Nelson County Rocks

At my Rutgers retirement party last spring, my colleagues gave me a generous and thoughtful gift: a gift certificate for fruit trees from Vintage Virginia Apples, an orchard and tree nursery about twenty minutes away, which is trying to keep alive varieties of apples and other fruit no longer commercially available.  We had to wait until the trees were dormant, but on Tuesday we picked up five two-year old trees, and the past two days have been spent planting them and protecting them with deer netting.  (You may click on the picture of me planting the Grimes Golden for a larger view.)

We bought and planted five trees, as follows (descriptions are from VVA’s catalog):

VIRGINIA BEAUTY originated on the property of Zach Safewright in the Piper Gap area of Carroll County, Virginia.  In the 1850s, it was given the name Virginia Beauty.  Large in size and oblate to truncate in shape, the smooth and glossy, greenish-yellow skin is half to nearly totally covered a shaded brick-red with indistinct red stripes in the greener areas… The yellow flesh is fine-grained, tender, and a light sweetness in flavor… In the early part of the 20th century, the Virginia Beauty was popular for not only dessert, but also for processing, especially for apple preserves.  It stores very well and ripens the first weeks of October.

GRIMES GOLDEN was found by Thomas Grimes in Brooke County, West Virginia, 1804, near Wellsburg, West Virginia, where John Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed, established a nursery with his brother.  One of the parents of Golden Delicious. Roundish or slightly oblong in form, small to medium in size, with a greenish-yellow skin, ripening to a clear yellow.. Yellowish flesh is crisp and tender, with a spicy, sweet flavor. A good all-purpose apple, it contains 18.81% sugar that ferments to a 9% alcohol, popular for making hard cider… Self-fertile and an excellent pollinator for other varieties… Ripens in late September and stores very well.

REINETTE SIMIRENKO may be the same as Wood’s Greening. There is some uncertainty whether it originated as claimed in the garden of P. F. Simirenko in the Ukraine, or in the United States, as Wood’s Greening. It was described in 1895, and was popularized by Soviet cosmonauts, who took the apple into space for dessert. Medium in size, the greenish-yellow skin has a brownish-orange flush, and is russeted in the cavity and dotted on the surface. The finish is waxy. The greenish-white flesh is tender and crisp with a subacid flavor. It bears early and heavily and will also hang long on the tree after ripening. The tree top develops into a wide pyramidal crown and the variety is very drought resistant. It stores well and ripens in October.  [Note: it appears that Wood’s Greening came first, and was developed by a family named Wood (no relation as far as I know, but who knows?)  in Burlington County, New Jersey in the early 19th century.]

We also planted two Black Heart Cherry trees, for which rather little information is available:  “BLACK HEART Cherries are a sweet dark fruit on a large tree. Fruit matures early and over a relatively long season.”  Our understanding is that they have been grafted from a tree on an old farm in this area.

It will take a little patience, but we’re excited about tasting and sharing these fruits in the future.  And heartfelt thanks to my (still-working stiff) colleagues back at Rutgers for this wonderful gift!

Pictures from the Vintage Virginia Apples Harvest Festival

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma introduced Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm to its many readers, and since then both have acquired iconic status in the emerging sustainable and local food movement.  Salatin himself is a prolific writer, and in addition to his various books, he writes an excellent column in Flavor Magazine, and has been featured in the recent films Food Inc and Fresh (these film links include short clips and photos featuring Salatin).   Duly inspired but also anticipating Thanksgiving dinner, Monika and I drove out to Polyface Farm today.  It’s a lovely ride over the mountains and across the Shenandoah Valley to get there.  Visitors are invited to explore the farm on foot, which we did.  It was fun to see the famous eggmobiles (which transport and house hens in  sequential feeding grounds).  We left with a Thanksgiving turkey, ham, pork chops and chicken parts (including feet!) for chicken stock, which is bubbling away on the stove as I write this post.  More pictures of our visit are available here.

