Gordon Tooley, Truchas, New Mexico, Apple Guru and Soil Whisperer
The New Mexico Press Association award-winning environmental/agricultural story by photojournalist Bob Eckert.
Story and photos by Bob Eckert
Gordon Tooley has a strong support base.
“He’s an apple guru,” Gino Brazil said enthusiastically.
“A soil whisperer,” Tim Seaman said with reverence.
Both are talking about the owner and tree guru of Tooley’s Trees in Truchas, New Mexico. Brazil has his own orchard in La Mesilla and Seaman grows apples in Abiquiú, which are used for hard cider.
Brazil first encountered Tooley at a grafting workshop at the New Mexico State University Sustainable Agriculture Science Center in Alcalde.
“He introduced me to a more natural and holistic way of looking at and caring for the orchard — through teaching me about pruning, grafting, better soil care and use of organic (non pesticide) sprays designed to give the trees increased vigor and strength.”
Seaman said he appreciates Tooley’s encyclopedic knowledge of trees.
“His breadth of knowledge is so broad, I deal with him with apples, but he knows all the other fruits,” Seaman said. “He knows what works here. I’m just helping him.”
While working at a farmers market Seaman said if someone “tastes the apple of their dreams in my stand,” he’ll send them Tooley’s way.
“I tell them they can get a tree up in Truchas, and that surprises them,” Seaman said. “I’m more of a cheerleader for Gordon. He knows what he’s doing. Most everything I know about being an orchardist comes from him. He believes the foundation of everything is in the health of the soil. Both of us believe that if you take care of the soil, then most of the other problems that come up in an orchard, with pests or what have you, will take care of themselves.”
Heading up the hill
On the Tooley’s Trees website there is a map directing visitors up SR 76 from Chimayó until you hit the 15-mile marker, right before the cemetery. There turn left onto a dirt road. Almost immediately on the right is a Tooley’s Trees sign. Go down the drive until reaching the first greenhouse.
Tooley is sitting in one of the greenhouses on the property on a Sunday morning, when the orchard is open to the public. They are open Friday through Sunday to the public, from April through early November (except Labor Day weekend which is September 4, 5, 6, 2015). The other days are devoted to work that requires that they not be disturbed or as Tooley said, “Juggling five balls at once.”
“We bought this land in ’91,” Tooley said. “Cimarron, New Mexico is my home. I gallivanted around,”
Tooley became involved with orchard care and tree-growing through his father. He taught Tooley about trees while living in Cimarron on the Philmont Ranch.
“When we were younger we used to go pick apples at all these old, abandoned homesteads,” Tooley said. “Then I spent time as a laborer in farming and ranching. After that I went up to Maine and was farming and did an apprenticeship program with a fellow and saw fruit tree grafting in the early 1980s — I was about 23 — and realized that connection of the apple traits not coming through from seeds, so they have to be grafted. Grafting is a craft that has been around for over 6,000 years.”
Apple history
Tooley provides a primer on apple history in the United States. He explained a lot of the old varieties are ones that came across the country with people who were migrating. They brought with them the hopes of getting started. To assure rights to homesteading, settlers had to make improvements and planting trees was considered part of that deal, then they could receive the deed to the land.
At that time there were no grains being grown in North America and a lot of European homesteaders wanted fermented beverages.
“Apple trees will thrive just about anywhere in North America and most varieties were planted for cider,” Tooley said. “As a result of many, many seeds being planted by John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed—with his effort in the Ohio River Valley, there were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of seedlings planted and of these certain varieties exhibited desirable characteristics, which would lead them to better storage or fresh eating or even for commerce whereas most stuff that came off the trees was ground up and fermented.”
Since malted beverages were not available, Europeans needed some sort of fermented drink to “survive at homesteading,” Tooley said.
“The way we can propagate these old varieties is… they don’t come through from seed, so they have to be grafted to assure all the characteristics of that variety,” Tooley said. “A lot of those 17,000 varieties have European ancestry and came over here on the Camino Real. There are trails of old orchards, like down in the Manzanos and Salinas. We are always hunting old varieties.”
Tooley said he has over 200 varieties in his “bank.” To illustrate this quest for old varieties, Tooley uncovers a new batch of “bench grafts.”
As he gingerly pulls a batch of the grafts out from the soil, he said, “A man from Guadalupita brought over some twigs of a quite large, bright red apple with sprightly pink flesh, which is kind of an anomaly. Red flesh in apples isn’t extremely rare, but to find one of that age that is still producing is really exciting! It’s an apple they really love and I grafted up six or eight and I’ll give them a couple back for their orchard and plant some for our bank.”
