Notions on Arborship

Planting tress in a storm

“As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”

-Wendell Berry, Mad Farmer Liberation Front

I stop the truck at the end of the pavement, click in four-wheel drive and jostle up the uneven bedrock road, leaving the edge of the forested valley. Sneaking past the last oaks, bird cherries, and rosehip, I enter the open plateau that, until recently, was one large field, uniform in species and color in the growing season and brown tilled earth for nearly half a year. It still looks that way mostly, but some changes are in the making if one stops to look around. Life is springing back, reclaiming lost ground.

The truck bed is nearly overflowing with saplings: chestnut, ash, walnut, willow, raspberry, currants, hazelnut, blackberry. Some we grew ourselves from seed of cutting, others volunteered in the garden, planted by wind, bird, or squirrel. I pull up to the big gate made last winter from a fresh ash we felled in the valley below. The sun shines intermittently as the clouds pass fast overhead. The light comes in low, almost parallel to the ground from the early February sky, but gradually longer and higher each day. Black clouds in the distant Northwest, gather steam, biding their time until our meeting on the exposed plateau above Prague. 

This plateau is an island surrounded by the city. A long, narrow, forested valley, Prokopske Udoli, runs along the south side of it, preserved now mostly thanks to its geography, the steep slopes unsuitable for building. A stone’s throw north from the land we farm, up a slight incline, one can turn in a circle with an unobstructed view of buildings, smokestacks, and highways off in the distance; a view that I hope these trees disrupt someday. 

I place the truck parallel to the future row of trees in the northernmost part of the land, a triangle that juts out into the sea of scarred, brown earth. To the south of the triangle is the uppermost fence of our young fruit orchard. This bare triangle will become a small thicket, a wild refuge for birds and other creatures. I hop out into the gusting wind, pull the shovel out of the bed of the truck, and start digging. 

 We, my wife Lucie and I, arrived on a moonscape in the early spring of 2020. The city of Prague owns this land and ended the contract with the farmer who managed it for at least a decade. Rules were changing. All city-owned agricultural land would now be farmed organically – a word we had to invent to mean, “not sprayed with poisons.” The stated aim was to improve food security for the city, increase biodiversity, and reduce chemical runoff. We were surprised, after a single season of starting a small market garden in the valley below, the city asked if we would want to expand our little enterprise with a seven acre plot up the hill. Before starting the garden, our only other agricultural credentials involved a bucket garden on our balcony. 

Our first season on the big field was a comical display of our ineptitude as farmers on a scale larger than a garden. We had one-third of the land seeded to a pasture, another third to a wildflower meadow and the last we left unseeded. In that section we would start a plot of vegetables and seed the rest out to oats, sunflower, and wheat that we’d harvest for chicken feed. The “plot” yielded 2 pumpkins about the size of apples and a single potato. The rest of the field quickly turned into a jungle of weeds. We finally found a nearby farmer with a tractor and hired him to cut and bail the field. We then had thirty hay rolls of mostly weeds, full of weed seeds, that we had to roll around the land by hand due to our lack of machinery. The old farmer who used to farm this field stopped his tractor along the road one day as we were scything the edge of the weed field and greeted us, “God will punish you for what you’ve done to this land!” Not a great start, but we’ve learned a few things since then. 

Last winter we fenced one-third of the field that, at one time, was an orchard in the distant past. We planted fruit trees at a wide spacing to allow crops to grow, even when the trees reach full size. Between the fruit trees within the row are various edible and medicinal shrubs and herbs– everything from gooseberries, to honeyberries, to thyme to mint. We grew potatoes last season without tilling the ground. Jumped on a spade to open the ground, dropped a potato in, rolled out our weedy hay rolls. As the vines grew through the hay we piled more on. The south of the future orchard connects to the forest of the valley, a corridor for life to reclaim stolen ground. Snails, snakes, and worms were cause for celebration as we harvested potatoes like children on a autumn equinox Easter egg hunt. Two days’ work for two people yielded over three-hundred pounds in an area about half the size of a tennis court. Pumpkins had similar success from simply sticking seeds into piles of horse manure.

