More than a Decade in the Making

Farmers are obliged to be patient. After all, can one hurry the sunlight? Or rush the rain? Grow-lights and sprinklers aside, our ability to bend Mother Nature to our will is pretty puny.

I know this.

But the Would-Be Farm follows this particular lesson plan over and over and over. So here's me, learning.

Since 2014, I have purchased and planted more than 25 fancy apple trees.  At present, a dozen summers later, 7 trees still stand. I think there were five separate elderberry plantings before the current crop of survived deer incursion. Four different plum varieties passed quietly into the past, leaving Black Ice and native wild plums (but ones I paid good money for, and planted, and nursed gently) still putting out leaves in the spring.

Two of the first pears. Only the one on the left survived the cold of 2015-16.

Porcupines stripped the bark on this same surviving pear over the hard winter of 2025-26.

These apple trees still standing have survived being lifted after I planted them too deep. They have recovered from deer and porcupine predation. They've resisted killing cold, drought, and flooding rains. They've kept going after tent caterpillar attacks and Japanese beetle bombardment, and countless forms of ick—all without the kinds of chemical aid most commercial growers use.

And <happy sigh> this year, I have my first Honeycrisps, and Katherine's Favorites from those tough little trees.  
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She's no monster, but it's a Honeycrisp apple at long last.

I'm grateful, sincerely, to see the result of patience.

It's been such a pleasure to watch these plants (mere twigs when I planted them) finally attain "taller-than-deer-graze" height. It's a miracle to have a year like this one: no late frost, very little bug pressure, plenty of pollinators, enough rain and plenty of sun to produce—VOI-freakin-LA!–an actual crop of intentional fruits. ​

​It's an extraordinary year for the Would-Be Farm for fruit. The countless feral apples (planted fifty and more years ago and neglected for decades) across the two old homesteads are bent to the ground with heavy fruit. Some are delicious, some are even girthy. The smell of cider and overripe apples is intoxicating along the driveway. 

These apples are plentiful, though frankly they are not pretty individuals, since we avoid the chemical helpers that would keep spots and dents from forming, but a couple of trees produce nice big fruit that makes solid apple-pies and toothsome pie-adjacent morsels. 

In other fruit news, I've been plucking juicy blackberries along the pathways since July. The buckthorns (not edible for me, but still) are COVERED with dark berries. The bird cherries, looking like a dollhouse-sized fruit on a full-sized tree, made enough of an appearance that I had a handful. My planted plums, even fighting off some weirdo fungal disease, have hundreds of fruits.  

And for once, neither bear nor grey fox, not birds or rabbits, not deer and not even woodchucks have done damage to the orchard.

I harvested Aronia berry this year –– Aronia or chokeberry is an astringent kind of fruit with tiny seeds, like a bitter blueberry. I've learned that when a fruit is "best used in jellies, jams, or syrups," it means that sugar is required to make that fruit acceptable to the human tongue.

Having been a sucker for a good plant catalogue description, my collection of astringent fruits include, but are not limited to

• champagne currents
• elderberry
• honey berry (they had a fine PR team on their side. Honey my ass!)
• goji berry
• red currents
• Aronia
• sour cherry
  
  

Whether the four kinds of service berry will likewise disappoint remains to be seen, but I have my suspicions. 

By the way, alert readers will note that all these are ALSO known as super fruits, full of health-boosting compounds and very dark-staining pigments.  After working with the berries, my hands could stand in for Lady MacBeth's. All the water in Neptune's ocean will not wash them clean. 

But Aronia. It's a hearty brushy shrub that's been steadily producing clusters of dark berries without fail for a decade. 

After the first couple of years ("Oh, maybe these will get sweeter after a frost." and "Ooh, how about a little heat and sugar to make them a little less tooth-enamel-shrivelingly bitter."), I left the Aronia for the locals. 

The flowers are attractive to pollinators and I've heard that birds find the berries life-sustaining at the end of winter when everything tastier has been eaten. 

But in August, even the Aronia was bowed down under the weight of a heavy year.  And if Amazon can get $35 a pint for Aronia juice, isn't it worth the experiment—virtually for free—to extract some of this superfood juice?

I harvested a mixing bowl of fruit, cleaned them of stems and unripe individuals, froze them, and then popped the berries into a blender. No sugar, no water, a whirr of the blades, and the result was a slurry of vivid fruit bits in a big Mason jar.

I gave it a day in the fridge, and then used a fine mesh bag to extract the juice from the pulp.  

Many internet gurus suggested keeping the pulp and seeds for flavoring balsamic vinegar, but my hideously stained hand to heaven, I have been nursing a single bottle of balsamic for three years. I just don't use it enough to make it worth my while. My compost pile is just that much more healthy, right?

That mixing bowl yielded half a pint of thick juice. It's still astringent, but I think some of the bitterness lives in the seeds, which were removed in the mesh bag. 

So pretty and the color of dark rubies, it  just has to be good for a person, right?

While wandering around with the mixing bowl of Aronia, I noticed—how did it evade my notice for a decade? How!?—a 25-foot-tall black cherry tree on the edge of the home field.

​Like every other fruiting tree this summer on the Would-Be, it was co-ovv-covered with fruits. A wild black cherry is tiny, a bit smaller than a small marble, with a large pit (stone), like a domestic cherry but tiny.  The flavor is subtle and layered: astringent yes, but most assuredly cherry.  ​

​Thank you, O internet, for providing guidance on this one: an easy use of the black cherry is to mash it manually (don't use a blender, as the pit of a cherry contains a kernel which in turn contains a compound call amygdalin.

​Amygdalin converts into cyanide when digested. And even in tiny amounts, we like to avoid ingesting cyanide), add some sugar, and let it decoct with alcohol to make Cherry Bounce or, more as we might call it more genteelly, cherry cordial.  

As I'm sure I need not say, but I will, but Cherry Bounce was favorite of the OG cherry-chopper himself, George Washington.  Martha Washington had a recipe.

This nectar is also well known among the moonshining community of North Carolina.  It looks and smells delicious so far, but it's going to age for a few weeks before give it some sampling attention.