Hi There!

 

We would love to see you on the farm.
On Sunday May 5th from 10:00 AM until noon join us for a free tour!
Also, come the night before, Saturday May 4th, to camp out under the stars and wake to birdsong among the trees in the orchard.
Bring your own picnic to enjoy in the orchard after the tour on Sunday!

 

Sunday morning come and walk the orchard with your fourth generation fruit grower, Steve Ela.

 

Steve is like your personal fruit professor for teaching you what it takes to grow delicious organic fruit in Colorado.

You could also make a weekend of it. Come over on Saturday and check out the:

Adair Ela putting out home-made luminarias along the top of the farm’s encircling rock wall Christmas Eve.

When we think of a new year we think of new beginnings, of light or maybe hope refreshed, of energy reinvigorated. What is the most powerful marker of those things, and when is it a new year?

‘a single luminaria, one of 127 this year, casting a gentle light onto the snow around it’

Can you imagine if we turned off the power grid and extinguished all our heating throughout our society in the dead of the solstice (usually around December 21) night? The return of light would certainly become as notable in modern society as it was/is in pre-industrial ones.

In the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice is the longest night/shortest day of the year. Some peoples here used to extinguish all their fires on the night of the winter solstice, then relight them from scratch as a new beginning.

On the farm we really see this. Following the solstice, as the sun starts its return to longer days, the amount of solar energy coming our way starts coming back too (yay!). All the fruit trees depend on sunlight for their lives and for their ability to produce sugars in their fruit. Our farm gets 70%-80% of the electrical energy we use from solar panels. Does the new year begin with the solar turn-around of the winter Solstice?

Luminarias line the waist – high stacked rock wall on each side of the entrance to Ela Family Farms.

There are other ways to think of it though. Although the sunlight is returning, we are just beginning our winter season. It’s a time many of us would like to just curl up by a fire and rest. The trees, too, need to rest. In fact, they must accumulate a certain number of Chill Units, or chill hours (hours between 32° – 45°F) before they will emerge from dormancy and set fruit. That is certainly not a predictable calendar date – it depends entirely on the weather.

The almost-full moon shines down on an old apple orchard at Ela Family Farms. Luminarias illuminate the length of the bordering dry-stacked rock wall.

So is the new year Chill Unit or weather related? Does the new year begin when the fruit trees emerge from dormancy, perhaps? Or maybe when blooms emerge? Or something else?

This winter the full moon occurred just a few days after the solstice. So we have a kind of new lunar year, though the Chinese lunar new year isn’t until the start of February. And Diwali, the festival of lights in the Hindu calendar which combines lunar and solar calendars, marks the triumph of light over darkness with the new year starting the following day, but occurs around the start of November. And of course there’s the tradition of counting down the last moments of December 31 to a grand finale of clinking glasses and maybe fireworks ushering in a new calendar year.

Steve distributing luminarias along the rock wall

Is the new year related to solstices or to moon cycles? To a calendar we can mark with vows and parties? Each year Steve makes candles which we use for a light display on Christmas Eve, lining the dry-stacked rock wall which surrounds a big part of our farm with luminarias which burn well into the night. That is an annual ritual of quiet, and of time coming together and sharing beauty. It certainly marks a turning point for us. It has the feeling of closure, and of something renewed. Maybe this is our new year.

Spring on the farm is a glorious time, especially this year after a winter with such an astounding snowpack. Verdant green overflows every nook and cranny – such a contrast to the past couple dry years. Inevitably the new life invokes contemplations of the long line of life and years which have come before. Some aspects feel like kindness. Some are bittersweet. In all aspects, spring is a conduit of connection. We were especially surprised this spring by a reach-out for connection from our local community. We were invited into a production called Story Share – a superbly executed evening of integrated arts and community. Strikingly, the fully packed house got to share glimpses into the lives of 4 sets of folks (one of which was us :0 ). Taking the time to hear each other’s stories, and then to see those stories reflected back through the lenses of sculpture, poetry, prose, music, and live improv theater was magical. The perspective shifting set up a resonance of connection which is hard to convey, yet was profound.

We’d like to take a stab at sharing at least a part of it, because you are part of our community too. And because the echoes of sharing back and forth bring our hearts alive.

Below, you’ll find a sample of the writing and sculpture derived from our story – that of family generations growing fruit. From the Story Share 2023 night hosted by the Blue Sage Center for the Arts:

Generations of fruit growing captured in sculptural form by local artists Ryan Strand and Nina Clouse

GLORIOUS

By Michael Cooper @michaelcoopermusicandlyrics

Story Share 2023 – Ela Farms 

GRANDFATHER

“If we sell you a two-worm apple and it’s only got one
Bring it back – and we’ll give you one with two!
We stand behind the fruit we grow:
We’ll make it right if it’s not so!”

WORM

I am the worm
Inside of the apple
The apple from Ela Farms.

I peel a piece
And burrow in
To feel alive
Beneath the skin

I steal a bite
Reveal a seed
The sweetest crunch
Is guaranteed.

My meal amounts to
So much more:
The heart inside
The apple core.

FARMER

His reasons for coming back?

