Why Does my Tree Only Bear Fruit Every Other Year?

Last summer someone wondered aloud to me that there were not many wild flowers. This year, walking through the forest and wild meadow on the way to the orchard flowers are exploding from the ground, trumpeting life and the air buzzes with insects. I knew that 2016’s drought was a heavy one for our area, but the stark contrast with 2017’s wet spring is shocking.

My fruit trees are growing like fireworks, currant bushes I planted as twigs in May have quadrupled in size. The blueberries I planted this spring have already outgrown the ones that struggled to survive the dry summer. The grass last July was brown and flattened against the earth, now it makes a solid green curtain reaching my navel. It has turned the orchard into a maze where I have to guess the general direction of my Honeyberries to find them. The grass is taller than most of my berry bushes, but they don’t seem to mind. They all have a small radius where I have weeded and mulched the 'root zone'. After all the rain we’ve been having and my application of manure last week the orchard is singing. A monarch butterfly flutters past, floating above the tall grasses and flowering milkweed.

This week I’d like to address a question sent by a reader asking why their apple tree did not flower this year. I commonly get asked about this sort of fruit tree behaviour. The alternate version of the same question is: Why does my fruit tree only bear fruit every other year?

Trees run on a two year cycle when it comes to flowering. Trees want to produce fruit and seeds in order to create offspring. Imagine this year your tree is not producing any fruit. It is going to put a lot of energy into creating flower buds which will be able to produce fruit next year. Fast forward to next year, the tree is loaded with pollinated flowers and it is using all of its energy to ripen its immense load of fruit. This means that during this second year the tree has not been able to invest energy into next year’s flower buds. Year three we are back to a tree with no fruit.

In commercial orchards farmers control the fruit set by spraying the trees (in both conventional and organic agriculture this is a permitted practice, though the chemicals and techniques differ) in order to make them drop two thirds of the potential fruit load. This means the apples, or peaches, or plums that are left on the tree will ripen bigger and more flavourful.  At the home scale you can thin fruit by hand and ladder. My second year working in agriculture I spent a few days in spring thinning fruitlets on peach trees in a greenhouse in northern Ontario.  It is a slow process, but it improves fruit quality and ensures a harvest for next year.

Once trees have gotten used to biennial bearing, it is very difficult to restore them to annual bearing. As far as I am aware it is not impossible, but the ease at which you can bring those trees back is largely affected by how long they have been allowed to bear fruit in this way.

Your berries won't need thinning, they are pretty good at self-regulating. You should thin your grapes to improve flavour. The amount of grapes you leave on depends on the vineyard, the use for the grapes (wine or fresh eating), and the climate. Go with your gut, trust your instinct. Often when it comes to plants the power of observation will lead you to the right place.

Hoping you enjoyed a lovely summer solstice, have a lovely week.

-E.V.

Restoration Agriculture

When I started planning my orchard, I had never heard of Restoration Agriculture, or Mark Shepard.  During the course of the summer when I worked as an organic farm inspector, the words Restoration Agriculture and Mark Shepard kept popping up at the most interesting farms I visited. My personal interests make this a biased ‘most interesting farms’. I love perennial crops. Fruit trees, asparagus, perennial herbs, nuts, and perennial veggies. You get the picture.

What is Restoration Agriculture?

Restoration Agriculture is a way of farming that has the ability to produce many human staple food crops on fields that are unusable to, or have been depleted by annual crop production. It is a way of farming that aims to restore or improve the health of soils, microbiology, wildlife habitats, and waterways that are connected to the production site. How? It relies heavily on imitating the natural ecosystems that were in place before modern man changed the face of the planet. By imitating the indigenous ecosystem of a region, the hope is that we can choose crops that function well in a climate without needing constant attention and coddling.

How do you imitate the natural ecosystem to create a farm? Mark Shepard mainly focuses on the oak savannah at his own farm. To oversimplify things, he has rows of perennial crops with space for cattle to graze beneath. He can grow oak, apple, currants, raspberries, pears, grapes, hazelnuts, and animal flesh and eggs on a hill that if it was under conventional management would be useless for growing corn and could only support a handful of grazing animals. He argues that despite the individual crop yield being lower per acre than a conventional farm, the overall yield if you add the crops together will bring a higher caloric yield than a field equivalent in size that grows corn or soy.

All the while, this system uses no sprays. Animals graze down the grass that competes with the trees and pests are controlled by tree frogs, bats, and ‘good’ insects. Pruning trees is performed by cattle and wild deer. The apples do not all end up looking like the ones in the pyramid display at your local supermarket. The best ones are sold for fresh eating, the rest can be juiced to make delicious cider.