The surrounding fields are privately owned, so remain industrially farmed. As with so much of Czech agricultural land, what appears to be one enormous field, is owned and parceled to two dozen or more different owners, a remnant of the history of forced communal farming during the socialist era. The only thing that can be done for the owners who own 1/20 of a field, usually with no access to it without driving through other’s plots, is to rent the land out to farmers with large machines that can “manage” many hectares of land. 

After the Velvet Revolution, the new democratic government was left to the unenviable task of deciding how to redistribute the land. Most of the original owners were dead, and their children had given up farming and moved to towns and cities. Hotly debated was the date that would be used to set ownership. Would it be the First Republic after the first world war, or prior to the German occupation in 1938, or before the Communist party’s takeover in 1949? Some even wanted to go back to before the Hapsburg dynasty in the sixteenth century. 

With each generation, the quagmire deepens as the land is subsequently divided among children. It’s no wonder that Czech has the lowest number of individual farm holdings in Europe. Massive mono-cropped fields characterize much of the flat land of Bohemia and Moravia. The landscape is so starkly different from Austria, spared from forced collectivization, that one can see the border from an airplane on a clear day’s flight to Vienna. A visualization of the cyclical nature of ideas feeding policy that shapes landscapes that form people that influence ideas and around and around. 

The result is that almost no one owns the land they farm. This presents a constant dilemma for farmers. Why invest in land that they might not farm after a three-to-five-year lease? What is the benefit of hedgerows? They take up space and cut into profits. Why plant trees? They take too long and require too much labor to harvest. Why spread manure and cover crops when you can mine the soil? Fuel and chemicals in, grain out. Absent diesel and chemistry, it would take an army of people employed year-round to create this barren landscape. Curiously, the blind pursuit of chemical intensive industrial farming characterizes the West as well as the East. Capitalism and Communism both ignore costs to the natural systems that sustain life, each with a promise of a better future.

The policies that placed cheapness of food above all else have taken a toll on the topsoil and the resilience of ecosystems to endure the mechanized onslaught and thoughtless use of poison. Soil is no longer viewed as a living being, the base of all life, but rather an inert substrate that grows crops. 

This was the state of our field when we arrived a few springs back. Despite tilling, or perhaps due to it, the ground was rock hard. We used pickaxes to make the holes for the first row of fruit trees along the road, a mix of apple, pear and plum, all very old varieties. It took a crew of six to plant fifteen trees in one day. We yelled across the field to each other on the rare occasion we found an earthworm. In many parts of the field, the soil was reduced to thirty centimeters of clay before hitting an impenetrable layer. It was a desert.

I press the soil down around a small chestnut sapling. This one I grew from a nut picked off the forest floor of a wild stand near Podebrady. Its mother was fully grown and had the largest chestnuts of any I found in the entire forest, almost double the size of her neighbors. The beauty of a fresh chestnut, it’s oily shine like polished wood, perfectly smooth till the pointed tip, is unmatched. The chestnuts planted today, if protected and cared for during the first few years, will fruit for half a millennium, regardless of whether there is fuel to put in a tractor or the land is plowed. The wild plums will feed the birds, squirrels and people that pass through. The ash can be used for tool handles, cut for firewood, charcoal, and fence posts in several year cycles for centuries. The willow, for baskets and bees. 

I stand up, stretch my back and gaze around. 

Winter meadow, coffee with a drop of cream color now, just waiting for the sun’s signal and spring rains to burst into color. The garlic planted in November begins to poke pale green shoots from the beds where the potatoes grew. Knee to chest high fruit and nut trees, berries canes and bushes, hundreds of them, rocking with the wind throughout the seven acres. Days of work, that if cared for, will rain down food for lifetimes of many hungry beings. 

Life returns when two dimensions turn into three. Several perches, three meters high, invite birds of prey. We see them often - black eyes, hooked beaks, talons wrapped around the cut branch that sits atop the pole. I walk under a perch while filling in a gap in the walnut row that forms our northern border. This small tree was girdled by a deer. It might still grow from the base. It occurs to me that this is why all wild walnuts have multiple trunks. Below the perch I find furry ovals, jaw bones, and femurs sticking out. I spread one out with my hand. A vole or maybe a shrew skeleton, the remnants of an owl’s midnight snack. 

