Orchard & Fields
I love old abandoned orchards. I don’t think there exists a better blend of beauty and utility. Unsprayed and unkempt, abandoned orchards throng with life—flowers for bees, nooks for spiders, rotting wood for woodpeckers, woodpecker holes for bluebirds, leaves for caterpillars, caterpillars for songbirds, fruit for all and sundry, each tree its own ecosystem, each orchard its own world.
Our orchard is neither old nor abandoned, but it is still pretty wonderful. The thirty-two trees are as much for the bees and the birds as for us, but there are plums, sour cherries, apples, pears and one little quince that should keep us well fruited for decades to come. Most of the trees were planted as bare-root whips back in 2020 and are just now starting to fruit. What we can’t eat or preserve we’ll press, cellar, and bottle in spring, or leave for the birds, raccoons, skunks, foxes, coyotes, deer and bears.
When we moved here this field was covered with Eurasian weeds and pasture grasses— hawkweed, ox-eye daisy, red clover, bedstraw, orchard grass, timothy, smooth brome. Most of these plants were relatively benign, but the smooth brome was voracious and taking over. In the middle of the orchard we solarized the smooth brome with half an acre of black plastic. We then seeded with a different mix of native wildflowers than in the sugar garden, using lots of showy goldenrod and gray-headed coneflower. In peak foliage season, backed by bright orange sugar maples, it’s a riot of color, with many thousands of bees tucking in. My favorite time in the orchard, though, is in early summer, when it sparkles with fireflies.
In late October the fields are brush-hogged, and it’s always a shock to see everything so shorn and bare, the orchard trees looking like they forgot to put their pants on. But snow soon falls and covers everything up.
The Back Field
South of the house, on the far side of the Sugar Garden, is an isolated acre of meadow. Here we play fetch with the dog, and here we come on summer evenings to watch the sun set behind the pines.
