Hoch Apples and Featherstone, a history…
Greetings CSA Members!
This week’s CSA boxes include apples for the first time since maybe 2011. There is such a long backstory on CSA apples, on our relationship with Jackie and Harry Hoch, and about FF’s broader history of trial and error (especially the error part!), I could write a short book on it all. Maybe I will, some day!! Meanwhile, I will offer you the following condensed version:
It was the early days of Featherstone Farm, we were so ambitious about changing the food system (read: wildly unrealistic!!), that we aspired to plant and manage vineyards and orchards and perennial crops of all kinds, right from the get go (hence the original name Featherstone Fruits and Vegetables). Our good friends at Full Belly Farm in CA did this; why couldn’t we follow the same model?
When family friend and orchard manager extraordinaire Rhys Williams became a full partner at Featherstone Farm in 1999, the big talk about apples was put on steroids.
Ha! Did we learn a lesson in humility, and fast!
To make a very long story short, the difference between growing apples and zucchinis is greater than, well, the difference between apples and oranges!! As well adapted as apples are to our particular corner of SE Minnesota, they are still a very risky, long term and expensive investment to plant. And as Harry and Jackie discovered early on, the planting is the easy part…!
We experimented and researched and planned an orchard right up through the early 2000s. And we planted a half acre of table grapes at our old site, and many hundreds of row feet of raspberries when we moved to the new one. But in the end, had to settle with a much less ambitious farm plan; annual vegetables, with side projects in strawberries and asparagus. The management effort and knowledge base that would have been required for our original, super ambitious plan… well, I should have noted at the time that Full Belly Farm was run by FOUR full time partners!
One of the people who helped us understand this challenge best at the time was Harry Hoch. There is a long history of smart, industrious and successful orchardists along the Mississippi bluffs near LaCrescent (the “Apple Capital of Minnesota”). But I would be hard pressed to think of anyone as comprehensively wise and industrious as Jackie and Harry. Certainly, nobody in this region has been more committed to the organic system as we know and love it ourselves. Suffice it to say that, from the moment we met these two in 2000, Rhys and I were in awe of nearly everything that Jackie and Harry were doing at Hoch Orchard (I still am decades later!).
Fast forward half a lifetime and Rhys has moved on, my eyesight is declining and Harry’s back is bad. But we have all found a way to keep on carrying on. And we are back to collaborating on apples, as we perhaps should have years ago. One suggestion of why it’s been so long: the last time we tried this, it cost us 95% of our storage carrot crop. No joke!
Here’s the backstory on this one: Like all fruits, apples produce ethylene gas as they ripen, even in storage (especially in storage, where by nature they experience less ventilation). Ethylene in itself is harmless, and actually helps many fruits develop full flavor (ethylene is what is pumped into containers of bananas or avocados that arrive in US ports green as grass from the global south). But ethylene exposure can denature other vegetable crops, including carrots. Especially carrots!
To make a long story short once again, in about 2011 or 2012 we became aware of a classic, century-old orchard about 20 miles south of us in Rushford, that had been abandoned for decades. Starry eyed innovators as we once were, we took a van load of employees down there one September and picked 6 bins of wonderful apples, that went into CSA boxes over the next 3-4 weeks’ time. BUT, having those apples sharing cooler space with our modest crop of storage carrots that autumn… disaster! By mid-October the flavor of the carrots had been ruined… they were spitting bitter, all because of ethylene gas exposure. As I recall, we hauled all 20-25 bins of carrots we had out to the compost pile. DANG.
Live and learn, I guess. And set ambitions and actions in better alignment. I guess all the grey hairs are a sign that maybe, maybe we’ve all become a bit wiser!
Gratefully- Jack