Local Business Highlight - Gleis Orchards

I was raised on locally grown Michigan produce, and it’s nice to know there is a nearby place where I can still get those high quality products.  Eating locally is easy when you can shop at a place like Gleis, just south of Jonesville Michigan.

I recently took my Hillsdale College Horticulture class to visit Gleis and meet with staff horticulturalist Chris Witschen.  We were eager to learn the ideas and practices that has kept this green business thriving for ninety-four years.  Chris described how he has stayed abreast of trends in the plant business throughout his career, which has spanned over 30 years. 

After going through a period of expansion during the mid 1980’s, the greenhouse business has had its ups and downs in Michigan, along with the general economy.  Chris explained the current market emphasis is on low-maintenance, high impact plants, such as wave petunias.  It is not as common these days as it once was to see people growing large flower beds and gardens, but there is a big demand for easy care plants and containerized plantings.  Chris described Gleis selection as a balance between the “bread and butter” items that everyone likes year in and year out, and new plant varieties coming from the breeders to appeal to people’s desire for something unique.  Gleis still provides perennials and more unusual plants for their loyal specialty-customers who often travel some distance every year to visit the nursery. 

Be Still My Heart!  :)

The consumer market’s diversity of interest is also reflected in the apple varieties grown in the orchard.  Most of Gleis customers buy a few types of popular apples, such as McIntosh, Fuji and Gala, and the regional darling Honeycrisp.  But Gleis carries over 30 varieties of apples, including the old favorite Northern Spy.  Chris said he had one customer who comes up from Indiana to the orchard every year to get this variety for her pies.

Another trend in plant sales Chris mentioned is an increased interest in home vegetable gardening, due to taste, economic and food safety concerns.  Gleis has started carrying more variety of vegetable plants in recent years.   They also grow vegetable crops to sell for their summer farm stand.  But there’s even more to love at Gleis!  You can find indoor potted plants and flower arrangements, as well as many food items including cheese, nuts, preserves and maples syrup.  They sell items to decorate your indoor and outdoor spaces for holidays too, including Christmas trees and pumpkins, Easter lilies and poinsettias.

When I asked Chris if Gleis had any interest in the organic movement, he emphasized his company uses a variety of non-chemical techniques for controlling pests, such as crop rotation and companion planting.  This is part of their integrated pest management philosophy.  It makes economic sense for them to use methods of crop management that prevent pest problems before they require a lot of chemical inputs.  He felt that USDA Organic certification was an impractical process due to many cumbersome hoops to jump through, such as the requirement that fields go without pesticides for three years before being awarded the certification.  That’s a difficult business model to follow and I have heard this complaint from many small growers over the years.  The policies and politics of “organic” in this country are a fascinating study, but that’s another article! Meanwhile, as I always say, best to seek out your local producers and get to know them and their practices.  They are usually happy to share!! 

Chris couldn’t give us any magical formula for his successes at Gleis, but he did emphasize keeping up with best practices and having a good soil formula and nutrient regime in the greenhouse, along with keeping records and following research through trade publications and professional networks.  He attributed much of his ability to manage things well to years of trial and error experiences.  We weren’t too long in Chris’ company before we realized why his colleagues call him the “Walking Encyclopedia!”  When it comes to keeping a small business running, there is no substitute for hard work and dedication and Chris Witschen embodies these principles!

Ms. Rose Makes Pink Applesauce!

Having recently returned to my home state of Michigan, I have become reacquainted with the wonderful variety of apples for which my agricultural powerhouse of a homeland is known.  At my local Meijers store, they label Michigan-grown apples, and there was one on the shelf I had not seen before, Ida Red.  My curiosity was piqued; I had heard it was a good pie apple, so I looked it up online.  One of the things I found out was you can make pink applesauce with this variety if you cook it with the peel!  If you know anything about me and my love of pink things, you know I had to give it a try!

The pesticide dilemma

Ida Red.  Isn't that the cutest apple!

