Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (24 page)

I
F AN ORCHARD, TECHNICALLY
, was as few as five trees, we now had an orchard four times over. There were twenty trees, most of them planted in a wide semicircle around the back meadow. There were apples, pears, Asian pears, a peach, a fig, three plums, and four cherries. My mother was a great believer in cherries.

When compared with vegetable gardening, orcharding is a sedate and relaxed pastime. There is minimal weeding or watering needed. For most of the year, the trees do their thing—and reward you with a harvest each fall. It is a satisfying effort-to-yield ratio. Tending an orchard, at least a small orchard, is almost leisurely.

This is not to say that there is no work. It's just that you could go out of town for a week or two at a time—even in summer—and your orchard would probably be fine. Growing fruit trees is like being an aunt or uncle—you need to show up for important events and give love, but you're not the parent; you don't have to be there every day.

I don't remember us doing anything to the fruit trees of my childhood. The apple trees my brother and I climbed were old and established, and the trees we planted either flourished or faltered. All we did was despair over the peach leaf curl, eat all the pears, and wrap the cherry in black netting in the hopes of foiling the birds (it never worked). In Washington, however, we soon learned that growing fruit requires a bit more effort.

In this state known for apples, there was something called an apple codling moth. These are the “worms” shown poking out of shiny red apples in children's books. Not worms at all—they are the larval state of a gray-colored moth that lays eggs in apple and pear trees. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the fruit for energy. Eventually they cocoon and emerge as a moth, but by then your apples are ruined.

Codling moths weren't the worst of the bunch—wormholes can be cut out if you're not too fussy. Worse were the apple maggot flies, whose larvae left the fruit laced with tiny, threadlike trails of brown. The apples might look rosy and ripe on the tree, but cut one open and disappointment waits within. The apple is useless—destined to soften and rot quickly.

“What are we supposed to do about it?” I asked my mother when we were both in the back meadow by the apple trees. She had been researching apple tree problems.

“You have to put little socks over each of the apples and pears.”

“You're kidding, right? We're going to put
socks
on the trees? That's ridiculous.”

“That's what you're supposed to do. They're made out of this nylon stuff—like panty hose.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yup—one sock on each apple.”

I remembered trees I had seen in Japan, where farmers carefully wrapped each fruit in a white paper bag. From a distance it looked like the trees were covered with large white flowers. It seemed insanely time-consuming, but I knew the Japanese desire
for perfection—and how much they were willing to pay for it. Their orchards also ran small. Such attention to detail would be possible only on a limited scale.

“You're telling me those huge orchards in eastern Washington put a panty hose sock on each and every apple they grow?”

“Of course not,” my mom said. “They probably use chemical sprays, but we're not going to do that.”

An orchard might not be as hands-on as a vegetable garden, but it was not without its labor. Apparently socks were involved.

Ours was not the only orchard with old apple trees in Seattle. Also in the northern part of the city lay Piper's Orchard, whose history stretched much further back than ours. Planted by a German immigrant family that had run a bakery and confectionary before the turn of the century, Piper's Orchard had actually been lost for years.

When the Piper family's bakery burned down in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, they moved north, to what was then the outskirts of the city, a wild and undeveloped place. They lived in old logging cabins and used a cookhouse built over a creek that ran down through the canyons. Butter and milk were suspended through a hole in the floor into the cold water of Piper's Creek to be kept chilled.

It was Mrs. Piper—Wilhelmina or “Minna”—who planted the orchard. There were more than thirty apple trees, in addition to a few pears and cherries. Her husband baked the fruit into his confections. The family also sold produce from the garden and water lilies they grew in a large pond. They had eleven children: One was close friends with the daughter of Chief Seattle; another started a sporting goods store later purchased by a man named Eddie Bauer.