Tooley is also involved with a project to preserve old trees in Colfax County. He’s working on two old orchards: one at the Philmont Ranch, the other at the Chase Ranch. The Chase Ranch trees were planted in the 1880s and the orchard is about 50 acres. There are only a handful of trees that are still producing so they’ve “mapped” them, “taken wood off them,” grafted them and have now replanted the orchards with those varieties.
“That orchard actually won an award in the 1908 World’s Fair in Chicago,” Tooley said. “So Colfax County was shipping apples before 1900 to St. Louis and Chicago. Nothing was shipped west since it was already taken care of by growers in Oregon and Washington.”
Tooley gives the history of the orchard reaching back to the 1860s, when Jesus Abreu planted an orchard at Rayado (near Cimarron). It eventually became a fort manned by Kit Carson. Jesus Abreu was part of the Abreu, Beaubian, Lucien B. Maxwell land grant.
“He had an orchard there and there is a huge stand of black walnuts and absolutely enormous pears,” Tooley said. “So we’re grafting all those varieties. I think there’s 160 new trees in a historical orchard that is now part of a museum project.”
Practical experience
Tooley’s vast knowledge came from working in orchards and asking a lot of questions.
“I’m pretty much self-taught in taxonomy, botany and woody plants,” Tooley said. “College provides a lot of basic information, but for what people really, really want to do, the practical experience is the best teacher. If you have passion for something, there are no secrets. You can find out how to do something well, if you really want to.”
As he heads into the 10-acre farm, Tooley speaks about holistic orcharding.
“The whole infrastructure of the farm and the landscape below ground is so much more enormous than just the tree itself,” he said. “Planting the tree is just one component. It gives us satisfaction and we like that, but to assure this plant’s longevity and reliability of fruit production, it has to be maintained in a healthy manner.”
Tooley walks down a dirt path and points to a field, past a fence and said, “In 1991, this field looked like that — all sagebrush, piñon, and juniper. We cleared these fields and seeded them. It’s a constant building process. We practice holistic orcharding, which means ‘whole health.’”
Tooley said everything has to be in balance. He tries to create balance, although everything isn’t in balance.
“We’re trying to create healthier habitats in the soil by feeding the beneficials: the decomposers, the fungi, the bacterias,” he said. “That helps roots get out there. A lot of times roots won’t venture too far into inhospitable soil. We want to encourage this whole orchard floor to become one huge, living organism.”
The field he is standing in, the one that was cleared and seeded, is lush and, when you walk through it, feels spongy underneath your feet. It feels extremely healthy and alive, which is exactly the idea.
“The fields are all in a permanent cover,” he said. “We have a lot of varieties of different legumes. We’ve got red clover, vetches, stinging nettles, comfrey. It creates a habitat for beneficial insects. It helps feed the bacteria and the funguses in the soil. It’s a capillary cover that retains moisture. It keeps the ground cool longer. Creates a living habitat in mulch for the good guys.”
Bats, Bugs Fertilizers—Oh my!
The tour continues and arrives at a white object hung from one of the trees.
“That’s a temperature monitor,” Tooley said. “It marks the highs and lows at night and then we can keep track of our degree-days. We use that for monitoring the insect mating cycles.”
This allows Tooley to know when the coddling moth is going to fly. When they catch males that want to mate, they can work with the mating disruptors or create an environment where the coddling moth doesn’t want to lay her eggs. This results in fewer wormy apples.
This allows intervention without using heavy-handed chemical sprays. Tooley said such sprays “kill all the good guys, too.” It’s a relatively easy thing to monitor.
He then heads to another tree nearby that has a different object hanging from it — one of the traps.
“I would imagine that most of your readers would recognize these traps since they are used a lot in the Valley,” Tooley said. “That little rubber disc there, that has a pheromone in it that emits the fragrance of the female coddling moth. The males pick that molecule up in their antenna and start flying until they find out that this isn’t a female and get stuck on this sticky pad inside. When we start catching males — that’s called ‘biofix’ — we know males are flying and we start accumulating degree-days and we know when egg laying will begin to happen.
Tooley and his staff can then interfere.
“We could saturate the field with these pheromones, so the male moths can’t find their girlfriends,” he said. “They’re like, ‘I’m going to another bar.’”
Tooley then offers another, non-chemical, scenario for moth control.
“Once the fruitlets form, we’ll spray the whole tree with micronized kaolin clay,” he said. “It’s called ‘surround.’ That creates kind of like an abrasive surface that the insects don’t like to land on and get on their feet.”
Tooley said insects are always grooming..
