Weeds and Other Gifts

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”                        —Abraham Lincoln

When I am anxious or out of balance, which is often these days, I turn to weeding. I can always find weeds on the farm. The weeds are tenacious; they want to grow. One definition of a weed is a plant growing in the wrong place. We have lots of plants growing in the wrong places. Most of them need to be dug up. On the farm ‘to do’ list, weeding sits in almost every category: blueberries, raspberries, rhubarb, asparagus, around the apples, pears, and peach trees, the hoop house, and the kitchen garden.

Sitting on the ground, along the rows of blueberries, as if at a banquet table, each of us brings our favorite utensil. Ariel’s preference is the triangular Korean hoe, Holly prefers a claw, and I use a pink-handled small trowel.

Holly weeding young blueberry bushes on a cold and windy day.

We yank, we pull, we dig, leveraging our tools into thick mats of grasses, and tug some more. Grass clumps lift out—these get a hearty shake sending the worms and the soil attached to the roots back into the row, while whatever is left finds new life in the compost pile.

Frederic G. Cooper, 1917, U.S. Food Administration

My mind is occupied by thoughts of farms and food. The largest apple grower in our town depends on two migrant workers, but he has yet to hear from the embassy about their arrival. The commercial vegetable market in California doesn’t know how they will manage not only because of their dependence on migrant workers, but the chain of supply, the connective system, the trucks, the transport, the weigh stations, the middle places where all the packaging happens, are facing their own challenges. Farmers in Florida are plowing under vegetables, and in the Midwest, dairies are dumping fresh milk, though stores limit the amount customers can buy. Small farms feel the pressure, too. The restaurant that bought fifty pounds of greens a week is now closed, and many farmer’s markets have been canceled.

Abraham Lincoln promoted the cultivation of land after the bloodshed of the Civil War. During and at the end of World War II, the American Victory Garden movement created sustainability and health. England had their own movement, Dig for Victory. Maybe the restoration of the world’s psyche after times of great suffering was in part due to the return of our connection to the soil, to food. Maybe, it is a time to build more resiliency into our communities. Food is basic to our needs along with water, clean air, and shelter. We need to return to the basics and provide this for all people on the planet. Let’s give up fighting for causes and beliefs that only divide us. Let’s rally around what truly supports us.

I think about these things, and obviously oversimplify them, while I grab a small clump of grass, and ease out its long root system, pure white and thick, from among the blueberry’s dark, thin roots. Pull too hard and the root snaps. Only by teasing gently but firmly, can I coax out a foot-length root, with grass nodules every few inches, to release its hold. Of course, some weeds will quickly regrow, we don’t get them all, but if we don’t weed, the mass of growth under the blueberry plants will rob the bushes of nutrients. We weed in order to ease the competition for resources, to encourage a bountiful crop.  

Weeding is not glamorous work and It doesn’t save lives, but it offers a connection to something trustworthy that helps keep me balanced. I know not everyone has access to weeds, but even in a city, we can break for a moment, see a bit of earth or touch a tree, and know this is all part of us. Amid slicing an apple, or washing salad greens, we can pause within our anxiety, and connect to this gift from the earth, the ground that sustains us. 

This morning’s surprise: blown by the wind from a pile of old materials outside my studio.

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Remembering the Seeds

On this cold April day, many seeds still wait underground, but with a few days of warmth, they will crack open, the tiny rootlets will poke out, find their way to sustenance, and their first seed leaves will appear. A seed at birth is already programed to be the fullest expression of itself. It arrives on the planet with all the knowledge it needs. The seed knows when to grow and how to respond to warmth. As it develops leaves, it takes up nutrients, drinks in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. The seed is a storehouse for a great reservoir of knowledge, of shared history, and experience. As it becomes a mature plant, it knows what to give another plant struggling nearby and to send out warnings to its tribe of approaching danger. The smallest seed only needs to find itself in a hospitable environment to flourish. For it will respond to whatever it encounters. The influences of the outside environment affect it, be it toxins, or a great flood, hail, a heat wave, or a blessed perfect growing season.

I lived my first seven years in a row house in the industrial city of Chester, Pennsylvania. I didn’t know about seeds, but I was always attracted to one plant. When I was about six years old, I remember walking alone into the alley behind our row house, carrying a metal kitchen bowl. It was the insert from the classic Revere Ware double boiler. Then, seating myself on the concrete near a patch of weeds, I gathered the seed stalks of this plant that grew in abundance. I rubbed my fingers up the stem against the grain, and the seeds, small, elongated, and soft, fell silently into the bowl. Myriads of individual entities.

