Not How We Planned It

We do have some apple trees at the Genuine Faux Farm.  When we first moved to the farm, we made sure to put in some apple trees and added to their numbers over the next several years.  Some years, we have had apples.  Other years, we have not.

A whole host of things can push our apples towards good or bad harvests.  But, it rarely seems that we get an "in-between" year.  We've also lost some apple trees over the years.  We were very sad a few years ago when one of our Fireside apple trees succumbed to a couple of windstorms.  The first came from one direction and the other finished it off by coming from another direction.

But, there is one apple tree that has continued to thrive - and this is after we feared it wasn't going to get past its first year on the farm.

Several years back we picked up a few bare-root trees, and among them was this little Cortland apple tree.  We put it into the ground on the west side of one of our orchard areas.  We call it an orchard, but there has never been more than five fruit trees in this area at any one time.

We planted it, we watered it and it seemed like it was going to do ok.  Until we got a windstorm that snapped our little tree off at about one foot above the ground.

Now here's where the story gets interesting.  There had been a sucker (a branch growing out of the lower trunk area) that I was meaning to prune, but I hadn't got around to doing it.  Now this sucker was above the grafted area of the tree and below where the trunk snapped.  The sucker had a few leaves.  So, I decided I would just leave the tree there and see what happened the next year.

Why not?  It wasn't going to hurt anything and I could take it out the next Spring.

To make a long story less long, this is that very same Cortland apple tree.  It's our healthiest and our strongest apple tree on the farm.  And yesterday, we harvested several bushels of apples off of this tree.

It's not how we planned it, but the results are what we dreamed.  I think we can live with that.