“We think they are always sitting in a pile of manure, they are actually always cleaning themselves,” he said. “Since they don’t like to land on this clay they’ll go to an untreated site.”
The clay treatment also allows photosynthesis to continue uninterrupted and it helps cool the surface of the fruit.
“You get less sun scald and more even ripening,” Tooley said. “It’s like a little whitewash or like putting sunscreen on them.”
Here you are free to imagine a tree full of apples with swimsuits and sunglasses lounging around a pool — happy and protected.
“We don’t use any heavy-handed insecticides or long-lasting residuals or systemic products.”
Walking through the orchard seemingly random objects are there for a reason and a specific purpose. They are all integral elements of the whole, making it stronger and fully-functioning.
“It’s like putting up the bird houses over there,” Tooley said, as he points to one of the many bird and bat houses on poles around the farm. “That’s our daytime insect crew. The coddling moth is nocturnal so also encouraging bats in an orchard where you want to control moths laying eggs is important — you need to invite bats into your life. They are voracious. And we keep bees, because bees and trees work well together because they need each other.”
To properly feed the entire orchard, hence the trees, Tooley said they use a lot of cold, unpasteurized, whole fish.
“It has a 3 percent nitrogen content, so not a heavy nitrogen — very light,” Tooley said. “NPK: nitrogen, phosphorous and potash. We’re not spraying to fertilize the trees, we’re spraying to fertilize the bacteria in the soil. We’re spraying our fish, our kelp, our fermented garlic to enhance the soil.”
The whips
Tooley continues until he reaches a field planted with many small trees.
“Down here are some of the 1-year-old whips,” he said. “After they come out of the hotbox in the greenhouse they’re transplanted here.”
Tooley bends down and touches some buds on one of the little trees. There are about 700 of these planted.
“They were pencil-sized last year,” he said. “They’ve grown this last year to about three feet tall. I cut them right here (he points to the top of the whip) and this top bud is going to keep initiating the growth and these buds down below are going to branch out. That’s how the tree scaffold starts.”
Tooley said they’ll keep the whips until spring 2016, when they’ll dig them up and sell them.
“The roots now go out about a foot on each side,” he said. “When we dig them, we get a nice fibrous root mass that we can plant in the appropriate sized bag.”
He spreads his hands out to about a foot on each side of the robust-looking whip.
“The fabric bags that we plant in, don’t allow roots to circle like plastic pots do. It’s a much more costly way to grow a plant but you get a much more fibrous root mass and no circling roots which helps in the transplanting. It allows the roots to venture out undisturbed.”
Tooley said when plants are put in pots, when removed, there is little to no soil, just a long, spiraling root, which will never straighten out. It would have to be cut, which compromises the vigor of the plant.
“Then you plant it in a harsh, difficult site and give it neglect and each of these things nicks away at the genetic potential of the plant to where it might say, ‘I just can’t make it,’” he said.
Tooley’s “tour” comes to three young workers removing rhizome grass in an area near the front gate. The area is going to be used for planting whips and the rhizome is a heady competitor for nutrients and so is removed before whip planting.
Temperature
Probably an often-overlooked aspect of planting is considering the temperature of various areas on the property. Later-blooming tree should be planted in warmer areas of the property. An area that stays cooler longer, might be a place to plant trees that tend to bloom earlier, and are often frozen as a result.
“This is a new apricot orchard down here,” Tooley said, as he points to the edge of the field. “It’s the coldest site in the whole farm. This is where the snow stays the longest and hopefully we can delay bloom on the apricots a long time. The whole field is in a permanent cover. There’s a birdhouse with hops growing on it. I’m sure the residents of that house are out at work right now. We do our work here but we want everybody else to come and work on it also.”
“Everybody else” being bees, birds, and bats.
Pine trees are also part of the habitat.
“It isn’t just fruit trees,” Tooley said. “We want conifers. We want other wooded plants. You can see that every single plant has kind of its own identity.”
Tooley said some nurseries have 300 acres of the identical tree. Tooley approaches it more like therapy.
“Every plant has its own expression,” he said. “So we work with each plant. Even with the trees, some exhibit more branchy, lateral growth, others are more upright so we work with the shape that each plant exhibits. It’s a lot easier that way.”
Tooley’s Trees’ catalogue lists some unfamiliar names: Bell de Boskoop, Chick-a-dee McIntosh, Spigold, Sops of Wine. And although Tooley’s is well-known for their apple trees, you’ll find grapes, plums, species trees and shrubs included in the catalogue along with planting tips and more.
