More change afoot!

It's almost unreasonable, the amount of change that goes on around here. First of all, Mother Nature just keeps on truckin', as evidenced by this:Those little applets are bigger than kumquats!

Other exciting change: Gunk Haus (the awesome restaurant and beer garden just up the hill from the orchard), is going to open this weekend! Woohoo! (You have no idea how exciting this is. Seriously. These guys rock.)

There are other changes afoot, but none of them are as concrete. So I'll leave you with those for now.

Before and During

Everyone loves Before and After pictures. Everyone loves the big reveal. I'm one of those people. I love those moments! This? is not one of those moments. And I'm pretty sure I ought to get used to more of these. Welcome to an era of Before and During. The photo above is a project that isn't especially long term: I'm just sanding and sealing the picnic tables I bought last year for you all to enjoy while harvesting your apples. But it's not something I can finish in a day, and, given my week, it probably won't be done this week. But that doesn't mean I can't tell you what I'm up to. It just isn't an especially satisfying moment. So there it is - your first Before and During photo. We all better get used to it, because Little Dog is a work in progress. And it's going to take us years to get where we're headed...

Incredibly cute (and yet, no picture), plus a bit on thinning

It probably goes without saying that I am besotted by our mascot (a.k.a. The Hudson Valley's Handsomest Hound), but I just had to tell you that he is especially cute when he is enjoying fresh asparagus. It's hard to capture with a camera because I'm greedy enough that I never give him a whole stalk. He gets the bottom ends only and he chews them waaaaay back with his hind teeth. I have no idea why it's so cute. I'll have to figure out if I can take a video. I have to be able to post video when the apples are ripe, because another endearing thing Weasley does is fetch apples. He won't fetch anything else, though. And I swear we didn't train him to do that!

Okay, apologies for gushing over my dog. I got a little distracted by the tractor and sprayer out my window. I would imagine they're putting another (?) thinning agent on. I'll talk more about thinning in the next few days. This year, we're going to get into it MUCH earlier than we did last year. (I hope!) The fruit set this season is amazing (go bees!), and we hardly got hit by frost, which means there are entirely too many little fruitlets out there on the trees. The conventional response to too much fruit is to spray any number of chemicals that kills off the weaker buds. Obviously, here at Little Dog, we don't roll like that. So I'll be reaching out to my neighbor to hire hands to snap off hundreds (possibly thousands) of buds per tree.

The crazy thing is, thinning ends up meaning more fruit in the long run. I'm going to try to take or find good pictures so I can illustrate this stuff for you a bit better. Pictures are good, right?

Eeeeeeeeeeeeevil.

It constantly surprises me how much of farming is killing things. I spent hours yesterday pulling the pretty princess pictured above out of all manner of unfortunate places. She loves to snuggle up with anyone, and seems to have no standards. Left alone, she'll take over, insinuating herself into every crack and crevice, insuring that no one else can get close. I hate that bitch.

For those of you who, like me until recently, don't know who that is, that's poison ivy. And yes, The Coasters were singing in my head ALL DAY.

I had to pull the ivy out before I could start reclaiming a chunk of land that Mother Nature has been trying to take back for years. I can't go in with a weed whacker (or "string trimmer" for you professionals) until the ivy is cleared. Whacking is will only lead to more ivy. More ivy is bad.

So I pulled out a garbage bag full of the stuff. I dressed up in the functional equivalent of a haz-mat suit so she couldn't inflame my soul (or skin). It took a good couple of hours, as you have to get as much of the root as possible, otherwise you're wasting your time. She's impressively persistent.

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Apples, Kazakhstan, biodiversity and you!

My cousin Kim is going to love this: One of the people working on the Little Dog permaculture plan has visited the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan. If that sounds vaguely familiar and you can’t remember why, you’ve probably read Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire. In the first chapter, Pollan tells part of the history of the apple and learns that the birthplace of the modern apple is most likely Kazakhstan. The apple forests there exhibit the surprising genetic diversity. The forest is healthy, balanced, natural, and tends to remain fairly unbothered by pests and disease. Sounds brilliant, eh? We should get some of that action here, you say? Indeed. Biodiversity is going to be the key to Little Dog’s future. We’re on the path to planting all kinds of interesting stuff in the orchard: berries, hops, nuts (the Northern Pecan! Woo!), pungent greens. All of those things are going to make the orchard a healthier, happier place to be. We’re going to build a system that supports itself. It’s going to take a big chunk of time and money, but it’s going to happen and you, dear reader, are going to be a part of it.

Speaking of taking part, let's all brainstorm names that might trip off the tongue in a more pleasant way than "permaculture", shall we? Or perhaps I just need to practice...