The problem with using apple peel in applesauce is apples are one of the most pesticide-intensive produce crops out there.  They are at the top of the Environmental Working Group's list of the “Dirty Dozen” testing most heavily for pesticides.

Organically labeled apples cost more than conventionally grown ones, and variety is rather difficult to come by, so I usually circumvent problems by peeling the apples I eat.  But in this case I had to figure how to get rid of the pesticide residues, no easy matter.  That would be a great topic for another article, perhaps another day.  

There are many variables to consider if you want to go about cleaning apple peel in a scientifically proven effective way.  One problem is apples are coated with waxes in addition to having natural waxes on their skin.  Pesticides adhere to these waxes.  Also, many pesticides are waxy, and hard to remove with water.  If pesticides just washed off with water, they would be less effective because they would wash off when it rains.  Some pesticides do wash off this easily, some don’t.  You don’t necessarily know what pesticides any given apple producer is using--one reason to get to know your local farmers and buy from them, that way you can ask!  

After doing some research, I decided to wash the apples in warm water with a mild natural soap, and then rinse them with water and follow that by a vinegar rinse to remove any possible soap residue.  Some sources will tell you soap isn’t necessary and it could add additional toxins to your apples.  While this is true for some washes, not sure it is true for all.  As far as I can tell that assertion isn’t backed up by any science, it's purely conjecture.  Pesticide removing washes haven't been widely studied.  Soap's chemical constituents will vary depending on what kind of soap you use, and eating a lot of soap might give you a stomach ache, but I have no reason to believe the chemicals in the soap I used are going to bio-accumulate in my body or wreak havoc with my immune system, unlike some pesticides.   I made the educated guess the tiny amount of soap chemicals that might adhere to an apple’s skin weren’t going to be a problem, but I hope to explore this topic more in a future post.  I used a natural soap with the non-toxic ingredients listed.  I scrubbed the apples with a brush, which is also recommended.  The ratio of vinegar I used for the rinse was 1 cup vinegar to three cups water.  I used apple cider vinegar.  I didn’t notice any soapy taste in the final product at all.  Here is a good link from Colorado State University Cooperative Extension on cleaning produce, with the standard recommendations, Guide to Washing Fresh Produce

The peel dilemma

The second problem I encountered making this applesauce was removing the peel from the sauce.  The easy way to do this is to run the cooked applesauce through a food mill of some type.  The peels will get caught in the mill and pure sauce will come out the other end.  This is the standard efficient way to make applesauce,  since peeling apples wastes time and energy.  I have a Roma food mill but I don’t have access to it where I am right now, so I had to get creative.  I thought I could peel the apples, leave the peel in big pieces, and then fish it out later.  I didn’t realize the peel would cook down significantly, so the task of fishing out the peels was very fussy.  Also, a lot of sauce adheres to the peel.  After fishing out the biggest pieces, I ran the peel through a sieve to extract most of the sauce.  There were a few small bits of peel in the sauce but sans the pesticide load, that’s good for ya!  I was reminded of my Baubie’s homemade applesauce which often had bits of peel in it.  I didn’t like that as a kid but now it brings back a wave of nostalgia for Baubie’s old kitchen and Baubie’s old arthritic hands somehow still managing to make yummy homemade applesauce and homemade noodles.  I always feel connected to her when I make applesauce like she did so long ago.

 

The taste dilemma

So here’s the finished results.  Not so much pink as a very pale peachy color.  As far as taste, not my all- time favorite, rather mild.  I have found that when it comes to apples, taste is very subjective.  My mom likes mild applesauce made with soft McIntosh, she thinks that kind tastes most traditional and has the best texture.  Dad and I like spicier, chunkier applesauce.  My go-to apple for sauce is Golden Delicious.  Many folks swear by a mix of apples, some tart, some sweet.  I recently made a batch of applesauce that was a mix of Jonagolds and Empire, which are themselves crosses between Jonathan and Golden Delicious, and Red Delicious and McIntosh.  Best of both worlds, it was a hit with everyone in the family.

