sara and I will be collaborating on a half pork/half beef Spanish Style Chorizo in the next month as well. This will also be available online in early November.

Pork Cuts: I am primarily selling cured bacon, ribs, pork chops and sausage (assorted flavors). This is pick-up only or delivered en route between Northern VA and Southeastern VA (but try me. I drive all over the place). Pick up by appointment only.

Everyone in the Frederick MD area: Go shop at Open Book Farm’s on-farm store on Saturday mornings and support really amazing people who grow nutrient dense food and saved me big time!

 

 

 

 

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything on this blog and that’s not to say I haven’t been writing (I’ve been writing quite a bit and getting extremely (and excitedly) nerdy). However, my 1000 word essays have been in short supply and I thought I’d throw one up on the blog today. It is inspired by the amazing Jack Kertesz of Maine, who shared this photo with the Maine Tree Crops Alliance  last week:

Same branch.
Same tree.
Two distinctly different apples. (Calyx, stem, skin, fruit shape, flavor, etc)

This was one of those WOW moments for me because I don’t ever see this sort of thing.  No, the yellow/green apples aren’t unripe versions of the red apples. Nor are they a more pale version of the other. This is something special and when I first saw it, there were three possible scenarios for what this was:

1.) Bud Sport. Not a typo for the epic Jean Claude Van Damme movie. A bud sport it’s basically a chance mutation of a single bud on a tree that produces a different looking fruit.  Sometimes this bud turns into a branch that produces apples double the size of the others on the tree. Sometimes a red delicious apple tree produces a branch of black apples…

No, I don’t think what Jack found is a bud sport, as two distinctly different kinds of apples are coming out of the same bud. We won’t venture down this rabbit hole, however I do plan to write more about bud sports in the future. They are fascinating!

2.) Top-Grafting. This is one of my favorite methods of grafting because it allows you to graft one or unlimited cultivars of fruit onto an existing tree of the same genera (ish). I made a quick video of how to do this with Bradford Pear:

However, if everything goes correctly, you still wouldn’t end up with a tree producing two different apples from the same bud on a branch.

3.) THE GRAFT-CHIMERA!  OMG. I’ve been waiting to find one of these! I had first learned about this crazy concept  when reading about the rediscovery of the citrus fruit cultivar ‘Bizzaria’. The gist of the story is this: Back in the 1600s, a Florentine gardener named Pietro Nati discovered a citrus fruit tree  that was growing three different fruits.  One fruit was the sour orange, which was from the rootstock’s genetics. The next fruit was the citron, which had been grafted onto the sour orange and was of the scion’s genetics. A third fruit was growing from this stem, which appeared to be a complete meld of the two fruits. The scientific community at the time, perplexed, fittingly named this fruit ‘Bizzaria.’ This branch was grafted in gardens all over the place and, amazingly, the chimera held true.

Centuries later, the concept of having 2 or more distinctly different fruits emerging from one stem was revealed to be a graft-chimera, a botanical phenomenon where the cells of the rootstock and the cultivar being grafted get wrapped up together in a single branch and both traits are exhibited.  Sometimes, like with the case of Bizzaria, a 50:50 fruit also emerges. How this happens can be boiled down fairly simply thanks to a German botanist named Hans Winkler.

Support my writings and more through the purchase of charcuterie at www.hogtree.com

Winkler was fascinated with the idea of graft-chimeras and began to experiment with how this sort of thing could come about and happen more regularly. How could he cause two different cultivars of fruit/vegetables/flowers to come out of the same bud? Instead of using apples for his experimenting, which take years to produce fruit, he used tomatoes and other graft-compatible nightshades (I’ll use eggplant for this essay, though it may not be historically correct) to conduct his experiments because they looked completely different in fruit and leaf.

The experiment goes like this: He grafted a tomato cultivar to an eggplant rootstock and when the graft was well healed and the plant established, he cut the graft union in half so the rootstock/scion union had exposed cut tissue.  He watched these cuts callous over and develop adventitious buds (new buds that arise from calloused tissue) grow. If a bud arose from the eggplant portion, it was an eggplant. If it arose from the tomato portion, it was a tomato.  If it arose from the graft union, it was a n Eggplato, composed partly of eggplant and partly of tomato. Essentially, two different species present within the same stem!

