Wild Apples

"The era of wild apples will soon be over. I wander through old orchards of great extent, now all gone to decay, all of native fruit which for the most part went to the cider-mill. But since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no wild apples, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up among them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man! there are many pleasures which he will be debarred from. "
H.D. Thoreau, Journal Nov. 16, 1850

The era of wild apples is still going strong here in the UP of Michigan. There are by far more wild apples than cultivated in our area. A favorite pastime for us is to sample the apples from the once-cultivated trees as well as the innumerable volunteer apple trees hereabout
Favored fall activities are gathering bushels of the choice hand picked fruit for apple sauce, cider and pies.
Early summer apples, spicy and some bitter like crab apples. Gnarled, twisted, contorted trees producing sweet fruit. Some hard and bitter fruit mellowing and becoming juicy and sweet given frost and aging. A whole world of heritage apples in the woods, hedgerows and lanes of the Upper Peninsula...

The large electric powered apple press
that produces 5 gallons of juice each time it squeezes

Fields of November

The title "Fields Of November" is taken from a Norman Blake song and album of that title. My old FM disc jockey and music aficionado friend Michael Curtis sent me the album on cassette tape when I was living at Anaktuvuk Pass in 1976. Michael could never have realized how much those carefully boxed up tapes meant to me during the long and cold winters there in that high arctic mountain pass, where the sun went down, not to return for months. I would come back from teaching the Nunamiut students, feed my dogs by headlamp light and then go into my little cabin and cook dinner while listening to the tunes from another world.
I remember going for a walk,as Principal of the new school on St. Lawrence Island, looking at the lowland tundra with a wind blown striation of snow crust with Blake's song going around in my head. That tundra landscape would begin to look like a Midwestern landscape, especially if I scrunched up my eyes as I walked. Music can be magic!

Lynn and our eldest son's dog, Dixie in our upper field, out for a walk to try some of the late apples still on trees in the hedge rows and woods. This was a superlative year for apples at our place, in spite of the drought. Apples this year were extra sweet and made cider so sweet that we would dilute it with water.

The vegetable garden on the field near our house has been through many transitions over the years. One of the first garden acts that Lynn tried was the Ruth Stout Method to prepare the spot for a garden. In this method Lynn, with help from the whole family, lay down newspapers over the thick field grass, after first cutting the grass to stubble. Over the newspaper she lay grass and many broken bales of hay and straw. The layers were all wet down and then we took off for Alaska for the winter. When we returned in the spring the garden plot layers were composted down and filled with earth worms. The thick turf was composted down and easily worked and ready to plant without having to spade up the whole area in preparation for planting. I was amazed upon looking at the newspaper and straw mulch in the spring to see how the earth worms, moisture and warm soil had composted down to soil over the winter. I have since learned that the deep snow pack insulates the ground so that it hardly freezes where it is not disturbed so it is actively decomposing through most of the winter.
Having a garden in south central and then the interior of Alaska had made Lynn prefer raised beds for gardening. The raised beds had helped to get the seed beds up off the cold soil for better growing conditions. Lynn has continued down here to prefer raised beds, though permafrost is non-existent. Lynn mulches the walkways between the raised beds to control weeds and heavy mulch around all the plantings keeps down grass and weeds as well as retains moisture.
The deer, hare and other animals made gardening a bit of an extra challenge but the electric fence that we put up this year made it easier to not end up with the garden nibbled down by deer at night. The little solar powered box and battery seemed to keep them out for once!
Muir and his girlfriend Katelyn want to help plant an expansion on the garden so the area of the picture outside the fence is the expansion. It should be all ready by the spring time.

Our wood yard, where a lot of my time is put in during autumn. I am working on next winter's heating wood with a lot of help from Muir. The jumble of wood in the foreground is yellow birch and maple that Muir has taken while out grouse hunting with his friend Kyle. He cuts it off of logging sites, loads it in his truck and brings it home where I wheel barrow and dump it, making a long continuous pile that is then split with wedges, sledge hammer and maul; stacked and covered with long and narrow tarps. As Thoreau said,"Wood warms you twice, once when you cut it and a second time when you burn it." I would say that there is a lot more warming than twice with all the cutting, moving, splitting and stacking.

Fires of November

The fires of November, as viewed in our woodstove here, are often burning too hot for the variable weather conditions or else are smoldering and smoking to add just a bit of heat to the house as the thermometer hovers just above freezing.

The snow sifted down a bit last night as the temperature remains below freezing. The weatherperson claims that the weather will warm and then the snow will melt and autumn will continue...
I hear that up on the Upper Yukon that winter has been holding sway for quite some weeks now. I remember with fondness being out on the snow with dog team by this time every year and safely mushing on the River during Thanksgiving. Somehow the winter that we moved down here in the Keweenaw to is not quite as enjoyable or prolonged enough to suit me.