The Pipers' land was sold in the 1920s, purchased by the Carkeek family, and given to the city as a park. It was a wild place—densely wooded canyons and steep slopes. On the sunny hillside that Minna Piper had tended, blackberry vines and ivy
quickly overcame the trees, and her orchard lay lost and forgotten for more than fifty years.

The orchard was rediscovered in 1981, by a landscape architect hired by the city to create a master plan for restoring the wilderness park. It took more than two years of work by weekend volunteers to cut back the dense thicket that had grown over the orchard. When asked why they would go to such effort, one of the volunteers replied, “This is living history.”

By the time I arrived in Seattle, the orchard of vintage trees was fully restored and tended by a volunteer group called Friends of Piper's Orchard. They planned work parties and a harvest festival in the fall that included cider pressing, pies, and apple tasting, and in the early summer, they put socks on the fruit to protect against the apple maggot and the codling moth. One day in May, I left the garden to join them in the orchard.

Piper's Orchard is not car accessible. To reach it you must leave your car at one of two trailheads and walk into the park on a wide dirt path that winds along Piper's Creek. Sunlight filters down through tall trees and makes dappled patterns on the mossy rocks and ferns by the creek. The hum of the city falls away. Suddenly, the woods open up to reveal a sunny hillside planted with gnarled old apple trees. The day I went to the orchard, there were two men, both perched on orchard ladders, wrapping each apple in a beige nylon sock. Apparently my mother had been right.

One of the men came down the high ladder and introduced himself as Don Ricks, a steward of the orchard. He set me up with a bag of nylon socks—called footies—and showed me a few shorter trees I could work on without need of a ladder. Orchard ladders have steps on one side, but the other side balances on a single pole. This allows for closer access to the trees but is less stable than traditional ladders; they take some getting used to.

Don and the other man were both professional arborists. This was their weekend volunteer gig. As I stood in the May sunshine, reaching up to wrap each infant apple in its own cocoon,
I heard them bantering back and forth, talking shop, telling stories of pruning adventures and challenges.

I was thinking of Minna Piper, who had grafted these trees. Fruit trees do not grow true—if you plant the seed of your Red Delicious apple, you will not grow a Red Delicious. What you grow will be a surprise, a mix of the parent tree and some other variety—the pollen of which has been carried along to your tree. In dog terms, you'll get a mutt. Occasionally you'll get an interesting mix, but often the resulting apples will be inedible.

To grow a Red Delicious, a bud or branch from a Red Delicious tree must be grafted onto the roots of another. It's not unlike those children's books that match the bottom half of one creature to the top half of another. If you've done it right, the Red Delicious bud will grow and bear fruit.

I had learned to graft in permaculture class, fascinated by fusing together the cambium growth layers of two trees, a process that felt a little like concocting my own Frankenstein's monster. That summer, when I was on the island, I had noticed chokecherry trees scattered around my mother's cabin. Could I graft real cherries onto them? Could I seed the woods with edible fruit?

“Think of the possibility for cities,” my permaculture teacher Jenny had said. “All those blooming plum trees planted along streets could be grafted into edible plums. Think of how much food we could produce.”

Like most homesteaders, Minna Piper had grafted a variety of apples—orchards filled with one variety are modern industrial developments. Homesteaders chose a selection of apples that would come ripe at different times—some good for storage, some for cider, some for eating. Piper's Orchard featured a rare German variety called Bietigheimer, as well as the Albemarle Pippin, known to be a favorite apple of Thomas Jefferson.

When we stopped for a break, Don Ricks told me about the old trees in the area—the oldest apple tree in the state at Fort Vancouver, the pear tree in Edmonds thought to be more than a
hundred years old. When I asked him why he was so interested in vintage trees, he rubbed his head, a sheepish half smile on his face. “As I get older myself, I care more about the older trees,” he said. “If you take care of them, there can be a lot of productivity in them still.”

I left that day with the business cards of both men. We needed to find someone to prune our trees, and anyone passionate enough to spend their free time doing the same work they did all week, dedicated to preserving and protecting older trees, seemed a good candidate to me.

