There is little that can rival the spring beauty of an apple orchard. It is nature’s crowning glory. All winter long the trees have appeared brown and skeletal. But as hard-bitten February yields to a gentler March, the first faint sounds of nature’s wakeup call can be heard. Deep in trunks and branches life begins to stir. Drinking in the warmth and sunshine, tiny buds start to grow and swell until one joyous day in April they burst from their casings.
The blossoms of each variety, like the fruit, have their own shape and hue. Most onlookers, however, see only a fragrant panoply of pink and white. A little-known fact: the order that blossoms appear bears no relationship to the order in which the fruit matures.
The blossoms do not linger long and the dandelions are even shorter-lived as the Bush Hog ruthlessly beheads them to keep the bees focused on the task at hand. The hives have been transported from their winter home in the south and strategically placed in the orchards. Then Mother Nature is entreated to provide a few warm days with lots of sun, not much wind, and no rain whatsoever.
After the blossoms have been pollinated, they drop off and in a few weeks tiny apples start to appear. The farm becomes a maternity ward with multi-ethnic offspring of green, yellow and red. An atmosphere of anticipation heightens daily and the heavily-laden mothers command our respect. This is the trees’ finest hour.
Early varieties of Ginger Gold, Paula Red and Jersey Mac will ripen in August. Gala, Earlybright, Cortland, Jonathan, Red Delicious, Jonamac, Empire, McIntosh, Honeycrisp, Northern Spy, Golden Delicious, Rhode Island Greening, Lodi, Jonagold, Liberty, Spigold, Macoun, Fortune, Acey Mac, 20 Ounce, Monroe, Royal Empire, Idared, Braeburn, Crispin, Granny Smith, Tydeman, Fuji, Red Rome, and Russet will follow in a continuum beginning around Labor Day and concluding in late October.
The crew arrived in mid-August and repaired bins; now they swarm into the orchards. Agile pickers, buckets slung over their shoulders, scamper up and down ladders, tractors bustle between the rows, and large trucks groan under the weight of several tons of fruit.
The drivers often start out with their first load to the storage or processor between 3 and 4 a.m. After double-checking the straps securing the bins on the truck, a driver calls to his partner. He gently lifts the black Lab onto the passenger seat and they’re on their way. When he enters the scale house the attendant hands the driver his weigh slip and a dog biscuit.
Out-of-state haulers pull in during the night, maneuver into the loading area and, once positioned, go to sleep until they can be loaded. A forklift driver is on the scene at first light. He raises each 800-pound bin of apples, positions it over the truck, and sets it in place as delicately as a butterfly.
Like his employers, the crew boss now wears bifocals and his jet-black hair is frosted with silver. Overseeing men in several locations, he ferries pickers and equipment from one block to another, usually at alarming speeds. He barks instructions in Spanish to his crew, switching effortlessly to English when he confers with the orchard manager. After everyone else has quit for the day, he often can be seen scouting out the next day’s sites and calculating his manpower needs. Coach, chauffeur, arbiter and drill sergeant, he is the omnipresent eyes and ears of the operation.
A sign of progress: commercial Porta-Potties replace the venerable Orchard Outhouse.
The atmosphere is one of great good humor and the orchards resound with music. Car radios, tuned to a Spanish-speaking station, are cranked up to full volume, boom boxes perch on hoods, and the men whistle, sing, and call out to each other. One brilliant October day a new composition makes its debut.
Apple trees are small to begin with and dwarf trees start bearing so early that when new ones are planted they are braced with poles. The poles, about 10 feet tall, are made of metal or bamboo and are open-ended. On a morning when the clouds played tag and the air was as crisp as a just-picked McIntosh, a strange melody floated in on the breeze. Not a whistle, not a voice, flute-like in its purity, it sang a haunting tale from another world. Amplified by those hollow poles, the music rose and fell on thermal currents, an arboreal chorus performing an ethereal cantata. It was a magical experience and that date became The Day The Trees Sang.
If Mother Nature is kind the harvest will be completed by November 1. By then the workers are tired and autumn’s golden days have departed with the Canada geese. Frozen apples cannot be picked until they have thawed because they will bruise. When they are merely covered with snow, fingers soon become numb. One of the pickers holds out his arms and observes ruefully, “My hahns, they frizz!”
After the last apple is picked and those under the tree picked up, the workers head south to home and family. The crew boss will stay around for a couple days to retrieve the ladders and picking buckets, jackets and coolers left behind, then he, too, is gone. For months the scene of intense activity, the orchards now are still and silent. A lone overlooked apple appears briefly behind its sheltering leaves, and the remembered shouts of the men fill the air, then are borne away on the scudding clouds. The tree-mothers allow their shoulders to droop and breathe a long sigh of relief. Their work is finished.
Cleaned and oiled, the spray rigs and mowers rest in complacent silence in the sheds. The storage barn is full of apples waiting to go to the processor and exhaust fans disperse their rich, winey aroma. Over back by the woods, the once-scolding crows take silent flight and the squirrel that always spat an alarm no longer bothers. Year ‘round workers cut down an old orchard. The trunks are chopped up for firewood, the branches burned. Soon a pile of ashes is all that remains.
But then a block of new trees appears. Hundreds of spindly sticks, each the same distance from its neighbor and each securely bound to its tall protector, stand at attention in topographically exact rows. Next spring, even though they are only a few months old, they will sprout tiny leaves.
One July years ago, Mathew, then three years old, watched his father drive “the tractor with the house on it” down the lane and prepare for an evening of spraying. In solemn and assured tones, Mathew announced that “those aphids are after our apples and my dad’s gonna get ‘em!”
Nearly three decades later, Mathew’s dad is still getting the aphids. The bees performed heroically and the heavens provided just the right amount of rain. Hail cut its murderous swath elsewhere. The maternity ward was filled to bursting. The crew boss and his men carefully plucked thousands of bushels of carefully-nurtured fruit and delivered it gently into the bins. Now winter will bring rest to trees and humans alike.
Growers replace the forklift with the snowplow and turn their attention to the year-end reports, teaching first-graders how to dribble a basketball, spending a few weeks in Florida, the winter pruning, trade shows, and planning for the next season.
The harvest is over. The covenant was kept.
N.B. New York is the second-largest apple producing state in the United States. Wayne County leads the state in apple production, and has the greatest concentration of apple trees on the planet |