In my world were my parents, my younger brother, Jon, Albert, a boy who lived across the street, Charlene who lived a few doors away and whose mother was always home when we came home from school, our housekeeper, Louise, and somewhere, further away, my parents’ drugstore where they worked every day. My world was small, but this bowl was filled with the largest number of anything I could imagine. So many small bits all neatly together filling the bowl. When it was almost full, I lowered my fingers into the bowl and trailed my fingers through the perfect seeds. Moving my hand around and through and under, the seeds shifted and tickled my fingers. Soothing and sensual is how I remember the experience. Even at this young age, or perhaps because of it, my hand in this bowl of seeds connected me to something peaceful and true.

Later, after I became an apple orchardist, I learned that the weed was plantain, an herbal remedy for insect stings and other skin abrasions. You only have to pick a few leaves, chew them, and rub them or poultice them onto a wound and they withdraw toxins and soothe. The taste is not sweet, not bitter, not pungent or sharp, just a mash of green leaves.  

Sketch of Plantain Seed Stalks and Leaves, Linda Hoffman, 2020

I am allergic to bees. When I am stung, which inevitably happens several times a year, I know exactly where to find plantain. It grows on the side our farmhouse near the back door. Growing in this most unglamorous place, it doesn’t announce its presence, but it is tenacious enough to grow despite other weeds and grasses. It even survives the mower. In cities, plantain grows in vacant lots and in cracks of the sidewalk. Plantain seems to be totally nonchalant about its closest neighbors or the soil chemistry. It grows both where soils are poor and where they are fertile. It forges a home in forgotten nooks and crannies.        

Plantain beginning to grow along the driveway in front of the Farmhouse, April 4, 2020

Plants offer their unique gifts. For example, poison ivy grows in disturbed areas. It also flourishes in unstable ecosystems like on the dunes on Cape Cod, appearing as if to say, “Keep off of this fragile bank.” When a friend recovering from chemo treatments, mentioned poison ivy had sprung up outside her front door, I smiled and said, “It wants to protect you.” And when I am feeling tired, I lean my head into a tall clump of mountain mint, and its strong menthol scent enlivens my spirit.

 I no longer live in Chester, Pennsylvania, but on a small farm where I can plant seeds and tend the earth. I think of the billions of people who can’t do this, I think of my stepdaughters in their small apartment in Brooklyn, listening to sirens, eating rice and beans, and my grandchildren who have been told not to go out because there is sickness outside. I long to bring them to the farm and show them the rows of seeds growing, to listen to peepers and wood frogs, to share the plumping of the apple buds, and see plantain, the healer, poking out. But for now, this is the way it is.

The myriad seeds in that long ago bowl connected me to something outside myself, to something far beyond my immediate world. As I sit alone now in isolation, I think about this world with more people than I can conceive of—almost eight billion people. Every single person on the planet born a unique and perfect being. Like a seed, we must grow in this imperfect world. We, too, have much innate wisdom, we know what needs to be done.

Catalpa Tree, watercolor, Linda Hoffman, 2019

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!

A New Year for Apples

Many of you who have been following my weekly blog know that this fall I became quite discouraged about farming and the orchard and so much that I’ve poured myself into over the last ten years. In large part, my frustration was due to a fungal pathogen, Venturia inaequalis, better known as scab. But thanks to a persuasive mentor and the researchers at PRI, I’m finding the door is opening and there is light on the other side.

PRI refers not to Public Radio International, but to Purdie, Rutgers, and Illinois Universities, the name of the cooperative disease resistant apple breeding program that has patented apples such as Scarlett O'Hara, Sundance, Pixie Crunch, and CrimsonCrisp — all apples bred to be crunchy, attractive, tasty and most importantly, resistant to apple scab.

When I started growing apples in 2005, my mentor Denis Wagner’s first concern was what we were going to do about apple scab, one of the worst problems for organic orchardists in New England. Denis advised I spray micronized sulfur, a common material used in agriculture to fight fungal infections. It is a mined material and permitted under organic regulations. The Sumerians used sulfur 4,500 years ago to combat disease in their crops.

The scab fungus overwinters in the orchard floor. In the spring, after a warm, rainy period —  millions of spores float upwards into the tree like dust motes in sunlight. Landing on warm and wet, fresh green leaves, the scab shows up as innocuous-looking dark spots on the leaves. But gradually, these black cloudy patches grow darker and spread over the leaf surface. Unchecked, the fungus becomes rampant and jumps from leaf to fruit.