No author has informed and influenced me more in recent years than Michael Pollan.  As I became interested in gardening, his Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education captured the tension (also, as Pollan says, a false dichotomy) between nature and culture that is inherent in the enterprise and bedevils every gardener.  His Botany of Desire provided, as its subtitle states, “A Plant’s-Eye View of the World,”  both putting claims of  “domestication” in perspective and showing how dangerously problematic the collaboration of corporate and plant species interest can become.  Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma then integrated these themes into a broader canvass that included a devastating critique of industrial agriculture and a lament for the loss of a coherent food culture in the U.S.  And most recently, Pollan critiques the faddish and corporate-influenced nutrition industry in his In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which also includes a vigorous defense of the pleasures of cooking and good eating.  I’ve learned much from each of these highly readable books, and recommend them to all.

In the past month or so,  Pollan has published two pieces in the New York Times that are perhaps less likely to have caught the eye of readers of this blog: hence this post.  The first, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, is a fascinating analysis of how it has come about that Americans as a whole spend more time watching cooking shows than actually cooking, something that only a decreasing minority actually engages in.  This has meant that corporations do the cooking for America, with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, food poisoning, environmental destruction, global warming, and a variety of other ills as the consequence.  Pollan ends with a claim that cooking matters hugely, and that it can be a fulfilling activity, not the “drudgery” that food industry advertising has claimed to liberate people from.

More recently, on the day after President Obama’s speech to Congress in support of health care reform, the New York Times published an op-ed piece by Pollan entitled Big Food vs. Big Insurance.  Pollan argues that the “elephant in the room” of the health care debate is the American way of eating, which is very likely the single most important cause of both the cost of health care in the U.S. and the dismal health status of Americans.  He also argues that any health care reform that eliminates the ability of insurance companies to discriminate against people with “pre-exisiting conditions,” to drop subscribers at will, and to charge different rates, will set in motion a new dynamic in industry and politics–one that will for the first time pit a new interest of the insurance industry in addressing issues of diet against a government-subsidized food industry that promotes a kind of eating that makes people sick.  Who will win in such a conflict may be uncertain, but Pollan certainly succeeds in placing the health care debate in a broader context of both food and politics.   You can read both pieces  by following the hyperlinks above.  Also recommended for those interested in food policy is Pollan’s letter to the future “Farmer in Chief” last fall (2008).

The desire to escape as much as possible from the industrial food system and to participate in an alternative food culture was central to our retirement vision, and so it has been particularly gratifying to see two excellent films appear that both critique the system and explore alternatives:  Food Inc and Fresh.  Both film websites provide trailers and other resources, including book lists.

With author Michael Pollan and sustainable farmer Joel Salatin as maj0r figures in both movies, it is not surprising that they overlap a fair amount.  Still, the feel and the details are quite different.  Food Inc is more of a critique of the industrial food system and its truly devastating consequences, while Fresh tilts more towards documenting promising changes that point towards an alternative.  Overall they reinforce and complement each other nicely and Monika and I recommend all readers of this blog to see both!

Our only real complaint is that while both films make clear that it is public policy that subsidizes and creates the distortions of  industrial agriculture, both films end with a message of individualized consumer choice: vote with your food dollars for healthy and sustainable alternatives.  This is certainly good advice, but it ducks the difficult issue of policy reform, without which systemic change is unlikely.  It also sidesteps the contradictions of praising a company like Wal-Mart for stocking organic yogurt while ignoring the degree to which Wal-Mart is the antithesis of other values of the alternative food movement, such as local production and decent labor relations.

Still, it’s nice to see that food activists are finally getting a hearing, and to see evidence of change even here in Nelson County, where there is now not just one, but three weekly farmers markets and a broad array of organic and sustainable farms.  And it’s nice to have our property butt up against a pasture for grass-fed and free-range cattle!

When Monika and I were looking around in Nelson County last summer, we bit into the best peaches we’d ever eaten while camping at Montebello Campground.  The peaches came from Saunders Brothers, which happens to be located just a few miles away from where we’ve settled.

And much to our surprise and delight, peach season has already begun!  Saunders Brothers grows 16 varieties of peaches, which appear consecutively from about June 20th into mid-September.  Currently we’re eating “Spring Snow” and “Early Redhaven,” and we’ll end up (appropriately enough) with “Fairtime” and “Snowball.”   So we’ll be having a peachy time time all summer long!