Just for fun, you might try checking out this Web site, “Orange Pippen,” where folks post reviews of various apple varieties.  You might find yourself spending a good bit of time reading the fascinating range of opinions!

Seed Saving Adventures

I have saved a few seeds in my day, but this year I went at it in a big way.  Well, actually a kind-of haphazard way--I started my new horticulturalist job in October, and noticed all these gorgeous plants in the Children's Garden going to seed.  So I cut off some of the dried flower heads and stuffed them into labeled brown paper bags.  This is NOT the most proper method of seed saving to guarantee success, but it is the quick and dirty way.  When I found out I would be teaching Horticulture the following winter/spring, I set the bags aside for my class to process.  That's what we've been doing for the past couple of weeks and I am totally enamored of the endeavor.  In fact, I think seed saving and planting/growing is going to be the next trend in environmental education.  Move over stream monitoring, recycling, and bird counting, make way for seed banking!!

Saving seeds in the fall and planting them in the spring is such an easy way to restore the earth, and fits in ideally with the schedule of the school year.  It's not an expensive endeavor, you don't need fancy equipment, you can use recycled and scrounged supplies.  You get something (useful plants) for almost nothing, what more could you ask for?!  At one time, saving seeds from the plants you were growing for your own needs, was a basic human skill, an integral part of that other basic human skill--growing food!  We need to re-educate ourselves on how to do this!  Talk about "Homeland Security"--it doesn't get much more fundamental than that!!  And there are many science/biotechnology concepts you need to master to do it--opening up a world of educational and career opportunities.  Especially for us here in the plant micro-climate powerhouse we call Michigan!  So what follows is an overview of how to save seeds and process them for spring planting.  Watch this space as the season continues, for more on how to plant and care for them.

To Every Thing There is a Season
The time to save seeds is in the late summer/early fall, as the flowers of the temperate-region gardens and meadows go to seed and it is still relatively warm and dry.  Some seeds, (like the berry kind) need to be kept cool and damp, but many seeds can be stored dry.  They're the easiest kind to save.  Ideally, you want to cut off the seed-heads from the plants before the seeds all drop, blow away or get eaten by birds, and before it gets chilly and damp and your seeds get destroyed by mold.  (Seed-heads are the dried-out flower part of a plant that has gone to seed.)  The best time to harvest seeds in the temperate zone is the end of August and through September, depending on the flowering schedule of the plants with which you are working.  Isn't that wonderful--just when school starts!!  If the seeds haven't completely dried out, you can hang or lay the seed-heads out to dry.  Tie the cut stems together and hang them from some type of structure like a drying rack or line, or place the seed-heads on a well ventilated surface to dry.  I skipped that part and just stuck the already dried-on-the-plant seed-heads into paper bags.  We'll see what my germination rate is!!

You Have to Separate the Seeds from the Chaff!
There are many ways of processing the seeds, but basically you want to separate the seeds from the chaff (the part of the seed-head that isn't a seed, so it's a capsule, wing, bit of fluff, or something like that).  How you manage to do the separating depends on the type of chaff.  If the seeds are heavy (they often are) and the chaff is light (it almost always is) you just close up the brown paper sack and bang the seed heads about in it to break open the pods and expose the seeds.  The seeds will often sink to the bottom of the bag so you can scoop out the chaff and you'll have a pile of seeds left at the bottom.  That's how it worked for milkweed, we just scooped out the fluff and were left with gads of seeds in the bottom of the bag.

In another situation, you can spread the seed/chaff mix out and fan or blow lightly over the pile and the chaff will blow away leaving the seeds behind.  That's winnowing, remember that word??!!  In the olden days people used special baskets to spread the seeds out and then they tossed them gently into a breeze to blow away the chaff.  Or used fans.  Not an easy skill to master.  This only works when the seeds are heavy enough to stay in the basket and the chaff is light enough to blow away.  Test this out first or you may end up blowing away your whole crop!!  My student Ben actually blew gently over his pile of Cosmo seeds to get rid of the chaff.  What a guy!