Turns out, this little experiment from Winkler is highly replicable and he was able to show how such branches can arise incidentally from normal grafting methods. The genetics and botanical world should have gone crazy at this time, experimenting with these concepts and producing serious Frankenfruit. But, like many cool experiments uncovered from the last century or more, they never picked up steam.

Back to Jack! And apples!

When I asked for more pictures, especially of the trunk, they sent this one over to me:

After seeing the picture, I think there are two possible scenarios for this graft-chimera.

1.) The tree’s graft union was buried and suckers came about from the union, producing chimeras.

1.5) The tree was mowed/driven over at the graft union and what came up was the graft-chimera

2.) The tree’s graft union was buried and some low-down injury occurred (weed eater?), causing a deep enough cut around the tree to reveal both rootstock and scion tissue. Up from that came these chimeric shoots.

Regardless, I think this ability to meld two cultivars into a single stem is very cool and somewhat witchy. I definitely want to experiment more with this concept in the future and I don’t know why more hasn’t been done with this concept. Maybe it has and I’m unaware, but I have found that some ornamental cultivars, especially the variegated types, came about as graft-chimeras.

Sidenote: I find it fitting that Winkler coined the term ‘Genome.’ How did he do it? Much like the Bizzaria fruit being half citron and half sour orange, he combined the words ‘Gene’ and ‘Chromosome’ together to get ‘Genome,’ lol.

Resources:

1. https://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/tisscult/Chimeras/chimeralec/chimeras.html
2. http://irrecenvhort.ifas.ufl.edu/plant-prop-glossary/03-genetic-selection/04-genetic-chimera.html
3. STOUT, A. B. (1920). A GRAFT-CHIMERA IN THE APPLE. Journal of Heredity, 11(5), 233–237.
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012160616300902
5. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/330463

I had a brief period of downtime last week and what did I do? I got in bed with my computer, a glass [bottle] of Eve’s pommeau , and a hankering to read about pigs in cultivated places (could be an orchard, could be a wood pasture). After some rabbit hole google searches, I stumbled on a bit of research that made me excited: A paper on pigs in Chernobyl.

Back in 1986, Ukraine had a nuclear disaster affecting 1000 square miles around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. All of the residents within this 1000 square mile exclusion zone were forced to evacuate, leaving their livelihoods behind. Many of the inhabitants were subsistence farmers, who were forced to abandon their gardens, orchards, hogs and chickens. Since, a radioactive landscape thrives in the absence of humans.

In 1992 and 1993, scientists ventured into the exclusion zone to capture pigs at different times of the year in order to record their age, weight and stomach contents. They wanted to know what in the heck these domestic-turned-wild pigs were eating once all of the people left. Turns out, I wanted to know as well! The results were put into a beautiful chart that I wish I could make using excel:

As someone who is VERY into perennial livestock food schemes, I LOVE this chart. This shows what free choice looks like within a human manipulated environment. Give a pig an orchard, herbs, abandoned grain silos, evening primrose and small rodents, and watch their preference by season. What’s very interesting to me is the absence of grain in  their Fall, Winter and Snow-bound winter diets. Yet come spring, the pigs are back on the grain train, though never more than a quarter of their diet. I also enjoyed seeing an absence of fruit in the early winter diet, but a presence in snow winter. This has got to be due to apples and pears that don’t fall.

Support my writings and more through the purchase of charcuterie at www.hogtree.com

I think there is a lot to learn from this type of study and would LOVE to know if this sort of study exists for anywhere in America. This study shows that pigs eat a LOT of evening primrose, dandelion/dandelion cousins, hawkweed and stinging nettle. All of these plants re-seed happily and profoundly by themselves, offer amazing nectaries for insects, and can provide medicine and food for us, too. Not to mention, these plants also comprise a garden club planting scheme from hell. (Mwahahahahahaha) 

Evil cackling aside, lets examine Evening Primrose (Oenothera spp) a little more deeply for a moment. It is native to the US and was brought to Europe in the 1600s, where it quickly established itself all over the place (Ukraine included) and has now naturalized. For human consumption, it was once cultivated for the roots, which taste like salsify. In today’s time, it is now grown for the seeds which contain large amounts of Omega-6 oils. Natives used the whole plant to treat minor wounds and bruises, and the roots to treat hemorrhoids. The pigs probably know about all of these health and wellness benefits, which is why they love it so much.