Maybe you’ve started to notice similarities between me and Mark Shepard? Mmm, cider.

Corn needs to be planted, sprayed, weeded, and stalks plowed under every year (despite no-till getting more and more interest). Vegetable crops need to be covered by row covers, hand weeded, or chemically sprayed, protected from insect, frost, wind, and rain damage.  Agriculture is an awful lot of WORK and the returns are not often what anyone would call ‘profitable’. There is one chapter in his book that Mark Shepard begins with the sentence “On the whole, unless someone has special circumstances, nobody is really making any money in agriculture”. He has a few examples of farmers operating at huge losses until they go out of business.  

I don’t want to use sprays on Eden’s Rise, or get too obsessed about things being perfect. I do want it to be an Eden for humans and animals alike. The most exciting moments this summer were when I either got to eat a berry or discovered an amazing new bug or animal in the field.

During the course of my farm inspections I visited a few blueberry farms. One had netting over their entire crop. The farmer explained to me how they had just come up with a new way to set up the netting that took half the time (still several days of labour for the whole team, and that doesn’t include taking it down again), and also complained about being organic because they had to spend 30 hours squishing caterpillars that were ravaging the crop. By contrast, another blueberry farm I visited had no nets, and apparently no pest problems. The farmer said he couldn’t be bothered with the nets, his harvest was able to pay all the bills, and his personal thoughts were that birds prefer protein over sugar. The birds were probably eating as many bugs out of the blueberry plants as they were eating blueberries. When labour is a huge cost in your business, cutting out a useless practice like this could save you a lot of money. Sure, you probably will get a smaller harvest. But a smaller harvest with fewer expenses might actually lead to greater profits.

Mark Shepard also talks about a process of selection whereby he plants a lot of seedling trees and lets the ones who want to die, die, and the resulting trees are strong and capable of surviving his unique environment. Eden’s Rise is only one acre, and I don’t have the capital to get crazy planting thousands of trees and hoping 5 of them will be incredible performers. What I did was similar, albeit I let other people do the work of selecting varieties for me. I planted a wide range of different fruits, and different varieties of the same fruits in order to discover who does well on a shallow, heavy site. I will see what survived the first year and be able to start a second shopping list of the crops and varieties that I will be planting more of in 2018.

If you have any intersecting interest between agriculture and conservation, or an interest in permaculture, I would recommend watching a couple Mark Shepard talks on YouTube. He can be pretty condescending, self-aggrandising, and evasive on the certain subjects, but what I enjoy the most about him is that is stirs in you a new permission to dream up your own way of solving the ‘problems’ of your site without relying on the usual Big Ag expensive ways of ‘fixing’ what doesn’t work for a specific crop.

Have a lovely week!

Welcome Mantis, bring your friends

I kept my word and have been watering my plants every evening, when possible. I had to miss a night here and there due to either social events or back pain, but overall my plants have been spoiled these past two weeks and they love it!

I see lots of new wood, new leaves, and the largest surprise of all- a few days after I started regular watering, the insects that were eating the leaves nearly all disappeared. One exception is one apple tree was attacked by several hundred miniature caterpillars, but after a bit of squishing they seem to have disappeared too.

Best of all- it finally rained yesterday. A welcome relief during our summer or drought.

There haven't been many pictures lately of Eden's Rise and that is because of how brown, crispy, and dead the field looks. The only colour comes from my trees and the particularly drought resistant golden rod that has taken possession of the bottom of the field. 

And yet life carries on. I don't know anything about snake life cycles but there are some miniature snakes hanging out near my asparagus and I assume they must be some recent hatchlings. I love snakes, and I am happy that having left the grass long means that they feel comfortable having a habitat in my garden. 

There are also voles, or some kind of fluffy round ball animals. They make holes and run away in a flash of dark fur when I approach them. They don't seem particularly destructive, but I don't appreciate when they make their holes right through the roots of my newly planted trees. They likely don't appreciate me planting trees right through their newly dug holes.

Today I made a new friend: a praying mantis! 

At first I was horrified, all my knowledge about praying mantises came from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Xander was nearly eaten by a large Praying Mantis Demon Lady. Still, I had an idea that it was probably not eating my plants and likely even a welcome visitor for my garden. A quick google search when I got home confirmed it. It seems they have enormous appetites for aphids, mosquitoes, caterpillars, and a bunch of other bugs I have no immediate love for. Suddenly I love my new freaky insect friend, and I hope she invites all her friends over for a party! 

