Spring 2010
Roots Approach
Northern orchard grows trees and plants as hardy as the terrain
By Dirk Van Susteren
Photographed by Stefan Hard
Spring starts with a gurgle at Elmore Roots, not an explosion of pink blossoms or the chirps of red-winged blackbirds or robins — that comes later. There are also drips from shed roofs and splashes from snowmelt making its way down the southeast-facing hillside that is Elmore Roots Fruit Tree Nursery. Six streams, bulging, flow across its 13-plus acres in Elmore in mountainous Lamoille County.
"Suddenly, the hill starts heating up, and sheets of snow start disappearing. In some places, water begins spurting up from the ground," says owner David Fried. The water is a mixed blessing. It makes for wet messy work in field and orchard, but, says Fried, "The trees love it."
While plants, big and small, are busy soaking up April's waters, Fried and his five employees are out collecting scion wood, pruning, grafting, digging and potting trees and shrubs, and tending to dozens of other tasks.
"Everything is coming back to life. ... Geese are flying north, horseradish is poking up and buds are starting to swell," says Fried. "Before you know it, you are wearing a T-shirt."
It was a T-shirt day in the first week of last May, when Fried, 52, bearded and wearing a baseball cap, greeted a visitor on the deck of the nursery's board-and-batten office. From the deck, one gets a panoramic view of the landscape: Tidy and lush, the property looks as much like a Buddhist garden as it does a commercial enterprise. Far beyond the plantings, in the distance, are the Woodbury Mountains, just reaching peak greenery.
Our informal tour begins at a Stacey pear tree a few paces from the office. "This is from Maine, an early, very sweet pear," Fried says with measured words and soft voice. "The tree makes so many pears that I can supply two or three stores with its fruit."Farther down the mulched trail, Fried points to a Luscious pear tree from South Dakota, then to a Siberian pear tree ("good for sauce") from Russia.
Virtually all of Elmore Roots' fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, flowering shrubs and grape and northern kiwi vines come from hearty stock grown in the north. The Elmore Roots motto, affixed to its brochures and website, proclaims: "If it grows in Elmore, it will grow where you are."
"We just put in a row of Swenson red grapes," he says, citing the grape named after a Wisconsin horticulturalist, a pioneer in growing cultivars for northern climates.
The winding trails at Elmore Roots lead past benches; a picnic table, where gardening workshops are held; past a fire pit, where employees sometimes have cookouts; and past a dozen sheds and shade houses, one where an Elmore Roots' staff member is busy potting pear trees. There are fences of all styles and shapes, from picket to split-rail to a 7-foot-plus deer barrier that last year stopped a moose. Several gates sport the international peace sign.
Fried points to a field lower on the hillside, site of the nursery's graft beds. It contains some 3,000 pear, plum, cherry and apple saplings, all varieties able to withstand temperatures of 40 below. "We have a collection of plants from all over the northern tier; we research and test what might do well here."
The focal point of the nursery is the rustic 400-square-foot retail shop, where a visitor can buy all the planting tools needed: pruners, hoes, extension saws, organic fertilizer, how-to books, you name it. On a shelf, colorfully displayed, are nine varieties of jam — from plum to black currant and elderberry — produced by nursery staff.
This year marks a special anniversary for Elmore Roots: It was 30 years ago this spring that Fried began putting his first trees in the ground.
He arrived in the Elmore area via hiking the Long Trail in 1979. He spent the winter of 1980-1981 in a farmhouse on the Elmore property, a guest of a friend he had met at the Organic Carrot Cooperative in East Hardwick. In the spring of 1981, he began to plant an organic garden and sell produce. Soon he was cutting alders to make way for fruit trees.
Fried traces his interest in growing things to three experiences: eating his mother's pies made from apples grown on a tree in the family's backyard in Yonkers, N.Y.; working at age 19 on a kibbutz in Israel, where he tended to banana trees and planted mangoes and avocados; and that trip on the Long Trail, where he made a habit of tasting wild fruit and nuts along the way. "On the hike, I realized how well something could grow without people (constantly) caring for it," he says.
An English major, Fried explains that he had to learn horticulture the hard way: by trial and error, from an apprenticeship and through help from orchardist mentors. A budding entrepreneur, he eventually arranged to buy the land so he could further develop his business.
Fried says "the most exciting thing we do" is finding and reproducing productive heirloom trees offering quality fruit. He reports that he occasionally will get a call from someone somewhere in the state, someone all excited about a particular tree on his or her property. If the person is persuasive enough, Fried just may give the tree a check, and, if impressed, he will make a cutting, graft it onto one of his seedlings, and, lo, the old tree will be duplicated. Elmore Roots has coined names for Fried's young introductions — Barre, Eden, Greensboro, Waterville — depending on where they were found. "Now people from Maine to Alaska have some of our Vermont trees," he says proudly.
