Weekend Wrapup May 8-9

Charlotte and Bea help Julie and Chris cover their garden plot with newspaper and straw.

Spring weekends are never quite long enough–by Monday morning, we’ve begun as many new projects as we’ve completed, and we wish we could keep riding the momentum of two solid days, all of us together, on the farm. Our weekend began with the first flavors of the garden: Saturday breakfast of poached eggs on homemade toast with lightly sautéed asparagus and a drizzle of mustard whisked with olive oil. It was a fortifying meal for a rainy day with a big project at hand–after tending the saplings in buckets packed with wet sawdust for a week, we finally put in the latest additions to the orchard! In addition to our ten (eleven?) established apple trees, we now have two new heirloom apples, three pears, and four high bush blueberries.  In an effort to extend the growing season of the farm, the new apples are winter producers, Frostbite and Black Oxford, and the pears will fruit in succession: Seckel in summer, Bosc in autumn, and Sheldon in winter. The Sheldon is especially exciting because it’s a good keeper, and is said to taste even better after mellowing in the root cellar for a couple of months. We chose heavy producers for the blueberries, to round out our existing patch of wild and high bush plants: Elliot, Bluecrop, and Earliblue.

On Mothers’ Day, we had the treat of picking out a few new plants (Charlotte saved her allowance to buy Margaret a geranium for the front porch), and helping our friends Julie, Chris, and Ada in their garden. Julie and Chris are in the process of looking for land to farm, and one of the most exciting developments at Ten Apple this year is being able to offer them a plot to experiment with in our orchard as they start their farm journey. We all celebrated our hard work with a Sunday supper that included volunteer mustard greens that reseeded themselves from last year and rhubarb cobbler.

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Poached egg with asparagus on toast

Thinned pea shoots make an early treat from the garden.

Our new bosc pear tree soaks up Sunday’s sun after Saturday’s rain.

Our new Frostbite apple tree, wrapped in its protective cage, which we hope will dissuade any deer from taking a nibble.