Violence haunts this place. This was a land of Celts, now Slavs, full of their stories. On those cliffs to the east, just under the horizon from the land we farm, Vltava river flows below, there once was a castle of warrior maidens, or so the legend goes.

 Libuše, the youngest and wisest of three daughters, and the first Czech queen, ruled these lands in those pagan times, before years were numbered. Pressured into marrying by her councilors, she told her men to follow her horse beyond the mountains to the land no one ruled. There they would find a peasant plowing behind two spotted oxen. He would eat at an iron table. His name was Přemysl, or “Reflect.” The queen’s men found him just as described, with two oxen, using his plow as a table to eat breakfast. This was to be their new king and he would rule by iron.  

Legends say that when the beloved Libuše died, women’s freedom was restricted in the kingdom. The distraught maidens revolted against the men and founded a castle on these cliffs, overlooking their rival’s castle at Vyšehrad across the river. It didn’t end well for the young ladies, but not before some trickery, torture, and eye gauging was exacted on the men. 

Our first hatched hen on the farm was named Libuše; one of three, just like her namesake. She is the cleverest of the whole flock.

I scoop soil back into a hole now inhabited by a willow and raspberry and look up to see black clouds getting closer. I feel a few small frozen droplets on my face. I continue to the northernmost exposed part of our field. I dig three holes at a time, soil to the downhill side. This makes it harder to back-fill the hole but creates a dip where water can soak in rather than run off. These trees need all the help they can get. I plant them with a companion; a willow cutting with an ash, raspberries, and blackberries next to a chestnut - maybe the thorns will dissuade a deer. 

I push root fragments of comfrey and cloves of garlic into the loosened soil. The comfrey will send roots down over a meter, breaking up the hard soil, mining minerals, and depositing them at the surface each fall when the leaves die back. Bumble bees will feed on the nectar of the violet bell-shaped flowers. European peasants call this plant “bone-knit” and dressed wounds with a poultice from its leaves and roots. Being hardheaded and well trained by modernity to dismiss such ancient knowledge as folklore, I doubted the potency of this plant until last season when I grabbed a pot on the stove, badly burning my thumb. A large blister with dead skin formed immediately. I found the comfrey cream Pavel, our friend and bee master, gave to us and applied a thick layer, wrapped it and kept my hand submerged in cold spring water. After two hours the pain was completely gone; by the next day there was no dead skin, no blister - like it never happened. 

The wind picks up. I have trouble opening the truck door after a snack inside. It roars through the fence. Three more holes–dug and planted. I get respite behind two rolls of hay - not going home with unplanted trees. My movements get faster now. I focus on breathing in and out the nose. 

The clouds race by overhead. The storm swallows me whole. My instinct is to head for the truck or the woods, anywhere but out here in the middle of the field in the dark belly of this beast. The wind’s a pack of wolves, biting and howling. Frozen rain, like pellets, rips sideways across the plain. I stand up holding the planted sapling straight, stepping down the soil around it with my boot. I look east and my hood shoots over my head, turn into the wind and it whips down. Frozen rain stings my wind-chapped face. Not ten feet away I see a poštolka, the smallest bird of prey in these parts. She’s perched on a small walnut sapling I just planted, talons holding on, face like mine pointed into the wind. I stand there watching her. She takes off fighting upwards, flapping with all her might against the wind. She catches a bit of a draft and still flapping, moves higher, then hovers in one spot, flapping wildly to stay aloft. Even now, she’s hunting. A mouse waits for this sort of weather to move. Bad weather means safe skies, or should. I see her dive. She disappears behind a mound of plowed earth, and I know she has dinner. 

I let out a whoop and a yell. The wind and sky respond, a chorus of wolves howling, blinding white flakes outlined in black. I start laughing. Soft at first and then like a mad man. I remember the look of Pavel, our beekeeper, when we captured the new hive last summer, white circled wide eyes, huge grin, drunk with passion. That’s me now.