One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

Pruning the apple trees is good for spurring more fruit production, they say. You cut back the branches leaving a sparser, leaner tree that lets in light and allows fewer diseases. So far I only have about ten trees that are big enough to require major cutting. I let trees under about three years just grow the way they want to. It's one of the seasonal farm chores that lets me feel like I am having a hand in the natural world's healing while I attempt to provide healthy food for my family. Meanwhile it's kind of ironic that the girls have both had gastroenteritis the last couple of days and are laid up sick and Michael looks like he's coming down with it this evening. So the mid-winter pruning is about manipulating nature to ensure health, and at the same time nature is manipulating right back at us. One step forward and two steps back, isn't that life? Lately it seems to me that the whole of civilization, if not evolution itself, is like a dance on the edge of a precipice and we never know when the stage will collapse below us. Meanwhile we keep our shoulder to the wheel, most of us struggling to avoid calamity from day to day and a few of us shooting to the top and flaming out with an extravagant, self-destructive arc like Whitney Houston - God bless her wherever she is tonight! All part of the same whirling, delusional ballet.

I just read an article by Robert Kagan in the Wall Street Journal, Why the World Needs America. His premise is that preparing and accomodating for a post American world order is a foolish thing to do and that instead we should be aiming to maintain our military predominance in order to ensure the global democratic order. In a way it is like pruning the apple trees. We just can't abandon the orchard and expect the trees to keep producing good fruit. I know it's a vision of benign interventionism that both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama seem to be listening to, but to me it's all about keeping the soil healthy. If we don't improve our educational outcomes and jobs infrastructure, then we are going to have a top-heavy, over-extended military presence that will eventually topple like a dead tree.

Hope Mountain Farm Bulletin

We got about six inches of snow, but not much here now. We've had some mild weather the last few days. There's a few inches of snow left on the ground, and Susan insists it's good for skiing, but I'm waiting for another big snowfall to go out again. We put out taps and buckets to collect some maple syrup this week, just three taps, not too much, from the maple trees in the front yard. It's running like crazy, though. We have about ten gallons of it bottled. Mostly we put a pot of it on the wood stove and drink it as a mildly sweetened tea. The yearling apple trees have not been hit by any deer, not yet anyway. I'm thinking of grafting some shoots from the old tree in the front yard, and so I ordered root stock, Antonovka, from the Fedco Tree catalog online. They are an amazing company, one of the strengths of any resurgent local food movement here in the Northeast. Our old tree is so rotten I don't know if it'll last more than another season, but it still produces hundreds of incredibly tasty apples. Have no idea what variety, probably some heirloom. Bring on more winter. Usually, I'm cutting from the wood lot this time of year to make up for depleted reserves, but not this year. Plenty left.