“We don’t do anything that you’d find in the grocery store: Fuji, Braeburn, Gala, that holy trinity, we just don’t do it,” he said. “Our focus is on old, historical, heritage heirlooms that have been handed down or were very strong in commerce more than a century ago but fell out of commerce because of the expansive work that was done in California and Washington and now China and Argentina and Chile.”
A lot of the focus on varieties is when do they flower. Trying to address blooming and freezing of local pit fruit crops (apricot, peach, cherry) it’s almost a spin the wheel game to see what happens.
The rootstocks are really the determining factor of how well trees do in certain areas: heavy soils, cold winters and hot summers, drought, high pH — the rootstock holds the program for the tree and it also determines how big the tree is going to get and how precocious it is — when it comes into fruiting age.
Why tree farming
Tooley said keeping the old orchards alive and continuing the many species is important. Trees live a long time but they do have a finite life span.
“Maybe a century and a half ago somebody came from parts unknown, with no idea what to expect, but with the skill of farming or ranching or providing for themselves and the talent to plant something in a difficult environment and have it prosper and feed them and their animals and provide habitat and have it live for 150 years neglected and then they reach a lifespan, things happen to them, and then it goes away,” Tooley said. “Preservation of this stuff is really important.
There are genetic varieties that have never been gene sequenced or paralleled because many will come from seed or just grow from bear scat or somebody throws an apple core out the window and actually grows a pretty decent apple. And that is its own variety of apple. Tooley said if you plant 10,000 apple seeds, you have 10,000 different varieties of apples, most of which may be astringent and bitter, but somewhere in there, there may be one that develops into a really, really good apple.
“The whole thrill of it is that there are centuries of people’s work represented in this little box.
“Basically our whole goal is genetic preservation of forgotten fruits,” Tooley said. “We’ve been collecting old varieties for more than 25 years along the Santa Fe Trail and the Camino Real and we get calls from people all the time to come and graft an old tree that’s on its last legs.”
The regeneration is getting attention. Tooley said the seed of the old orchards won’t produce the desired variety, hence the grafting.
“People are really concerned about food stability and security and how seed saving is really, really huge and preserving perennial, permanent agriculture is equally important because the woody plants are the backbone of everything,” Tooley said “When it’s gone it’s gone.”
Tooley thinks we all have some agrarian genes in us.
Tooley’s message
“All these valleys and towns have agricultural things going on that oftentimes get missed,” Tooley said. “You know how you read the news and the press is really, really guilty of causing people to not be proactive about their environment or their habitat or the climate. The headlines in the papers or on the nightly news, ‘Mega Drought,’ ‘Worst Drought in 1,000 Years,’ and the people go, ‘I can’t do anything about it.’”
Tooley said the only way to mitigate these global crises is through photosynthesis and no bare ground.
“Protecting our water and protecting our soil and keeping it all here and alive,” Tooley said. “And they might even find some aliveness in themselves when they get on the business end of a shovel and put some energy back into the soil. They might find that refreshing.
“When the papers say, ‘Oh, we don’t have water for that.’ I say, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And don’t expect us to be able to fix this. This is huge.”
Tooley said it’s a group effort.
“Don’t just expect someone else, or the government, to fix things for you,” he said. “This tiny little place has an incremental positive effect, but it’s working and we work with a few who work with a few and then you start to see some major results. But if we keep waiting for the government and blaming them for the problem, then we’re doomed.”
Lloyd Moiola, who has a small farm in Chimayó said he’s known Tooley 12 years.
“I’d heard that he had a great tree farm up there,” Moiola said. “I used to buy trees from Plants of the Southwest and when I moved to Chimayó they mentioned that they got their trees from Gordon. So I started going directly to him. Over the years I’ve purchased 60 to 70 trees from him: apples, cherries, pears, peaches, plums, apricots… a variety, but I’ve probably got about 35 varieties of apples.
“He clearly loves what he does. He preaches organic methods and a holistic approach to healthy trees. If you go buy a tree from Gordon, he’s going to tell you exactly how to plant it, how to take care of it. He’ll help you pick out the best fruit trees for the area you live in — where you may get the most success.
Moiola said it’s contagious.
“His enthusiasm for fruit trees and orchard care management, it rubs off on people.”
Gordon Tooley has a strong support base.
“He’s an apple guru,” Gino Brazil said enthusiastically.
“A soil whisperer,” Tim Seaman said with reverence.
Both are talking about the owner and tree guru of Tooley’s Trees in Truchas, New Mexico. Brazil has his own orchard in La Mesilla and Seaman grows apples in Abiquiú, which are used for hard cider.
Brazil first encountered Tooley at a grafting workshop at the New Mexico State University Sustainable Agriculture Science Center in Alcalde.