From a horticultural perspective, there are many cultivars of Evening Primrose. Some are annuals, some perennials and some biennials. Some are drought proof and love infertile soils, others prefer moist fertile soils. Some grow to be 6 feet tall, while others become low-growing ground covers. The diversity is huge within this plant’s genetics and it seems like there is a cultivar or two (or three) for everyone. The other interesting thing about Evening primrose is how it is propagated. They are amazing and prolific self seeders, but they are also propagated by division. Division is when the roots are divided into smaller pieces and then replanted wherever you want.

With the ability to be propagated by division or by seed, it seems as if Evening Primrose is well adapted to the pigness of the pig.   Pigs and their rooting behaviors would easily divide this plant and provide a seed bed to be sewn for the plants loaded with seed. What roots they don’t eat would return again the following year in plant form. Perhaps this is, in part, why this plant occupied such a large space in their yearly diets?

Though I could see it becoming slightly out of control, there is more to learn about this plant and others in their applications as pig fodder. Identifying fodder for pastured pigs in cold (or not so cold) climates that will thrive against repeated destruction is hard to find. I’m excited for some of you out there in the world to give it a try.

*Rumor has it, evening primrose is also a japanese beetle trap crop. I wonder if pigs will eat Japanese beetles? Has anyone ever observed this?*

Chernobyl Apples

There was an old Ukrainian
woman at the market
selling her goods.

            Come get your apples!
she calls.
                  Chernobyl apples!

Don’t say that,
someone tells her.
No one will ever buy

                    radiated apples.
Don’t worry, she says.
             They all buy them.

Some need them
        for their mother-in-law.
Some for their boss.

     There was an old Ukrainian
woman at the market
selling her goods.

Come get your mushrooms!
she calls.
Chernobyl mushrooms!

                                                -John Bradley

I’ve been helped out by a lot of people this year. In thanks, here is a Gantt chart (my favorite kind of chart) of September apple drop dates for Zone 6b East Coast climate (with scribbling all over it because it’s hard to let go***). This is for you silvopasture folks, you u-pick folks, you livestock-in-orchard folks. Many of these apples are very cold hardy, so you Northern folks adjust to your own climate using common cultivars like Macintosh to guide you

I still have June/July/August/October in my secret crypt, but I’m giving away the abundant month of September. Thanks to all.

(Donations are accepted for this compilation if you find it of any use)

 

***It is hard to let go because this info is very difficult to come across and has involved both years of personal research and study from orchards and people in Maine, Virginia, New York, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. At this point, my life’s work is categorized into 7 months, May through November. This is 1/7th of my life’s apple work so far. You might be thinking: No biggie, 31 apple varieties in order. But it is a big deal.  Please use it, respect it, fix it according to your particular climate, and build from it.

Last May, I wrote a post announcing the launch of my new orchard concept/business called Hogtree. Since writing, an entire summer season has come and gone and HogTree pigs are nearing their market date (I have a few left and if you are interested in purchasing, click here). With the pig season coming to a close and a rainy day forcing rest, I wanted to take some time to write an update for you all. This is a long one, folks.

1.) Land

I am nearing in on 6 months of an 8 month lease. The lease, which was an experimental one to see if the landowners and I could be good farm partners, cost $1. The pigs were to be pastured in future orchard rows, prepping the property for future orchards if it worked out between the two parties. I am happy to report that, to the best of my knowledge (and farm partner Phil demanding me write an online update), the two parties get along very well and share an affinity for the pigs. This isn’t to be taken lightly, as we’ve been through a lot together this season:

-First of all, we are 30+ inches above our normal rainfall for this year. It has been wet and muddy and not glamorous or romantic whatsoever in having pigs. Catching pigs in the pouring rain. Moving pigs in the pouring rain. Feeding pigs in the pouring rain. Fun!

