Soule: Three Old Gals in Springtime Finery

Someone has lived on my farm for about a century. She started life as a fragile sapling and grew into the big apple tree that stands in our backyard. Flanked by two other apple trees almost as old, she was planted in the 1920s by Sarah Whitehouse, a previous owner of Miles Smith Farm.

Sarah was a midwife, helping babies into the world in Loudon and Canterbury, making house calls in her cart, pulled by her stylish Morgan horse. The legend goes that one birthing went badly, and the baby and mother died. Upon arriving home, in a fit of frustration, Sarah threw down her driving whip, a twitch from an apple tree. It stuck in the ground, sprouted roots, and eventually produced apples. Pleased with the tree, Sarah planted one companion on each side to provide more apples for her famous pies.

I’m no botanist and don’t know (or care) whether my trees are technically male or female. But given their ability to bear fruit, they’re female to me.

When I moved into the farmhouse in 1972, these three gals were overtaken by forest and struggling to live. With the help of a chainsaw and youthful muscles, we released them from the confinement of the woods, but they were in bad shape. Twenty-five percent of the limbs on Sarah’s twitch tree were dead, and others had sucker sprouts growing so densely from branches that there was no room for apples.

The three seemed at death’s door, so we called in a tree surgeon who cut here and there, opening up the trees and shaping the crowns, giving them a form that any mature apple tree would be proud of.

I was told by a Yankee farmer that apple trees should be pruned so that you can “throw a cat through the middle.”

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Carole Soule is co-owner of Miles Smith Farm in Loudon, N.H., where she raises and sells beef and other local products. She can be reached at carolesoule60@gmail.com.

Her book, Yes, I Name Them, will be available in Sept 2023.