This year we start our fourth growing orcharding season at the farm. Our big push this trip around the sun will hopefully see us get another 75 trees into the ground in a new orchard on the south side of the creek. We'll also graft another 250 trees and establish a "stooling bed" for propagating rootstock on our own going forward.
The first of our apple trees went into the ground in early 2021, about 80 in all. We chose a spread of mostly old-school cider apples on several different types of dwarfing rootstock. Ambitiously, we also grafted more than a thousand trees for planting in subsequent years. A year later in 2022, we started a second orchard down near the creek and populated it with 60 trees or so, this time on semi-dwarfing rootstock. In 2023 we followed up with another 50 trees in the Creekside Orchard--also on semi-dwarfing rootstock--and put in a third orchard of about 40 trees down on the west of the farm, mostly crab apples which were the mainstay of the American cider industry prior to prohibition.
As with many adventures, these first efforts were all about trial and error. In order to take the sting out of some of the learning, we tried to find locals with strong apple growing knowledge. But there are no longer any commercial growers or even sizeable amateur operations in our valley. The only nearby old-timer we found had recently retired from the Ag Extension Service. I reached out to him, but he was happy looking toward retirement and offered to refer me to a younger colleague, one without much actual growing experience hereabouts. So, we mostly set forth with some experience with apples in general, an enviable collection of books about apples, but no strong sources of local knowledge on the subject.
We laugh now--not without smarting a little--at the profusion of rookie errors we committed...wholly unforced errors in the service of a few hundred trees and a whole lot more education. A lot of our early goofs were simply generic bad practice. There were a lot of evenings working out in the orchard when we stopped to wave at folks going by on the road next to us and were pretty sure they were smiling back at us and shaking their heads about whatever it was that the city people were up to out there with those apple trees.
Looking at things more kindly, a number of our missteps were pretty specific to this valley and would have been hard to preempt. Most of all we took a beating with our early grafting by losing control of the aftercare. Our grafts themselves took. But as we struggled to figure out effective fencing and weed control, the young trees fell under attack from deer, cattle, wild turkeys, and then a profusion of bindweed that I'm pretty sure moved faster than either the deer or the cattle. We anticipate bear trouble. All in all, after three iterations of fencing and some trench warfare with the weed situation, we ended up with about 75 brilliantly healthy grafts from that first big push, a sorrowful success rate of about 7%! The wildlife out here (which do NOT feature in our city orchard) make it a pretty rough neighborhood for succulent young trees, especially in the middle of the dry season when everything else is brown and scratchy. Western Oregon's seemingly bi-polar relationship with water (too much six months of the year, none for the next six months) add undeniable slope to the learning curve.
We have learnt some important things about growing apples here on this ground. For example, we now know to scope out the varied soils in the bottom land to find the good stuff. Topographically, it all looks the same. But, it's not. The ancient riverbed which is the valley features alternating flows of clay loam and hard cobble. There are generally outstanding soils at the mouths of the sub-canyons running north-south. Some sub-irrigation is available from the many small springs coming in from the east. Blissfully unaware of most of this when we started, we laid out our initial orchards mostly in geometrical shapes. Easier to fence, plough, etc...or so we thought. A more observant and adaptable grower would likely have followed the soil types and planted in patterns which trace along the old geology of the valley. We were also delighted this past year to identify G890 as a clearly superior rootstock for our farm. It does well with our acid soils and seems to be good at finding water even during the protracted dry season between July and October. Landing on G890--which we are using in all of our grafting this year--was something that only became possible after we had the opportunity to trial about a half dozen different rootstocks and compare the results over a couple of seasons. Similarly, we're also zeroing in on scion varietals which seem to really want to be here. Some--like a few of the Spanish cider apples we were so excited to try out--seem prone to difficulty. Unsurprisingly, our strongest performers (for now at least) appear to come from cuttings we took from old existing trees on the farm that have thrived for decades. These "natives" now share company with another fifty or so heirloom varietals we've brought in. We continue to watch how things unfold.
This fall--if the stars align--we will also likely set about prepping about 10 acres of ground for what we intend as our main orchard on the west end of the farm where we have an established water right. This will involve significant effort: ripping, ploughing, disking, amending the soil, and probably digging some swales to help eliminate standing water. We'll also have to install about a half mile of 8 foot game fence to keep the orchard out of reach of deer, elk, and all the rest. In the spring of 2026--again, as long as the stars align--we'll be pleased to get irrigation setup and then plant out the 250 or so trees we're grafting this year. Eventually this new "main" orchard will hold about a thousand trees if we're lucky.
It's gratifying to join this ancient procession of trial and error. Every apple enjoyed by a person today came from a tree that only exists because some person cared to graft it, understand where and how that tree would be happy growing, and then took care of it for several years without reward as it grew to bearing age. Necessarily--because apples are only reliably reproduced via grafting--the patient process of growing an apple also has to be reproduced again and again across generations in order to preserve the varietals we know today. You can't plant a Granny Smith or a Braeburn or a Honey Crisp seed. They must be grafted. Because of that longitudinal gauntlet, each resulting apple tree likely represents an untold number of other trees which for one reason or another didn't make it. Moreover, beyond the tree itself, the perfect apples most of us see in the supermarket represent only the top 20% or so of what the source tree or orchard produced. In fact, the large majority of apples grown never make it to market. Instead they wind up discarded, cast off owing to some bump or blemish or bruise that might wrinkle the noses of shoppers.
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