-Secondly, we had some tragedy strike in the form of losing 2 pigs to heat stroke. The weather has been tremendously variable, and 2 weeks of rain ended abruptly with 2 hours of intense 96 degree sunlight. That 2 hour period was enough to put two pigs over the edge. Dealing with the two deaths showed crisis could be handled in an empathetic way.

-Thirdly, we all value hard physical work. I had never considered this factor before in leasing land, but I’ve begun to value it in a huge way. Hard physical work needs to be valued by all invested, and it often is not.  Having landlords who are into your vision because of the romanticism and can’t see past the weeds is a problem I (and many of you) know all too well.

And last, we’ve had some fantastic help from two extraordinary people, Grace and Kris, who are there whenever I have to leave town, move pigs, ferment feed, pick up whey and don’t have a truck, etc etc etc.

We are moving forward with further planning/visioning for 2019. That includes what the lease will look like, what shared labor and equipment looks like, and making sure the big picture is in agreement.

2.) Rain and Pigs and Fruit Trees

I don’t know what the future holds for our weather patterns other than likely being totally whack, but here are some observations.

-It only seems to pour these days. This makes having pigs difficult because they become rooting machines in the rain. I don’t actually know why this is, but I have a theory that it is earth worm related. If you hang around someone who harvests night crawlers, you may see them bang a metal rod into the soil. That reverberation, I’m told, mimics the sound/energy of raindrops hitting the ground. Loving rain, the night crawlers come to the surface. It’s my theory that rain=earthworms coming to the surface= pigs starting to root in order to eat these earth worm. I could be totally off base about this theory, but it’s what I tell myself whenever it rains (Rain=protein, Eliza.). This rooting action is a problem when you don’t want your orchard to get pocked with ankle-spraining craters, and given the rain this year, some new game plans need to be adopted…

IT IS TRUE that once an area has been “pigged” (as in, gone through virgin ground and thoroughly rooted to eat all the grubs, dock/dandelion roots), the pastured pig genetics tend not to root much. Maybe a sod flip or two every now and then. However, add a 2 inch rain event in a couple-hour period and shit gets real, fast. Pigged or not, I’ve learned I’ll need to set aside a “pig overflow” area in the orchard, where they can go if the sky opens up and dumps on you. This is an area(s) that can be disturbed and I have plans for what that will look like (hint: rhizomatous, stoloniferous and suckering shrubs/trees).

3.) Cover Crops

I don’t know grass. It’s not something that has been in my wheelhouse of knowledge nor have I tried to seriously learn about it because I’m a tree person (Just recently, I had a mentor show me the difference between orchard, timothy and alfalfa).  I’m learning, though, and that involves learning this whole reseeding-a-pasture for grazing game.

-I learned first hand that if you seed barley into a field without anything else, it provides an EXCELLENT nursery for foxtail, an eager invader here.  I’m not sure if it was my seeding density (probably), but I’m also going with a need to co-plant clover with anything else I try to seed. Feedback and experience is welcome on this, but it might take me a week or two to respond because it takes me at least 2 weeks to respond to anything this time of year.

-I’ve seeded crimson clover with buckwheat with great success (and such a great insectory right about now!), and oats with peas (needs clover, I think), and just finished seeding wheat with red clover and, of course, everything I have mixed all together (because what the hell?). These are all annuals because they will probably graze the paddocks again (aside from the wheat/clover paddocks), but I couldn’t handle thinking or learning about a perennial pasture this season. This is an area I’m looking to step into this winter.

4.) Fermenting Feed

I used to do things like make hard cider and brew beer. Now I just drink other people’s beer and cider and spend my hobby time fermenting pig feed. It has been a journey that I want to take a minute to write about.

I don’t want to treat my pigs in any way different from how I treat the trees. This means, I want my tree sprays to be pig beneficial, and my pig inputs to be tree friendly. So! This year I watched a few youtube videos/read some articles of various people fermenting their hog feed and it varied from water to energized water (using a vortex machine) to whey to using Effective microbes.

In the fruit tree world, there is a defense strategy in organic management that I’ll call “colonization.” This involves spraying alive yeast and bacteria beasties onto your trees in order to colonize the surface, effectively setting up a viking fortress on the surface of the leaf that strongly discourages harmful cultures from buying leaf real estate there. Whey and Effective Microbes are often talked about in the beyond-organic fruit management world as good leaf colonizers….