“He introduced me to a more natural and holistic way of looking at and caring for the orchard — through teaching me about pruning, grafting, better soil care and use of organic (non pesticide) sprays designed to give the trees increased vigor and strength.”
Seaman said he appreciates Tooley’s encyclopedic knowledge of trees.
“His breadth of knowledge is so broad, I deal with him with apples, but he knows all the other fruits,” Seaman said. “He knows what works here. I’m just helping him.”
While working at a farmers market Seaman said if someone “tastes the apple of their dreams in my stand,” he’ll send them Tooley’s way.
“I tell them they can get a tree up in Truchas, and that surprises them,” Seaman said. “I’m more of a cheerleader for Gordon. He knows what he’s doing. Most everything I know about being an orchardist comes from him. He believes the foundation of everything is in the health of the soil. Both of us believe that if you take care of the soil, then most of the other problems that come up in an orchard, with pests or what have you, will take care of themselves.”
Heading up the hill
On the Tooley’s Trees website there is a map directing visitors up SR 76 from Chimayó until you hit the 15-mile marker, right before the cemetery. There turn left onto a dirt road. Almost immediately on the right is a Tooley’s Trees sign. Go down the drive until reaching the first greenhouse.
Tooley is sitting in one of the greenhouses on the property on a Sunday morning, when the orchard is open to the public. They are open Friday through Sunday to the public, from April through early November (except Labor Day weekend which is September 4, 5, 6, 2015). The other days are devoted to work that requires that they not be disturbed or as Tooley said, “Juggling five balls at once.”
“We bought this land in ’91,” Tooley said. “Cimarron, New Mexico is my home. I gallivanted around,”
Tooley became involved with orchard care and tree-growing through his father. He taught Tooley about trees while living in Cimarron on the Philmont Ranch.
“When we were younger we used to go pick apples at all these old, abandoned homesteads,” Tooley said. “Then I spent time as a laborer in farming and ranching. After that I went up to Maine and was farming and did an apprenticeship program with a fellow and saw fruit tree grafting in the early 1980s — I was about 23 — and realized that connection of the apple traits not coming through from seeds, so they have to be grafted. Grafting is a craft that has been around for over 6,000 years.”
Apple history
Tooley provides a primer on apple history in the United States. He explained a lot of the old varieties are ones that came across the country with people who were migrating. They brought with them the hopes of getting started. To assure rights to homesteading, settlers had to make improvements and planting trees was considered part of that deal, then they could receive the deed to the land.
At that time there were no grains being grown in North America and a lot of European homesteaders wanted fermented beverages.
“Apple trees will thrive just about anywhere in North America and most varieties were planted for cider,” Tooley said. “As a result of many, many seeds being planted by John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed—with his effort in the Ohio River Valley, there were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of seedlings planted and of these certain varieties exhibited desirable characteristics, which would lead them to better storage or fresh eating or even for commerce whereas most stuff that came off the trees was ground up and fermented.”
Since malted beverages were not available, Europeans needed some sort of fermented drink to “survive at homesteading,” Tooley said.
“The way we can propagate these old varieties is… they don’t come through from seed, so they have to be grafted to assure all the characteristics of that variety,” Tooley said. “A lot of those 17,000 varieties have European ancestry and came over here on the Camino Real. There are trails of old orchards, like down in the Manzanos and Salinas. We are always hunting old varieties.”
Tooley said he has over 200 varieties in his “bank.” To illustrate this quest for old varieties, Tooley uncovers a new batch of “bench grafts.”
As he gingerly pulls a batch of the grafts out from the soil, he said, “A man from Guadalupita brought over some twigs of a quite large, bright red apple with sprightly pink flesh, which is kind of an anomaly. Red flesh in apples isn’t extremely rare, but to find one of that age that is still producing is really exciting! It’s an apple they really love and I grafted up six or eight and I’ll give them a couple back for their orchard and plant some for our bank.”
Tooley is also involved with a project to preserve old trees in Colfax County. He’s working on two old orchards: one at the Philmont Ranch, the other at the Chase Ranch. The Chase Ranch trees were planted in the 1880s and the orchard is about 50 acres. There are only a handful of trees that are still producing so they’ve “mapped” them, “taken wood off them,” grafted them and have now replanted the orchards with those varieties.
“That orchard actually won an award in the 1908 World’s Fair in Chicago,” Tooley said. “So Colfax County was shipping apples before 1900 to St. Louis and Chicago. Nothing was shipped west since it was already taken care of by growers in Oregon and Washington.”