The first year we didn't prune the trees. There was just so much to do—we planted nearly a dozen more fruit trees, hacked back the blackberries, set up the side garden, and established vegetable beds. Then my mother left for the summer, and I spent the entire season trying to keep up with the growth of a productive garden: the watering, the weeds, the produce.

A farmer I once interviewed said summer was like a train pulling out of the station, and he was the passenger running to jump on board. But the train just got faster and faster, and all he could do was keep running all summer long. Sometimes the train slowed down and he almost caught it—he almost got on top of all the work—but then it sped up again. The entire season he was sprinting, just trying to keep up.

At the end of my first summer in the garden, I knew exactly what he meant. When my mother came back from Canada, I couldn't wait to leave. I was tired of weeding and watering and trying to catch up to the train that was summer. I was sick of the garden. I hightailed it to San Francisco and stayed for nearly a month.

My mother called a few times while I was gone. Perhaps I should have picked up on the low-grade panic in her voice, but I didn't. I was busy packing up my San Francisco apartment, saying good-bye to a city I loved, panicked that I might have made
the wrong decision in choosing Seattle. Garden problems were the least of my worries.

“Can I use your dehydrator?” my mom asked on the phone one day.

“Sure, it's in the garage. The instruction booklet is inside.”

“Oh, good, I want to make apple chips.”

“That's easy. Just make sure to cut them thin enough, or else they take forever to dry.”

“Okay, I will. We have
so many apples
.”

I should have noticed—my mom doing anything with food, her tone when she said
“so many apples.”
But I didn't. I often bought a case or two of apples in the fall, when prices were low and you got an extra discount for buying the box. Apple chips were easy; even my mom could manage that.

It wasn't until I came back to Seattle and found myself in my mother's kitchen that I really understood. That day I opened one of the large cupboards, and the entire thing was filled with jars of apple chips in a crazy variety of sizes. It looked like my mother had become a survivalist who stocks food in preparation for the doomsday. A very odd survivalist who planned to survive on dried fruit alone. That's when I realized: an apple tree, an orchard, can provide a lot of fruit.

We were not the only ones dealing with the generosity of an autumn fruit harvest. My friends Melinda and Brian had bought a house in the northern part of the city on a steep hill with a view of snowcapped mountains. There was a yard they were beginning to landscape, which ran long and ended at a large pear tree.

Melinda told me their first autumn in the house they had been overwhelmed with pears. These days most people are not versed in the ways of food preservation. Melinda and Brian worked full-time and could not keep up with the fruit. The pears quickly began to rot and draw flies. “We ended up digging a huge hole, piling them in there, and
burying
them,” she said. “We just didn't know what to do with them all.”

Seattle was dotted with fruit trees, many of which went untended and unharvested. In fall it was not uncommon to see apple trees in the grass parking strips between street and sidewalk surrounded by fallen and rotting fruit. This was the sight that spurred Gail Savina to start a nonprofit in Seattle called City Fruit. If you had a fruit tree you couldn't keep up with, you could call and offer your harvest. City Fruit's volunteer pickers would come and pick your fruit, which was then donated to local food banks, shelters, or senior centers. It was an elegant solution designed for people in the same situation as Melinda and Brian.

My friend Knox had run the fruit-harvesting program in his neighborhood. My second summer in Seattle, when I had only a P-Patch garden to look after, I occasionally spent an afternoon perched on a ladder, picking plums with Knox. The fruit smelled musty and sweet in the sun, like brown sugar, and when we dropped the crates off at the food bank and I saw people lining up to the end of the block for packages of white bread, day-old pastries, and canned food, I felt glad we had saved this food from rotting on the ground. In a city where fruit sometimes went ignored and unharvested, people were still going hungry.

“I hired someone to prune the fruit trees,” my mother announced one day when I was working in the garden.