Crossover time!

Effective microbes (known as EM) are expensive. Like, a barrier to affordably using it in an orchard unless you can ferment it and keep it going forever (akin to keeping a sourdough starter going). However! I happen to have ties with a feed store in the area that sells livestock grade probiotics for WAY CHEAPER. EM contains Enterococcus faecium, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus plantarum which can all be found in Probios (not sponsored, but would totally be up for it). EM also contains Bacillus subtilis, which can be found for cheap as an additive to the chicken feed industry for increased weight gains. I acquired all of those ingredients as well as striking a deal with a local cheese maker to get her whey, and then I started to ferment the feed.

After some time, I developed a “house culture” that I think is pretty fantastic. A little bit of feed from the last batch is used in the new batch and the result is a wonderful pineapple/tropical smell. I’ve yet to get it analyzed, but that’s part of my winter’s work to see what proportions of what it may contain. I’m hoping to turn this culture into a colonizing fruit spray that makes the whole environment come a little more alive and beneficial from a microbial perspective.

5.) Tree Fodder

This is a huge topic that I will only briefly talk about today, but it’s an important one. HogTree’s orchard systems are based off of a tree fodder scheme, so putting trees in order according to harvest. Fruits and nuts are considered part of tree fodder, and I have a plan for those from May to November. What I haven’t talked much about is the leaf fodder scheme that is a part of my plans (which is still housed under the topic of tree fodder). For years, I’ve been dreaming this up as part of my ideal orchard system and I had to travel all the way to France and Spain earlier this year to feel like these plans weren’t crazy and out of reach.

This year, I fed heaps of leaves and the stems to the pigs. It was a test at first, and then became a regimen. Here’s a sampling of what I fed:

• Mulberry- This is like candy to the pigs. The leaves have a protein content between 18 and 28 percent, rivaling alfalfa. Unlike alfalfa, mulberry is drought proof.
• Willow- This is a mild pain reliever and natural wormer for the pigs. Watching them eat willow is a treat to behold. They strip the bark and eat it like spaghetti. I can only imagine that it is uncomfortable to gain 1.5 pounds a day. I will be planting more willow after watching their affection for the leaves and branches.
• Black Willow/Pecan- Both of these species come from the walnut family. They are great natural wormers (black walnut being more potent than pecan) and the pigs enjoy the leaves and stems on occasion. They are currently loving the dropping nuts from these already established trees.

This business of feeding trees to livestock is not new. It’s an ancient process involving select pruning methods of certain tree species (usually called pollarding, but for some reason coppicing is all the rage in the states right now. The difference is the presence of a trunk).  Feeding leaf fodder to animals is an adaption to drought, as something like a mulberry tree is 100 times more drought tolerant than alfalfa. Being a tree person, of course I took to the idea of tree hay over ground hay, and here we are.

Seemingly regular trees will be a part of HogTree’s orchard, but many of them will be cut back in extreme ways. What some people consider “Crape Murder” is my total M.O these days and it would take me a few hours to explain why. Just know it is undisputed in Europe that if continually pruned using these ancient techniques, these truffula-like trees can live forever. Many have already proven to be over the 1,500 year mark.

This is my mycorrhizal game in the orchard. Drastic cuts on various species in the orchard cause some (but not even close to all) roots to die and/or release a root exudate that provides food for all sorts of soil life underneath. In ancient forests where trees still stand that once got this human treatment, the mycorrhizal diversity is quite amazing. Not to mention, hollowed out stems become amazing habitat for those seeking refuge. An old pollarded tree in Sweden was found to be housing 26 BRAND NEW, never before discovered species of beetles.

Oh, plus you get all the tree remnants laying above the surface after all the livestock go to town consuming what parts of the branch they want. Another mycorrhizal boost.

6.) Fruit-Drop Schemes:

I’ve added quite a bit more diversity to my fruit scheme thanks to some old citizen science I’ve come across in the recently scanned POMONA archives (the publication of the North American Fruit Explorers). This includes drop schemes for peaches, Munson grapes, plums, asian pears and many more apples. In the future, I’m looking forward to helping more Northern people out in HogTree-like quests, but only after I help my people in the South, first. Stay tuned for an announcement by the North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX) via their facebook page and website, as well as on here, for when the scanned Pomonas will be available for members to search!