Tooley gives the history of the orchard reaching back to the 1860s, when Jesus Abreu planted an orchard at Rayado (near Cimarron). It eventually became a fort manned by Kit Carson. Jesus Abreu was part of the Abreu, Beaubian, Lucien B. Maxwell land grant.
“He had an orchard there and there is a huge stand of black walnuts and absolutely enormous pears,” Tooley said. “So we’re grafting all those varieties. I think there’s 160 new trees in a historical orchard that is now part of a museum project.”
Practical experience
Tooley’s vast knowledge came from working in orchards and asking a lot of questions.
“I’m pretty much self-taught in taxonomy, botany and woody plants,” Tooley said. “College provides a lot of basic information, but for what people really, really want to do, the practical experience is the best teacher. If you have passion for something, there are no secrets. You can find out how to do something well, if you really want to.”
As he heads into the 10-acre farm, Tooley speaks about holistic orcharding.
“The whole infrastructure of the farm and the landscape below ground is so much more enormous than just the tree itself,” he said. “Planting the tree is just one component. It gives us satisfaction and we like that, but to assure this plant’s longevity and reliability of fruit production, it has to be maintained in a healthy manner.”
Tooley walks down a dirt path and points to a field, past a fence and said, “In 1991, this field looked like that — all sagebrush, piñon, and juniper. We cleared these fields and seeded them. It’s a constant building process. We practice holistic orcharding, which means ‘whole health.’”
Tooley said everything has to be in balance. He tries to create balance, although everything isn’t in balance.
“We’re trying to create healthier habitats in the soil by feeding the beneficials: the decomposers, the fungi, the bacterias,” he said. “That helps roots get out there. A lot of times roots won’t venture too far into inhospitable soil. We want to encourage this whole orchard floor to become one huge, living organism.”
The field he is standing in, the one that was cleared and seeded, is lush and, when you walk through it, feels spongy underneath your feet. It feels extremely healthy and alive, which is exactly the idea.
“The fields are all in a permanent cover,” he said. “We have a lot of varieties of different legumes. We’ve got red clover, vetches, stinging nettles, comfrey. It creates a habitat for beneficial insects. It helps feed the bacteria and the funguses in the soil. It’s a capillary cover that retains moisture. It keeps the ground cool longer. Creates a living habitat in mulch for the good guys.”
Bats, Bugs Fertilizers—Oh my!
The tour continues and arrives at a white object hung from one of the trees.
“That’s a temperature monitor,” Tooley said. “It marks the highs and lows at night and then we can keep track of our degree-days. We use that for monitoring the insect mating cycles.”
This allows Tooley to know when the coddling moth is going to fly. When they catch males that want to mate, they can work with the mating disruptors or create an environment where the coddling moth doesn’t want to lay her eggs. This results in fewer wormy apples.
This allows intervention without using heavy-handed chemical sprays. Tooley said such sprays “kill all the good guys, too.” It’s a relatively easy thing to monitor.
He then heads to another tree nearby that has a different object hanging from it — one of the traps.
“I would imagine that most of your readers would recognize these traps since they are used a lot in the Valley,” Tooley said. “That little rubber disc there, that has a pheromone in it that emits the fragrance of the female coddling moth. The males pick that molecule up in their antenna and start flying until they find out that this isn’t a female and get stuck on this sticky pad inside. When we start catching males — that’s called ‘biofix’ — we know males are flying and we start accumulating degree-days and we know when egg laying will begin to happen.
Tooley and his staff can then interfere.
“We could saturate the field with these pheromones, so the male moths can’t find their girlfriends,” he said. “They’re like, ‘I’m going to another bar.’”
Tooley then offers another, non-chemical, scenario for moth control.
“Once the fruitlets form, we’ll spray the whole tree with micronized kaolin clay,” he said. “It’s called ‘surround.’ That creates kind of like an abrasive surface that the insects don’t like to land on and get on their feet.”
Tooley said insects are always grooming..
“We think they are always sitting in a pile of manure, they are actually always cleaning themselves,” he said. “Since they don’t like to land on this clay they’ll go to an untreated site.”
The clay treatment also allows photosynthesis to continue uninterrupted and it helps cool the surface of the fruit.
“You get less sun scald and more even ripening,” Tooley said. “It’s like a little whitewash or like putting sunscreen on them.”
Here you are free to imagine a tree full of apples with swimsuits and sunglasses lounging around a pool — happy and protected.
“We don’t use any heavy-handed insecticides or long-lasting residuals or systemic products.”
Walking through the orchard seemingly random objects are there for a reason and a specific purpose. They are all integral elements of the whole, making it stronger and fully-functioning.
