29 ~ Feral apples and first milk

Greetings! My apologies for the recent bout of silence. I’ve been traveling the last couple of weeks, and so doing more ‘watching out the window’ than writing to the page.  I’ve also been engaged (or perhaps engulfed) in working with some colleagues to launch a new wildlife conservation organization, which we rolled out last week: https://www.saolafoundation.org/ 

At least, I’ve been too busy to go to a grocery store. 

A few weeks ago, while I was driving home on a mild, sunny afternoon, not far from the house two bobcats bounded across the road in front of my car – an adult mama and a smaller kit bringing up the rear.  This was just my second and so far best sighting of my life of this sublime animal.

This fall, the two apple trees in my yard have not been very productive (a supportive understatement).  Early this year, during that hopeful cusp between winter and spring, I gave them a thorough pruning, inspired and emboldened by a talk at the Wisconsin Garden Expo in Madison.  This was their first pruning since I planted them several years ago (neglect through ignorance), and I really went at it.  I suspect they are now just in recovery mode this fall.  

Afterall, it’s during the summer growing season that apples set fruit buds for the following year’s crop.  So on my trees, many of the tiny apple homunculi probably ended up on the pruning piles last February and March. Ah well. Next year, inshallah.

 In the meantime, this fall I’ve been living off feral apples.  I love feral apple trees.  I love that they often mark where a farm once stood – a bit of living, edible archeology.  I love and admire their resilience.  Speaking of pruning, it’s amazing to me –and suspect– that careful, regular pruning and weed suppression are recommended as essentials for apple productivity.  Yet I’ve often come across ancient, gnarly, feral trees, growing out of thickets of weeds and brush and unpruned for years, probably decades, festooned in late summer with beautiful apples, free for the picking.  I salute feral apple trees for just getting on with it, despite the neglect, and quietly persevering on their path, and continuing to feed the world.

At our best, all of us are feral apple trees; at least we can strive to be.  At some point in our lives, we’ve all suffered neglect or abandonment from those we looked to care for us.  Paradoxically, this often followed attempts, from parents or partners, to domesticate our vibrant, budding souls, to overprune us. Too much attention, followed by neglect.  Like feral apples, our way now is to stand tough, get on with it, and turn our tears to fruit.  

At this time of year, feral apple trees along the back roads of Wisconsin have a special place in my quiver of inspirations. 

 In 1862, Thoreau published a slim, charming, volume entitled Wild Apples.  In fact, his book is not about wild apples, but about feral domestic apples, Malus domestica, which he encountered on his walks and roamings in Massachusetts. Malus domestica evolved to a species over millennia of interactions with humans, and today includes all of our domestic apple varieties. It’s the apple Thoreau knew. 

The truly wild apple, the domestic apple’s wild ancestor, is Malus sieversii, which is native to central Asia.  It still occurs in the wild there, in the Altai Mountains of Kazakhstan.  In fact, there is a nature reserve in Kazakhstan, Zhongar-Alatau National Park, that is home to both wild apple trees and snow leopards.  This is a place I intend to visit one day, as a pilgrimage.  In the meantime, I’ll content myself with feral American apples and bobcats.

 My neighbors from whom I buy dairy recently welcomed the birth of a new calf to their small herd.  When I mentioned the news to my Swiss girlfriend, Corina, she immediately asked, “Can you get some of the colostrum from the calf’s mother?”  Having never been either a farmer nor a nursing mother, I had no idea what she was talking about.  “Colostrum” sounded like an obscure body part, or an affliction of one. 

For those of you in the same state of ignorance, colostrum is the first production of mother’s milk immediately after birth of an infant, packed with high concentrations of antibodies and nutrients for the newborn, which gives this first milk a distinctive yellowish color.

 It turns out that the Swiss, with a long history of traditional dairy production, are all over this stuff.  As Corina explained, in her parents’ and grandparents’ times, in their mountain farmer families, the rich colostrum milk was a welcome highlight on the table, in the midst of an otherwise somewhat monotonous diet.  A sweet pie or pudding made from colostrum was a special treat, especially for children.  She still has some of the traditional recipes, I was in time to get a quart of the colostrum, and with eggs from the convent, turned out this colostrum custard pie (with cinnamon and raisins). It was a treat, indeed:

With the turn to October, most of my harvesting and canning is over (and trout season ends on October 15).  In an upcoming post, I’ll give an update on the status of my larder as I approach both winter, and the one-year anniversary of my last grocery shopping foray.

What I'm reading and can recommend:

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

This is a deeply engaging novel. It has little apparent plot, yet marvelously wrought, unforgettable characters. It has been described as a coming-of-age novel, but the fictional 19 year-old narrator is such an old soul, I found it more of a growing down novel. I savored it.