7.) Nursery Tree Business: 

Hicks Everbearing Mulberry and Stubbs Announcement:

Due to all the rain in May and June, I had a 100% graft failure rate for all mulberry nursery trees planted in the ground. 10-20 inches of rain caused every single graft to blow out of the rootstock. 2000 failed grafts, to be exact.

The in-ground mulberry rootstocks are doing just fine, however, and some are already up to 10 feet in height. Despite any found history or knowledge on summer budding mulberry with green budwood, we went for it and all looks well. I hired one of the best grafters in the country to help me and he is still optimistic about it all. If this doesn’t work, we’ll chip bud with dormant wood next summer.

8.) Planting Trees:

This winter I’m planting lots of rootstocks. I’m not bothering with planting grafted trees because the risk is far too high for deer destruction, and therefore waisted money. I plan to graft these trees above browse height once they get that tall, that way it’s only 1-2 dollars lost at most if the deer get in (which they probably will).

9.) Next Year’s Pigs:

The farm partners and I are already excited about getting pigs for next year. Perhaps we’ll get 24 ;-). I’ve had great success with David Crafton (of Six Oaks Farm)’s pastured pigs. I received 11 heritage cross pigs (tamworth x large black, blue butt x large black) from him this year and they have been great. I have also raised berkshire hogs this year that came from a local guy and the difference is day and night in terms of foraging. David’s hogs come ready to eat blackberries, any tree leaves you throw at them, grass, etc. Those poor berkshires still don’t really get it and rely mostly on fermented feed.

One thing of note about receiving pigs. YOU HAD BETTER MAKE AN AREA AS TIGHT AS POSSIBLE OR ELSE YOU WILL BE CHASING LITTLE PIGS FOR HOURS. Assume they can escape through anything, because they can. I even had one jump through a hog panel and then 3 others followed. I have spent far too many hours this year chasing pigs BUT I’m in pretty decent shape as a result. Pig cardio can be a thing.

**Apologies for the largely sepia tint to these photos. I put a blue light blocker on my computer and it snap shots the photos this way. At least you won’t be killing your eyes looking at my pictures!

In November of 2013, while sitting in my house in a holler in the middle of nowhere Virginia, I decided to take Lee Calhoun’s book, Old Southern Apples, off the shelf. I did this nearly every day, opening it up to a random page and reading the contents- sort of like one would with a daily calendar. On this particular day, I opened it up to a page mentioning the apple variety ‘Granny Neighbors.’ The explanations follows:

In her self-published book, Apples: Collecting Old Southern Varieties, nurserywoman Joyce Neighbors of Gadsden Alabama, writes: “A seedling apple variety found on my Dad’s farm in Clay County about 1975. . . and was growing in a trash dump about 50 feet from a hackworth (apple) tree. . . My dad named the tree after my mother. This apple variety has grown well in Illinois, where it was “one of the hits of this year’s tasting.” Fruit medium size, roundish conical; skin pale yellow splotched with red and some faint stripes; stem almost long in a wide, russetted cavity; dots scattered, large and small, grey; calyx greenish, open; basin corrugated, moderately shallow; flesh yellow, subacid; Ripe August. No catalog listing.

As with all apple books who mention someone’s name, I wondered if Joyce Neighbors was still alive. After posting in NAFEX’s (North American Fruit Explorers) facebook page, I learned that she had corresponded with others in the past year and was, more than likely, still around! I then tried to find her address online and noticed her place was for sale. With that, I vowed to go and see her as soon as I could.

In January of 2014, when driving down to attend the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (SSAWG) Conference in Mobile, Alabama, I stopped and knocked unannounced on Joyce Neighbor’s door. When the door opened, I told her that I was here because of apples, and she let me in without hesitation.