“It’s like putting up the bird houses over there,” Tooley said, as he points to one of the many bird and bat houses on poles around the farm. “That’s our daytime insect crew. The coddling moth is nocturnal so also encouraging bats in an orchard where you want to control moths laying eggs is important — you need to invite bats into your life. They are voracious. And we keep bees, because bees and trees work well together because they need each other.”
To properly feed the entire orchard, hence the trees, Tooley said they use a lot of cold, unpasteurized, whole fish.
“It has a 3 percent nitrogen content, so not a heavy nitrogen — very light,” Tooley said. “NPK: nitrogen, phosphorous and potash. We’re not spraying to fertilize the trees, we’re spraying to fertilize the bacteria in the soil. We’re spraying our fish, our kelp, our fermented garlic to enhance the soil.”
The whips
Tooley continues until he reaches a field planted with many small trees.
“Down here are some of the 1-year-old whips,” he said. “After they come out of the hotbox in the greenhouse they’re transplanted here.”
Tooley bends down and touches some buds on one of the little trees. There are about 700 of these planted.
“They were pencil-sized last year,” he said. “They’ve grown this last year to about three feet tall. I cut them right here (he points to the top of the whip) and this top bud is going to keep initiating the growth and these buds down below are going to branch out. That’s how the tree scaffold starts.”
Tooley said they’ll keep the whips until spring 2016, when they’ll dig them up and sell them.
“The roots now go out about a foot on each side,” he said. “When we dig them, we get a nice fibrous root mass that we can plant in the appropriate sized bag.”
He spreads his hands out to about a foot on each side of the robust-looking whip.
“The fabric bags that we plant in, don’t allow roots to circle like plastic pots do. It’s a much more costly way to grow a plant but you get a much more fibrous root mass and no circling roots which helps in the transplanting. It allows the roots to venture out undisturbed.”
Tooley said when plants are put in pots, when removed, there is little to no soil, just a long, spiraling root, which will never straighten out. It would have to be cut, which compromises the vigor of the plant.
“Then you plant it in a harsh, difficult site and give it neglect and each of these things nicks away at the genetic potential of the plant to where it might say, ‘I just can’t make it,’” he said.
Tooley’s “tour” comes to three young workers removing rhizome grass in an area near the front gate. The area is going to be used for planting whips and the rhizome is a heady competitor for nutrients and so is removed before whip planting.
Temperature
Probably an often-overlooked aspect of planting is considering the temperature of various areas on the property. Later-blooming tree should be planted in warmer areas of the property. An area that stays cooler longer, might be a place to plant trees that tend to bloom earlier, and are often frozen as a result.
“This is a new apricot orchard down here,” Tooley said, as he points to the edge of the field. “It’s the coldest site in the whole farm. This is where the snow stays the longest and hopefully we can delay bloom on the apricots a long time. The whole field is in a permanent cover. There’s a birdhouse with hops growing on it. I’m sure the residents of that house are out at work right now. We do our work here but we want everybody else to come and work on it also.”
“Everybody else” being bees, birds, and bats.
Pine trees are also part of the habitat.
“It isn’t just fruit trees,” Tooley said. “We want conifers. We want other wooded plants. You can see that every single plant has kind of its own identity.”
Tooley said some nurseries have 300 acres of the identical tree. Tooley approaches it more like therapy.
“Every plant has its own expression,” he said. “So we work with each plant. Even with the trees, some exhibit more branchy, lateral growth, others are more upright so we work with the shape that each plant exhibits. It’s a lot easier that way.”
Tooley’s Trees’ catalogue lists some unfamiliar names: Bell de Boskoop, Chick-a-dee McIntosh, Spigold, Sops of Wine. And although Tooley’s is well-known for their apple trees, you’ll find grapes, plums, species trees and shrubs included in the catalogue along with planting tips and more.
“We don’t do anything that you’d find in the grocery store: Fuji, Braeburn, Gala, that holy trinity, we just don’t do it,” he said. “Our focus is on old, historical, heritage heirlooms that have been handed down or were very strong in commerce more than a century ago but fell out of commerce because of the expansive work that was done in California and Washington and now China and Argentina and Chile.”
A lot of the focus on varieties is when do they flower. Trying to address blooming and freezing of local pit fruit crops (apricot, peach, cherry) it’s almost a spin the wheel game to see what happens.
The rootstocks are really the determining factor of how well trees do in certain areas: heavy soils, cold winters and hot summers, drought, high pH — the rootstock holds the program for the tree and it also determines how big the tree is going to get and how precocious it is — when it comes into fruiting age.
Why tree farming
Tooley said keeping the old orchards alive and continuing the many species is important. Trees live a long time but they do have a finite life span.