Sometimes the size difference between the seeds and chaff can be used to your advantage.  That's how we separated the basil, lemon balm and cleome seeds.  We ran the seed-chaff mix through a sieve--the seeds fell out the holes and the chaff stayed in the sieve.  You can buy sieves with varying sized holes for varying sized seeds, but we just used an old kitchen sieve.




Sometimes you've got to beat up or pick apart the seed heads manually.  In the case of Echinacea, we used a dissecting probe, after we read online that a darning needle could be used.  Next best thing!




Below is a photo of our whole seed-saving operation.  You can see the brown paper bags, the sieve, and white paper plates, which we used to spread the seeds out on.  Use white so that you can easily see the seed and chaff because of the high contrast.

Store in a Cool Dry Place  The last part of the process is to store the seeds in a dark, cool, dry place.  We sealed them in little white envelopes, the kind used for herbaria.  Be sure to label the seeds with the name of the plant and the date collected.  We then stored the little envelopes in larger pint-sized canning jars to make sure no moisture or animals/insects could get to the seeds.  We stored them in the cupboards in our cool educational facility.  We used some jars I had with holes punched in the top for ventilation.  You don't want to seal the seeds up with any type of moisture because that will mean mold!

Take Notes  There are tons of excellent Web sites on seed saving for various types of plants.  You should create a notebook with notes on all your seed saving techniques and pictures of how the seed heads and seeds look, as well as notes for later on how to sow and grow, and what the seedlings will look like.  We were able to do this easily by cutting and pasting (with citations!) of information we found online.  Again, great projects for students to learn a whole plethora of research skills.  Another thing we have is a spreadsheet with the names of the plants and the dates they need to be sown to get them ready to plant when spring comes around, and we can record our results and see how well we did in shepherding these little babies to full-grown plant adulthood!

A Big Tree Is Down

"Who will hold the sky up now the big trees are down?"  from the song The Big Trees Are Down by Doug Wood, honoring John Muir and Rachel Carson.

Just this week a friend and former colleague alerted me to the passing of Tom Fegley, former outdoor editor for the Morning Call newspaper in the Lehigh Valley.  I had the pleasure of meeting the man once when he came out to do some photography at the Graver Arboretum, and I enjoyed reading his articles for many years.  There is an excellent obituary for him in the online version of the Morning Call, which I am linking here, "Former Call Outdoors Editor Tom Fegley Dies at 72."

Something not mentioned in the article was that Tom was a teacher of ecology and environmental education before he became a newspaper writer, something he relayed to me when I met him.  He also wrote several books.  Tom was definitely a man to be looked up to as a role model.  He embodied much of the best in what it means to be a human being.  Here is what one of his colleagues, fellow writer Jim Casada, had to say about him: 

"I haven't known a lot of outdoor communicators in my 30 years or so in the business whom I considered truly iconic figures. However, Tom Fegely was one of them. Soft-spoken, deeply intellectual without being in any way obtrusive or overbearing with his knowledge and insight, he was a truly gifted writer and first-rate photographer. Beyond that, he was a delightful individual, someone who made you feel at ease almost immediately whether the setting was a backwoods hunting camp or a fancy dress banquet"

I tried to find some examples of his writing online. There are a bunch in the archives of the Morning Call, but unfortunately my skills at searching their database are not up to the task. It seems that articles are indexed solely by key words of topic, not by writers. I also tried conventional Googling and did find some additional examples. There was nothing fancy about his writing, it was just clear, thorough, well researched and informative. It wasn't this article or that article that made him great, it was the cumulative affect of his presence in the community.  He got up and brought his A game every single day, for 30+ years!  He lived his avocation for his entire life.

Here's a fun one with some current relevance, "Who's At the Feeders" by Tom Fegley for the Morning Call, 2000.  However, this one post simply cannot do justice to the body of work of this man.