Some older apple people will tell you that they don’t have much to offer when you want to come visit. This is, of course, an exaggeration..but in the case of Joyce it at first seemed as if she had taken on her orchard as a representation of herself.  “There’s not much left of the orchard…” she told me when I first visited. “I had a guy working for me who was helping to fight back the brambles and prune the trees, but he stole from me and I had to get rid of him.”  When I asked if I could see the orchard, she told me that she wouldn’t let me go by myself, and her legs wouldn’t let her go with me. I honored her request not to go into the orchard that day, knowing I’d be able to see it someday.

Before she became a fruit hunter, Joyce worked for a retired army general for 22 years and that experience taught her organizational skills beyond what most people consider to be proficient. She was an ambitious soul, where after a full day at work, she would stay up until 2 am every night, working on an over-the-mail business management correspondent course.  Joyce finished this two year course in 6 months.

She was never married, having chosen to take care of her younger sister instead. The years of stress involved in taking care of her sister had taken a toll on her nervous system and by 2000, she had developed tremors in her hands and neck. Shortly before I had visited, her sister was put into an assisted living facility because Joyce was no longer able to care for her properly.  Since then, things seemed to be looking up for Joyce. Her tremors had greatly improved and she was once again able to write her name using a pen and paper.  Aside from the phone, her primary method of communication was through email. She was incredibly computer savvy for her age.

When looking at Joyce’s computer, a large desktop, her screen saver flashed apple after apple after apple, all different varieties. I watched for a long while, waiting for the slide show to end, but it kept going. Hundreds of pictures of apples, many of which she had taken. Only a few of them were labeled on the screen saver, yet she knew every one of them by heart. “Buff, Cherryville Black, Wolf River, Early Cortland…now those are ones I grew!” “Maidens Blush, Spartan, Iron Black and Sal, Betsy Crocket, PawPaw Sweet.” This went on and on…

“Red Rebel!” She yelled as it passed along her screen. Her brother’s wife had a red rebel apple tree growing in her parent’s front yard.  Her Brother drove a truck under the tree so he could reach up there and take cuttings for Joyce to graft. Red Rebel was a better tasting apple than Carter’s Blue, the way Joyce grew it in her orchard. “Lee Calhoun said it was a good apple, too. But it’s not the Rebel he’s been looking for,” she said. “Make sure that everyone knows it. My Red Rebel is not Rebel!”

“That’s one right there! White Buckingham! Now you gotta get White Buckingham from Tom Brown. It’s the biggest apple you’ll find. Bigger than Gloria Mundi.”

“NOW THAT’S A GOOD APPLE FOR THE LOWER SOUTH!!! REVEREND MORGAN!!!”

She got so excited watching that slide show with me and calling out the names. Though her orchard was inaccessible to her in her own back yard,  it was preserved in the form of a screen saver.  She could watch it for hours on end, reminiscing about the flavors and growth habits and the hunt for each.

Joyce got into hunting apples when it became evident that she needed to save some apple trees off of her Father’s farm (one of them being Granny Neighbors). In 1979, She ordered a grafting kit from Stark Brothers and got Jim Lawson to sell her 10 rootstock (m7 she thought). She went by the directions in the grafting manual sent from Stark Brothers, and all 10 of them took. From there, a nursery business was born. January 14th, 1985- Joyce got her nursery license from the State of Alabama.

She told me how lucky she was to have received her nursery license. “It wasn’t this easy for all women,” she said. In her travels to find old Alabama apples, she visited Brannon Nursery because they were once a source for many of the old apples on her list, including  the very illusive Black Warrior. Joyce arrived to Brannon nursery expecting to meet with old Mr. Brannon, but to her surprise and delight, it was Mrs. Brannon who ran the nursery! It turned out that Mrs. Brannon was a school teacher who hated and subsequently quit her job. She wanted to be outside, working with trees, so she applied for a nursery license from the State of Alabama in 1960. They denied her a license because she was a woman. Undeterred, Mrs. Brannon then sought a nursery license in her husband’s name…and began grafting.  Joyce would go on to tell me about how Mrs. Brannon root grafted her apple trees (the only method she used). In December, she would take 3 or 4 inches of a root off an apple tree and then graft the scionwood to it. She put them in moist pine sawdust immediately after she grafted them and once they had taken root, she’d plant them out. Mrs. Brannon died a couple years after Joyce found her, and she wished she could have asked her more questions.