“To raise kids in a place where they can jump on bike
Play in the dirt
Dig a hole
Pick a peach
Walk outside and look up at the mountains
Get your hands dirty, feel things
(Even though he doesn’t do that as much as he used to anymore, because he’s in the office a lot…)

What would she miss?

“I’d miss the cascade of growth
The profusion of blooms in the spring
And watching them – burst
And then get tiny, into little, tiny fruits that start to grow
And then those get picked
And the leaves change
And they fall…
And the trees are bare
I love that.”

CUSTOMER

I tried a tablespoon of Ela Farms applesauce this afternoon:
And it was glorious.
Not too sweet. Smooth. Velvety.

“There is a satisfaction
Of taking sunlight and water
And turning it into really good fruit.”

FARM

Codling moth netting extends as far as the eye can see, like generations:
Long, long, long rows of trees, completely covered in continuous sheets
Diaphanous ghosts, scaring away the worms, so they can’t get into the apples
Mother Nature is dynamic.
Organic farming is dynamic.
There is so much heart.
Every morning, a mediation, a prayer.
Thank you, grandmother bee.
Thank you, grandfather sky.

Glorious.

photo credit Brigid McAuliffe

 

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stormy orchard, wind machine, snowy peaks

Tour group in orchard-mountians (2)

New apple Varieties in the Southeastern part of Ela Family Farms

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Ela Family Farms winter orchard - solar panels - wind machines - mountains

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Ela Family Farms has been awarded Gold Status by the Colorado State Environmental Leadership Program for our efforts in community, land, air, and water stewardship. As part of those actions, we make every effort to reuse materials, and we invite your participation! We hope that you, like we, can continue by using simply good boxes (new or not).

We are going to raise our hands in the air and say it loud and clear – We support the Bee Cause!  Why?  Because!

• Because bees are the quiet workers on the farm.  Without their work to pollinate apple, cherry, pear and plum flowers we would not get to enjoy many of the fruits we love.
• Because we know they pollinate the flowers of other plants and are a crucial part of our ecosystem.
• Because we know that bee populations are threatened by genetic bottlenecks, new diseases and pests, and various chemicals.

We rent 40 hives every year to help pollinate our fruit blooms.  They arrive sometime in early April after a long drive from the almond orchards of California.  They stay until our last fruit blooms fade and then they are off to work other crops.  We could keep our own hives, but that is full-time job in itself.  I am content to have some one else worry about bee care while I take care of the trees themselves.

The interesting thing about fruit trees is that some are varieties are self fertile and some require cross pollination.  A self fertile blossom can pollinate itself and bees are less important.  Most peaches are self fertile, with the exception of one variety we grow, the JH Hale.  Hales require the pollen of another variety on their flowers to set fruit, while the others are fine just hanging out with themselves.  Some sweet cherries are self fertile, but many are not.  Apples, pears, and plums require bees to move pollen from one variety to another for them to set fruit.  We interplant different varieties of apples to make sure different pollens are easily available for the bees to move around.  Likewise our plum varieties are intermixed for the same reason.

Despite our support of bees, we thought we might have to picket the hives this spring.  You see, honeybees are prima donnas.  They don’t want to work if it is too cold, too windy, not sunny enough, or any number of other factors.  And this spring brought all those conditions – days of murky, rainy, cool weather while the fruit trees were in bloom.  I would wander by the hives and they would be quiet with nary a soul stirring and going out to do their pollination work.  That is when I started to think we were going to have to rally them with marches and motivational speeches.

Most years, the bees easily do their job and we don’t have to worry.  In other years, pollination can make a difference in crop load.  For example, in 2015, after our terrible night of frost, I went out and carefully looked at our apple blooms.  Most were killed by the cold, but occasionally there was a blossom that had survived.  The damage was sobering, but I thought we still might have enough blooms for a 20% crop.  Then we had two weeks of murky, wet, cold weather.  The bees holed up and by the time things warmed up the blooms were past.  When I looked for that 20% crop, it wasn’t there.  Why? I think those last remaining blooms that survived the frost didn’t get pollinated and did not set fruit.

This year we were having the same kind of wet, murky weather.  Fortunately, there were windows of a few hours of sunny warmth and in those windows the bees got out and did their work.  It looks like it was enough, but not perfect.  On some fruits that were in full bloom in the worst of the murky weather, there are blooms that did not get pollinated and are now falling off.  On the plums in this picture, the ones that are yellow or pale green were not pollinated and will soon be on the ground.  Those that have green stems and are larger are the ones that were pollinated and will be the crop for this year.  There are enough good ones for a full crop, but it illustrates how important those bees are to setting a crop.

This is also one reason I always hesitate to talk about what crop we have in the orchard until after the fruits actually start to grow and I know they are going to stick on the tree.

As I write this, our beekeeper just drove in to pick up the hives and take them off to other work.  We are thankful for what they did do for us this year.  To make sure that they are available in future years we are going to keep supporting the Bee Cause – because we depend on those hives and because we have lost so many wild bees to disease and environmental stress.

Get with the buzz and support efforts to help pollinators of all types.  They contribute to our well being in so many unseen ways!