Apples, Peaches, ‘n’ Pomegranates!
On the dry side of sustenance
“I believe I could have as easily become an orchardist as a writer. I simply found a different shape to the passion I felt as a child, watching things grow and wanting to participate in the harvest.” (Barry Lopez, from the essay “A Scary Abundance of Water” in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World [2022]
While still a child, with my family I began following the fruit harvest. I learned to love the harvest bounty, and as a child does, I observed more than I could then fathom of the ways of trees, and of humans. We picked cherries in California; cherries, peaches, pears, and apples in Oregon and Washington; oranges, tangerines, lemons and grapefruit in Arizona. Before that phase of growing up began, my mother canned peaches from Colorado’s Grand Valley that had come across the mountain passes to our Eastern Slope Colorado foothills town, where mid-summer freeze-ups and early blizzards made fruit growing impractical. She talked of family trips to the orchards as child, and of the trees hanging low with the year’s crop, none of us then suspecting our futures, the change in life plans and livelihood.
Now, in this year many decades beyond my childhood discoveries, our backyard apple crop weighs in at 350 lbs., with plenty more for our town’s resident deer, birds, and insects, and enough remaining for our ample sampling. About a year and a half ago, we (myself, my spouse, and our faithful canine pal) adopted 4 apple trees and 2 apricot trees, a hedgerow of prune plums and a hefty mortgage, when we moved into a 1937-built house on the edge of a small town that sits along a minor river fed by Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. It’s a homecoming for us all, as we’ve each already spent a sizable chunk of of our lives hereabouts, while also maintaining another dryland home/hideout, a 10 acre, rough-cut desert oasis that we’ll touch on later in the post.
First though, the apples above, and how they came to be in our old cast iron pot, about to be made into apple butter. The trees are very old, possibly matching the age of the house, and when we got here one apricot was already a goner, with the others looking ready to join it in death. Dead branches outnumbered live ones, and each carried too few leaves. A previous owner had shut off the property’s well, and connected to metered town water drawn from a reservoir upstream. We’re 20+ years into drought on this plateau, with too-little snow most years, and too-seldom rain when storms pass over. Some locals still hold out hope for old times to come again, though more and more these days, the term ‘aridification’ seems to fit. Meanwhile here we are, life forms calling this place our home. Mindful of the town’s drought-driven watering limits, we stretched low-volume soaker hoses under the trees’ drip-lines, guttered the house’s eaves to deliver storm run-off to the trees, and got the survivors through to winter. Our surviving apricot tree grew a few more leaves, and much tiny fruit that we shared with some squirrels and a magpie family, freezing some apricot mash from what was left, and we dehydrated some of the plums. The apples were crop-free, a gift disguised as a late freeze, so extra water could be turned to root regrowth and bud spur development.
Humans first learned to cultivate apples in the mountain valleys of Central Asia, where a red-fleshed wild apple variety (Malus sieversii) has been identified as the primary ancestor of domestic apples worldwide. Cultivars were likely originally exported via China’s Silk Road, with humans steering the apple’s natural genetic variability from parent to offspring into the multitude of domesticated apple varieties now common. Some M. sieversii went east into China, where a still-cultivated, soft-fleshed dessert apple hybrid is thought to be a direct heir. Other seeds and scions from the ancestral apple gene pool migrated west along various trading routes, picking up crabapple strains in Siberia, the Caucasus, and Europe, acquiring a symbolism of sin in some religious traditions. Eventually, some crossed the Atlantic Ocean to colonize North and South America.
By the late 1800s, orchardists were growing apples, apricots, plums and other fruits along the rivers of SW Colorado and NW New Mexico, with the fruit being shipped north to the mining camps, and toward the coasts by rail. As houses spread, so did front and back yard fruit and vegetable gardens, so that by the early 1900s our local town, its new streets laid out through recent pasture and field, must have been a pollinators’ delight in the spring, a browser’s mecca through the summer and autumn. In a good year, that is. For as long humans have lived hereabouts, this high elevation plateau (ranging 6,000 to 7,000+ feet above sea level) has been subject to late frosts, dry winters, midsummer snows, occasional floods and fires, heat and drought. Variations of hazard are the bane of all farmers and orchardists. The flip side of writer Barry Lopez’s vivid description of a child’s fascination with watching things grow, the desire to join in the harvest, his vision of bounty I also felt in the orchards of my youth, is forever subject to the seeming whimsy of changing weather, health, and social customs. It’s a conundrum none of the myriad civilizations who’ve cultivated orchards and fields, and many times have had to abandon them to ruin, have been able to solve.
The current dry times have hit our little desert oasis hard too, with the combination of an expanding metro-megalopolis lapping up the aquifer underneath, and a year without rain almost defeating our local community well’s depth, the mountain runoff unable to replace the combined withdrawals of the desert’s human denizens, with our agriculture, amenities, lawns, gardens, golf courses, orchards, mining, and water extraction/storage/trading schemes. Our desert hideout hosts an ephemeral wash that drains a mountainside, a mesquite-dominated forest, and an upper Sonoran Desert panoply of mammals, birds, rodents, and reptiles. It’s a travel corridor from one mountain range to another, and occasionally from one nation to the next. A corner of it is populated by volunteer peach, apple and pomegranate trees, most having grown from random, composted seeds into a food forest that hosts year round bird and pollinator insect colonies, plus our 400 sq. ft. dwelling built around a 1950s-era mobile home that came with the property. The plants of the forest have suffered through this drought, as have all the other resident living colonies - but summer monsoon rains brought some relief last year, followed by a less-dry winter, and this past summer thunderous hints of old times called from the monsoon clouds, again bringing bounty to the survivors, who greet these gifts, seek shelter from the brunt of the storm, and prepare to bring in the harvest.
This year we press nectar from our apples, peaches, pomegranates. We gift fresh fruit to friends and neighbors, make fruit butters, and dehydrate many jars of fruit. Then, having once more used the old ways to store it for whatever the future brings, we put our abundance aside, as dryland denizens have always done.
Next up, Snowpack to Transpiration, on a Physics of Place. Until then, take care of yourself, and help some others out if you can. - B.
To learn more on the migrations of early apples, check this report: Silk Road Apples, [Luby, et al]