orchard

apples finally come from apple trees. the whole recipe is a gesture: use an apple on a placed oak sapling and the graft takes — a little cloth band at the stem — and what grows is an orchard tree, short-trunked and wide-crowned, that lives on a calendar. bloom, set, green, ripe, bare, each a visible crown, days apart. picking is a hand on a ripe crown: fruit comes off in ones and twos, the crown empties back to green, no breaking. a ladder against the trunk is a good afternoon. the same graft on a cherry sapling makes the cherry finally fruit, and currants grow wild at the forest edges, replantable in rows, because the household deserves the pun and the pie.

husbandry is real and it shows. shears on the graft log mark the tree tended for a cycle; bees working the bloom raise the set; a tended, pollinated tree ripens every crown where a wild one ripens half. nothing punishes you for skipping any of it — an untended orchard goes leggy and thin, still alive, just wilder. and nothing vanilla is touched: wheat is still wheat, bonemeal is still bonemeal, the fruit is good food but never the best food. the reward is the orchard itself.

the orchard reads almost everyone and requires no one. blossom petals drift downwind through the bloom — the pack's prettiest fortnight — and a real storm shakes ripe fruit down as windfalls that roll on the ground, where a tamed crow's shiny hunt may pick one up and make it tomorrow's gift, and where the current may take one downstream to be somebody else's riverbank apple. everything ripe lands in a fruit tag set for crumb's table. the seasons, when they come, will claim the calendar; the frost, when it comes, will nip the blossom; the bird-peck waits for the scarecrow, because a leak without a remedy is grief rather than weather.

as of 1.1.0 the trees give twice. a tap driven into spruce or birch weeps resin, and into oak a gall, for the works' pick to take and the kettle to render; and a tree felled at the base on dirt leaves a coppice stump that grows the whole tree back, no sapling, so a drag saw on the line has a tree farm with nothing planted.