The apples develop brown crusty scabs and eventually crack. Sulfur applied to the leaves changes the pH and makes them an inhospitable host. The problem is getting spray onto every leaf surface — next to impossible — and renewing the coverage after it rains. An organic orchardist might need to spray sulfur fifteen times or more.

Over next few years, I learned through my holistic apple grower’s network how to calculate the spore release and not spray at every threat of precipitation. I would spray only when there was a large percentage of inoculant. I found I could keep the virus in check, unless we have a bad year – meaning a very wet spring. Then it becomes impossible to control. Ten years ago was a ghastly season. The scab was so ugly on the Macintosh trees that I decided to take down every Mac that wasn’t in the first three rows. My thinking was that I could confine these scab-susceptible trees and control it better. Macintosh trees are notorious scab magnets.

This year was again a banner year for scab. We lost half our fruit. Scab jumped from the Macintosh to the Golden Delicious, and then to the Blushing Golden, varieties that are normally scab resistant. With the Macs in the front three rows of the orchard, it was not a welcoming site for those entering the orchard: for people coming to pick apples for the first time, it was alarming.

I consulted with Denis again. “Remove them,” he said. “The trees are old and very densely planted.”  I hemmed and hawed. I didn’t want to take down any trees. But I knew that even when I sprayed I got only about 50% coverage because of the tree size and density. I told Denis I would consider removing them and began my Macintosh cogitation.

What to do? Take down thirty-five beautiful trees? Take down only one row to start? I spoke with another apple grower and he suggested leaving a few Macs – because they make lovely early season cider.  ‘Ah, what a good idea,’ I thought. I mentioned this to Denis. 

            “Linda,” he said. “You made the decision to get rid of them, just get rid of them.”

First Row of Macintosh Trees

A phone call came in.

            “Don't hang up!” a gentleman said. “This isn’t a solicitation. I’m interested in organic apple wood.”

I would have hung up, but at that moment I was stewing in apple wood decisions. It would take considerable labor to cut down thirty-five full size trees, pile the branches, burn them, and stack the burnable logs. 

            “We’re looking for some organic apple wood to make charcoal,” the man said. “We think we can sell it to high end organic restaurants.”

He had my attention. He was in Arizona, but coming to New England and wanted to visit the farm, meet me, and see the trees. I explained that this year, I actually had a few large trees that I was planning to take down. We agreed to meet.

Len Kronman visited along with his business partner, Dave Santos. I don’t know how they are related, but Dave is younger and Len is older. Dave seems to be the on the ground man and Len is perhaps a financial backer. While we were walking through the orchard I told Len about my attempt at creating a wild orchard pointing out Valerian and Jerusalem artichokes growing between the trees.

            “My daughter-in-law had just published a book on wildflowers. Would you like a copy?” he asked.
            “Oh yes,” I replied.
            “Please send her a copy,” he directed Dave.

Len is also an art collector; he specializes in Native American art. But as he said a few times, he just loves to collect. We took a tour of sculpture on the farm, and he chose a piece of mine, a small figure sitting on a tall rock. All this from organic apple wood . . .

Dave and I chose a date when he would come with a few men, a chipper, and a truck. Then he called back, apologetically.

            “Would it be all right if we chipped and left the branches less than 2” in diameter? It will be too small for charcoal,” he explained. “If we take it away we will need to bring two trucks – one for the charcoal making wood and the other for the twig stuff.” 

Chipped wood from the smaller branches is called ramial wood chips. They have more nutrients than older wood. They’re hard to come by unless you have your own chipper.  We always burn our prunings in a huge bonfire and then spread the ashes around the trees.

Bonfire of Apple Prunings

            ‘Nutrients for the trees,’ I thought. “I would love to have them!”

            Dave and his crew won’t be here until after Christmas, but I am feeling better about removing the Macintosh trees. I’ve already ordered replacements — two early season, scab resistant varieties from the PRI breeding program. In the front row will be Pristine, a hardy yellow apple, with crunch and sweetness, that I already grow. And for the second row, Redfree, another early season apple with skin color 90% red wash over yellow. The tree salesman also convinced me to put in an order for the new Evercrisp apple. He said, “You might have to wait a year or so, but you’ll love it!”  I’m looking forward to the ripening of the new year filled with things not yet known, not yet tasted, not yet seen. I hope you are, too! All best for the Holdiays!