$100k Later… No Business Plan Yet

Last week I spent another $26,000 on our orchard. More trees, a mower, and general maintenance items.

It hurts a little, spending money on something with no clear financial return in sight.

That’s the accountant in me. The artist sees something different.

planning

This investment had no business plan behind it. It was just a dream — an inspiration from talking with my uncle and some friends, a memory of the tiny orchard my parents planted when I was a child, and a desire to turn that unloved sliver of field I drove past every day into something worth looking at. Something my future kids could grow up working in, learning the same lessons of responsibility, care, and hard work my parents taught me.

planting

The blustery day we planted those trees feels like yesterday. Each bare root stick was only a couple feet long, fragile and featureless. But carefully selected soil supplements, compost, water, and a handful of prayers were planted alongside each one.

Those first twelve months of sunshine, rain, wind, hot and cold air — all in due season — tripled each tender sapling upward and outward into the sky, downward into the soil.

pruning

A year after we’d planted, we cut the enthusiastic trees almost all the way back to where they’d started, leaving only one or two budding stubs. It felt like all that growth was in vain, but it wasn’t.

The two winters since, we’ve pruned again. The “experts” did, at least. I was always tied up with other tasks like replanting the trees that hadn’t made it, or managing the crew mulching around the trunks.

This time, my old friend Aaron, a consummate Texan agrarian who transplanted to Idaho a decade ago, was in town for a wedding and kindly agreed to help us out. Twenty minutes of watching Aaron dress up a pear tree, and something sparked in me. I tried one myself. Then a peach, and an apple. First remove the suckers, then the waterspouts shooting straight up. Aim for an open vase — 3-5 main scaffold limbs, well spaced, forking where appropriate, and never crossing. Clean up the fingertips, remove the clutter. Focus the tree’s energy. Show it how to grow.

Helen and her friends brought breakfast to the pergola a few hours later, but I hardly wanted to stop.

With each tree I pruned, it became more instinctive and less intellectual. Less is more. Balance and proportion are life and death.

Great design is like that. Yes you better understand some rules, but the point is not to follow rules. The point is to know and internalize what you’re really after. Then get in flow and have fun. Each person does it a little differently, and that’s part of the beauty. Pruning is the perfect expression of taste.

reaping

The business plan will come. Or it won’t.

I’m getting to participate in the oldest art form on earth. The one God gave us in the garden, when He commissioned us to tend and cultivate the canvas of nature. What a gift.

And I get to do it with friends like Ben, Kendall, Dennis, and many others. Each of you has played a vital part. Mowing, mulching, counseling, coaching. Fixing leaky irrigation pipes, fertilizing sickly trees, getting me to think about the hard stuff, helping me figure it all out.

While giving the very first tour to a group of about 25 folks at our Thanksgiving fair last November, I found them hiding in the tangle of bare brown bushes  — a couple of small, hard pomegranates. I split them open with my bare hands and passed them round.

Three years of patience, a thousand-plus hours of labor, $75,000. And there we were, tasting the first fruits.