Heading over to Marquette and up from there to Big Bay for a retreat with Earthkeepers this afternoon. Earthkeepers appears to be morphing into a different organization with the disappearance of one of the real fund gathering organizations from the group.
The northern Shrike has made at least one appearance in the side yard each day. I haven't seen it take a bird or mouse yet in this probably fruitful area of brushy fields and gullies with small streams and mixed woods hunting ground. A large male hairy woodpecker is lording over a female hairy and other downy woodpeckers, trying to keep both suet feeders to himself. This requires him to fly from tree to tree over and over.

In the Nov.5 issue of the New Yorker there is a quite excellent article article by Raffi Khatchadourian entitled "Neptune's Navy", Paul Watson's wild crusade to save the oceans. Paul Watson has been an enigma in the conservation movement with his firebrand mode of operation in trying to save marine mammals from man's predation. Katchadourian answered many of the questions that I have had about Watson and gave me a great deal of background on this highly gifted activist and author.
Sea Shepherd, Watson's organization always rides the far edge of legality on the high seas with their blockade tactics and sometimes out-and-out destroying of opponent's ships violating the International Whaling Commission's moratorium on taking endangered whales. Sea Shepherd's crusade against bottom trawling and man's destruction of the ocean ecosystems is raising awareness though corporate and governmental shills are dead-set against him. Yes, he is a modern day pirate and no he hasn't killed anyone in his crusade. Totally in the tradition of Ed Abbey.

First Lake Effect Snow

A look out from our front door stairs this morning at the blanket of snow. The garden cart had been used to haul cord wood to the rack on the front porch and not put away the day before.

Snowed-in Yellow Mums ...

A horse chestnut tree, still not having lost all of its chlorophyl, caught by the snow. This tree, somewhat uncommon to my knowledge, is on the slope at the back of our house, nestled in among apple, willow and spruce trees. It's nuts are a favorite of squirrels.

Today we awoke late after a night of gusting winds and driving snow. A white world in gray scale background led me out of doors to shovel, take a few pictures and finish burying the new copper propane line. My oldest son Muir had split up a big pile of maple wood that was waiting to be stacked for next year, but it could wait a day more for stacking. Too much to see and do around the house.
The bird feeding station was filled with hungry birds and for the 3rd day a Northern Shrike came around, flying in and scattering the chickadees and nuthatches in panic. I haven't seen the "butcher bird" make a kill, though I did see him face down and cause a blue jay to leave his perch. The shrike was an especially austere sight today with the snow as background.

"It was Better Then"

I was paging through the October Smithsonian Magazine and came upon a black and white snapshot and accompanying essay, "Salad Days" by Gore Vidal. The photo was by Karl Bissinger, taken in 1949 in a Manhattan cafe garden of five up-and-coming young artists: a ballerina, two novelists, a painter and a playwright. Besides giving background on each of the five, Vidal explicates photographer Bissinger's genius at depicting America's cultural arts rise when we weren't at war for a few years after WWII. The urban literati as photographed in 1949 "perfectly evokes an optimistic time in our history that we are not apt to see again soon."

It seems as though each generation has a time of young optimism that, when they look back at that time and tell the next generation "My generation's time was golden, times will never shine quite as brightly again."

Soon after I finished college and moved to Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska to teach, I was hosting in my little rental log cabin, a crafts buyer from Anchorage. He who was in the village to purchase the handcrafted Anaktuvuk masks to take back to Anchorage to sell. The middle aged man was talking about Alaska, pre-statehood and was lamenting that those wilder frontier-like days were gone for good. As he talked on I had the thought, which I kept to myself, that he was actually grieving the loss of his youth more than the disappearance of the frontier. For me, the Great Land of Alaska was wilderness frontier. In my youth it was all new to me and I was just starting to make my way in creating a life and identity there. Though I listened to this craft buyer and learned a bit about life from a generation before me, I didn't grieve over what was lost from before.
Now, as I look at the future I see an increasingly dismal picture: a middle class that is diminished, a planet that is growing increasingly polluted and crowded, and changes that are bleak. Life looked better to me in the past. Then I look at my children and many other young people who are starting out in young adulthood, I see that spark of fire in their eye and optimistic energy that recalls that time when I was young and only looking forward to life's challenges; and not having any of an older Alaskan generation's swan-song about "the (better) good 'ol days."

Fall Flowers

I was a bit disappointed by the washed out colors of these flowers, which may be from using a flash...


Pink Turtle Head

Winter Hardy Yellow Mums

Maroon Winter Hardy Mums with Wormwood to the right and leaves of High Bush Cranberry in upper left

Busy Weekend

I have been busy splitting up maple and apple wood for next winter's heating wood. On Saturday I helped prep lunch for the retreat that Lynn was at. Randy Little told me about the pellet stove that he bought and had installed in his house. He says that he is well satisfied with it and plans to save a lot of money on his heating bill. It sounds like a trouble-free way to go. I would wait for a pellet furnace to be developed with an extra big hopper and the blower power to hook it up to the existing duct work in our house.
My back is sore tonight. I bucked up some downed apple trees on a side slope. The wood is nice and maroon colored, dense and will be prime for heating next year.
I must get some pictures of some of the flowers that Lynn has still blooming in her flower gardens around the house and post them here.
A little snow on Friday; just a trace.