Every Orchard Starts Somewhere

I've been thinking about how to start this journal, and I guess the best way is to just start writing.

I'm not really sure where all of this is going to end up. I know what I want it to look like someday, though.

Rows of apple trees. Some old varieties you can't just walk into a grocery store and buy. A little cider house. Pumpkins growing out in the field. Old wooden signs, gravel paths, and a place where people can come spend an afternoon without feeling like they're in a hurry to get somewhere else.

That's the picture I've got in my head anyway.

The funny thing is, I don't even have the big orchard yet.

Right now, I'm learning. Reading about apple varieties, figuring out grafting, looking for land, collecting ideas, and probably driving everybody around me crazy talking about trees.

I've gotten pretty fascinated with the older apples. The ones that have been around for a hundred or two hundred years. Cox's Orange Pippin, McIntosh, all those varieties that have a story behind them. There's something pretty incredible about growing a tree today that somebody else was growing generations ago.

I think that's part of what draws me to all this.

I've spent a lot of my life doing different things, going different places, and trying to figure out what I actually want to build. And the older I get, the more I realize I don't necessarily want something flashy.

I want something real.

Something I can work on with my own two hands. Something that gets a little better every year. Something my kids can walk through someday and say, "My dad planted these."

And maybe that's why I decided to start writing this down.

Because I don't want to wait until I've got fifty acres, a barn, and a thousand apple trees to tell the story. I want to remember what it was like before any of that happened. When it was still mostly an idea, a whole lot of research, and me trying to figure out how the hell to make it happen.

I've already learned that growing an orchard takes patience. You can't rush a tree. You can give it good soil, water it, prune it, and do everything right, but it's still going to grow at its own pace.

I'm not exactly the most patient person in the world, so maybe that's something I need to learn too.

Anyway, that's where things stand today.

A small beginning, a pretty big dream, and a lot of work ahead.

I have no idea what this journal will look like five or ten years from now. But I think it'll be pretty cool to come back and read this first entry if I actually pull it off.

And I plan on pulling it off.

— Jeff
Jeff Hollow Orchard, Michigan