In Joyce’s own nursery operation, the most she ever grafted in one year was 700 trees, but she preferred to graft around 300 trees a year. They were always planted in pots, and people had to come to her. Never once did she ship a tree. She told me that on rare occasion, people would come to her with only enough money to buy one tree, not knowing that it needed a pollenator. Joyce would then go and find the most obscure variety she had that was a compatible pollination partner, and would sell it to them for next to nothing. She retired her nursery business in the spring of 2009, though her nursery sign was still hanging in 2015 when I went back to visit her with my friends Pete Halupka, Lindsay Whitaker, and Pete Walton.

Joyce LaRue Neighbors, 90, of Gadsden, Alabama, died September 30th, 2017. The apple world has lost one amazing fruit hunter and nurserywoman. She’s now eating and describing all the lost apples she came just short of finding, with Black Warrior being the first.

“It’s best to grow a variety out yourself and learn how to describe it. Learn how to describe a variety. Learn that for your own use. It’s going to vary for where it’s grown. Somebody down the road might be different from me. And the cultural processes have a lot to do with it. A lot to do with it. My growing condition, the pH, would affect it. Other people might look at it different. Give it plenty of sunshine. Roots don’t need to get water logged. You got deer? Put up an 8 or 10 foot deer fence.” –Joyce Neighbors

Pete Halupka, who lived a little over an hour away from Joyce, became a friend and mentee of hers. His write up is below:

RIP JOYCE NEIGHBORS. Who I am so proud to say was my dearest friend and apple mentor and deeply influential to many apple enthusiasts. Gadsden, AL. 

I’m very sad to say that I was sending Joyce a holiday email, and when I googled to remind myself of her email, rather than switching email accounts, I saw her obituary. It makes me feel terrible, but I hadn’t emailed her since her passing in September, 2017.

I first found Joyce in Lee Calhoun’s Old Southern Apples in 2014. She was listed under the Alabama apples that she had found since the 1980’s. I Googled her name to find her contact as I just couldn’t believe there was an Alabama apple hunter, doing what I wanted to do.

I called her number. As many have. She was a bit dismissive till I told her I wanted to help her find “Black Warrior”, an apple she has never found. She perked up. She invited me over to her nursery and old orchard. I was elated.

I came to her home, for the first time. I knocked and heard her faintly speak across the house to hold on. She sat me down, almost immediately, at her old computer. She told me that she was very adept at computers after a long time as an assistant to a General. It was clear she actually could navigate her computer amazingly well for someone her age and of her generation. She began to do something really specific. She was opening Word documents and each individual document was titled for each apple variety she had in her orchard. Within each document, was vivid descriptions of her apples both from other sources but also her own descriptions in her book. For the next six hours, she spoke about apples. I have literally scores of hours of her speaking. I also have stacks, and stacks of papers of her writing and others.

I made sure that each variety was accounted for in her orchard. They were grafted and distributed by me, but also scores of apple nerds across the country and world. She found almost 10 Alabama varieties out of “extinction” that had much cultural importance to our ancestors. Each of those varieties is planted, and sometimes fruiting. For someone like Joyce, an botanical preservationist and apple hunter, this was her legacy.

The last time I saw Joyce, I showed her my two year old “Red Rebel” apple planted in my orchard, a variety she found after it disappeared for many years. I was elated to show her and in a touching moment together, she was having trouble speaking her words, and I saw one tear down her weathered cheek.

When Eliza Greenman, Pete Walton, Lindsay Whiteaker and I went to visit Joyce one time, we went out to the orchard (which she hadn’t walked in four years) and found several apples (Red Rebel, Horse and Captain Davis). When she saw herself in the iPhone, she giggled, she became just so excited and asked us to take more. This made us so happy, as she often would be a little closed off due to pain or discomfort, but then some days she would be very open and giggly.

If you want to learn more about Joyce, unfortunately there is limited information. But, the best interview available is a Southern Foodways podcast on #thefruitexplorers with Eliza Greenman and I, where Mary Helen Montgomery does a great interview with Joyce. I will link this below. Lastly, If you can find it, she has a self published book of her varieties and other Southern varieties available not online but from folks who have it. It is now time to scan her book in, as well.

 

 

https://youtu.be/8e2TaSDjM7w