Uncultivated by Andy Brennan

Author:Andy Brennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

When a tree becomes of reproductive age, its energy shifts from vegetative growth toward reproductive growth: the setting up of fruitwood (including fruit spurs and, eventually, flowers and fruit). Farmers obviously have an incentive to see the trees turn sexually active sooner rather than later, but interestingly, farmers also spend massive amounts of energy in calming or rationing a tree’s urge to fruit. A farmer wants annual consistency while the tree itself wants the opposite.

This is very apparent in the wild when native fruit and nut trees get on forest-wide cycles known as mast years. You might notice, for instance, that acorns and pinecones often produce in abundance one year and hardly drop anything for the deer or squirrels in other years. Nature requires this unpredictability; it keeps the animals guessing (or struggling), and without unpredictability the system is unhealthy. This might seem counterintuitive to us, that struggle is actually a healthy thing, but we have examples of self-automated irregularity within our own culture, too, and it defies our reason. Tons of fluctuating dichotomies can be cited for their creation of balance: honoring both extroversion and introspect, “appetite” versus “withholding,” or—most notably—progressive versus conservative politics. Just when we think one way is better than the other, some cosmic order steps in and finds a natural balance that we couldn’t predict on our own.

Apples are deeply in touch with their connection to forest mast cycles, and this is a major bane to farmers who are dominated by market pressures and financial quotas. These worlds collide. So farmers have devised effective ways of seducing regular fruit production by virtue of controlling the trees’ urge to fruit overabundantly during on-years. When farmers thin the fruit, they’re asking the trees to withhold themselves and put some of that year’s energy into setting up fruit buds for the following year (a year in which the tree would naturally bear little to no fruit). Some varieties are more cooperative than others, and it’s no coincidence that the commonly known varieties are the ones most easily controlled, while forgotten heirlooms that tend to go biennial have fallen out of favor. Again, it’s all about consistency.

Obviously market pressures mandate that farmers cultivate regularity into the trees: Customers have lost their patience and understanding for years-at-a-time cycles in nature (and in fact, annual seasonality is invisible to us in the modern marketplace). But there is another reason for cultivating regularity: Once a tree has decided to concentrate on growing fruiting wood (branches heavy with fruit spurs), it develops older wood that can become a safe haven or home base for disease colonies. In contrast, a younger tree given only to vegetative growth is constantly changing shape, and the farmer’s saw can easily influence the way the tree forms. In much the same way that a balance between conservative and progressive actions is needed in a healthy culture, so, too, a farmer wants to cultivate a balance in the tree between reproductive and vegetative growth. New shoots will form the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.