“Maybe a century and a half ago somebody came from parts unknown, with no idea what to expect, but with the skill of farming or ranching or providing for themselves and the talent to plant something in a difficult environment and have it prosper and feed them and their animals and provide habitat and have it live for 150 years neglected and then they reach a lifespan, things happen to them, and then it goes away,” Tooley said. “Preservation of this stuff is really important.
There are genetic varieties that have never been gene sequenced or paralleled because many will come from seed or just grow from bear scat or somebody throws an apple core out the window and actually grows a pretty decent apple. And that is its own variety of apple. Tooley said if you plant 10,000 apple seeds, you have 10,000 different varieties of apples, most of which may be astringent and bitter, but somewhere in there, there may be one that develops into a really, really good apple.
“The whole thrill of it is that there are centuries of people’s work represented in this little box.
“Basically our whole goal is genetic preservation of forgotten fruits,” Tooley said. “We’ve been collecting old varieties for more than 25 years along the Santa Fe Trail and the Camino Real and we get calls from people all the time to come and graft an old tree that’s on its last legs.”
The regeneration is getting attention. Tooley said the seed of the old orchards won’t produce the desired variety, hence the grafting.
“People are really concerned about food stability and security and how seed saving is really, really huge and preserving perennial, permanent agriculture is equally important because the woody plants are the backbone of everything,” Tooley said “When it’s gone it’s gone.”
Tooley thinks we all have some agrarian genes in us.
Tooley’s message
“All these valleys and towns have agricultural things going on that oftentimes get missed,” Tooley said. “You know how you read the news and the press is really, really guilty of causing people to not be proactive about their environment or their habitat or the climate. The headlines in the papers or on the nightly news, ‘Mega Drought,’ ‘Worst Drought in 1,000 Years,’ and the people go, ‘I can’t do anything about it.’”
Tooley said the only way to mitigate these global crises is through photosynthesis and no bare ground.
“Protecting our water and protecting our soil and keeping it all here and alive,” Tooley said. “And they might even find some aliveness in themselves when they get on the business end of a shovel and put some energy back into the soil. They might find that refreshing.
“When the papers say, ‘Oh, we don’t have water for that.’ I say, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And don’t expect us to be able to fix this. This is huge.”
Tooley said it’s a group effort.
“Don’t just expect someone else, or the government, to fix things for you,” he said. “This tiny little place has an incremental positive effect, but it’s working and we work with a few who work with a few and then you start to see some major results. But if we keep waiting for the government and blaming them for the problem, then we’re doomed.”
Lloyd Moiola, who has a small farm in Chimayó said he’s known Tooley 12 years.
“I’d heard that he had a great tree farm up there,” Moiola said. “I used to buy trees from Plants of the Southwest and when I moved to Chimayó they mentioned that they got their trees from Gordon. So I started going directly to him. Over the years I’ve purchased 60 to 70 trees from him: apples, cherries, pears, peaches, plums, apricots… a variety, but I’ve probably got about 35 varieties of apples.
“He clearly loves what he does. He preaches organic methods and a holistic approach to healthy trees. If you go buy a tree from Gordon, he’s going to tell you exactly how to plant it, how to take care of it. He’ll help you pick out the best fruit trees for the area you live in — where you may get the most success.
Moiola said it’s contagious.
“His enthusiasm for fruit trees and orchard care management, it rubs off on people.”
Gordon Tooley holds “bench grafts” in greenhouse. These were grafted from an old tree from Guadalupita, New Mexico
Josh Raft, Quirvira Coalition New Agrarian Program apprentice (left), Sara Schiros and Ikhzaan Saleem, clear rhizome grass in anticipation of planting new trees. Lila the dog makes sure work continues on schedule.
"Bench Grafts” in one of the greenhouses. These were grafted from an old tree from Guadalupita, New Mexico
Knife used for pruning and Tooley’s Trees labels on a table in the greenhouse.
Temperature gauge hangs on tree. It’s used to determine when moths will lay eggs so Tooley can intervene, preventing worm holes in apples.
: Moth trap hangs on apple tree. The trap has a small rubber device that emits female moth pheromones and a sticky portion to capture male moths thinking they had a hot date.
“Another worn-out soul,” said Gordon Tooley and we passed by one of the many old boots atop fence posts at Tooley’s Trees in Truchas, New Mexico
Gordon Tooley peers into humid, lush cover crop covered floor, which will hold ginger, a crop in need of high humidity.
Gordon Tooley poses in greenhouse. “I’m glad I wore my Sunday best,” Tooley said when he realized he was going to be photographed for the story.
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