Have a lovely week, and take some time to look at nursery catalogues. If you want to start your own orchard or want to plant flower bulbs, then fall is a great time to plant. 

Cider

Of course when you are planning an orchard, there's a bit of you that thinks "wouldn't it be cool to make my own cider?"

At least that is my thought process.

Rather than wait until my own trees are producing enough to make a batch of alcoholic cider, I decided I should practice on cheap store bought juice first. Just to iron out the kinks in my knowledge of brewing.

First fermentation went well with a lot of gurgling, and the secondary fermentation was very quiet. The cider at this point tasted alcoholic but nearly unpalatable due to the lack of sugar. I decided to put some honey in the bottom of my bottles which I knew was likely to trigger a third fermentation which would make my cider bubbly. I also knew there was a risk that this third fermentation could be too violent and my bottles might explode.

When I went home this morning four of the corks had popped out. Cider all over the bathroom floor. Not a problem, I'm pretty sure cooling the cider down should halt fermentation. So I put as many as I could in a bucket with cold water, selecting particularly the bottles whose corks had already been coming out a little. 

This is clearly not a permanent solution during a hot summer. I happen to know, however, that there is a lot of unused fridge space at my mother's house. So I load the cider into my car and start driving very slowly towards her place with my AC blasted as high as it will go. Not high enough, incidentally. 

Shaking bottles that are full of pressure is not very good if you want to actually drink the cider someday. One cork pops, I wince, and the whole car smells of cider. I've gone too far now, I have to keep going.

I reach a stop sign and discover extensive road works are underway. There is nothing to do but sit in the baking sun with my own blood pressure rising as I know what the heat will do to the yeast having a party in my bottles. Two minutes pass, three minutes, four min- BANG! Cider sprayed all across the inside of my windshield, ceiling, dashboard and the cork whizzes past my ear. Right now I am really hoping I can make it to my mom's house without being stopped by a cop because I don't know how I'll be able to explain this. 

It is a happy ending, though. I made it home and I now have 20 bottles of cider in the fridge and the inside of my car drying in the sunshine. And I know for next time to STOP fermentation in the bottles after about a week if I want to avoid explosions and fountains of delicious cider. 

Have a lovely week, bottoms up!



Update: Having a glass of cider from one of the popped open bottles. It is sweet, fizzy, and definitely going straight to my head!

Obsessed, mulch?

Strawberries plants are often mulched. Mulch keeps the berries clean (no direct contact with soil), it also acts as a temperature buffer and reduces moisture loss from the soil to the sun. Best of all for the farmer with a bad back; mulch suppresses weed growth!

Strawberry beds kept tidy with use of mulch

My little field has been fallow for at least seven years. That's seven years of grass growing and dying. Mulch can be expensive for the organic gardener, but for me it was only a matter of raking for 10 minutes to get enough old grass together to cover one bed. 40 minutes later all my strawberry beds were mulched!

Blueberries mulched with pine needles and grass

The result was so good (particularly on the weed side) that I figured I should do this for all the plants on Eden's rise! The blueberries have a mixed mulch of pine needles (to increase acidity) and grass. All trees, bushes, and vines have a small circle of coconut coir mulch from planting day that has now been covered by a larger circle of grass mulch. I am grateful that I began this little project after the first full week without rain. There has been very little rain so far this summer and the field is in the full sun all day when the temperature is frequently above 30 Celsius. The mulch keeps the weed competition away for the base of my plants so when I waddle over with water for each tree I know I am not wasting that water on weeds. Thanks to the layer of mulch the hot sun also loses much of its opportunity to steal the water and the soil does not bake. 

Those are the often praised advantages of mulch, but I enjoy mulch for another reason. Bare soil, as the soil would be if I managed to keep it weed free, is subject to erosion. Anyone who has ever had a passing interest in sustainable agriculture knows that loss of topsoil is a serious problem in areas that are routinely cultivated. Erosion from wind and rain can hit hard on fine soil particles (like my clay soil). Since the soil depth on my hill is only about 1.5 feet to bedrock, every bit of soil is precious. The mulch will eventually rot down and be incorporated into the topsoil with the positive effect that in this case agriculture adds to the topsoil rather than depleting it. 

Two rows of asparagus, mulched around the edges with plastic
 and mulched in between with grass

There is always work to be done on Eden's Rise, I will leave you at that! Have a lovely week.

The grass looking fairly well combed after a raking session to mulch the apple trees.