The Apple Club Newsletter

Spring 2004

Like this newsletter, spring (at least for apples) is a bit late this year. Bud break is just happening on apples now, and this, while it would have been considered normal twenty years ago, can now be considered late. That is thanks to global warming, and the fact that over the past ten years bud break for many tree species has advanced by about ten days on average.
So now that spring is arriving at last, I hope that you enjoy our spring newsletter.

Apples in Italy

Italy produces more apples than any other country in Europe. A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit one of the main growing regions in Sud-Tyrol. There are many things that I did not know about this area just south of Austria, including that their first language is German, and that when they sell apples to other parts of Italy they call it “exporting”.
Sud Tyrol is located in the mountains, and apples are grown in elevated valleys varying from 200m (750ft.) to 1000m (3000ft.) above sea level. Apples grow well at high elevations (remember that 1000m is about the same height as Carrantoohil) due to the high light levels in summer and cool autumns that help to colour the fruits. In the Sud Tyrol region there are eighteen thousand apple growers, each with a small farm of about five acres. When you visit this area, you see nothing but orchard after orchard after orchard, with just the occasional vineyard here and there. Every inch of land is used, which is not surprising given that land prices are in excess of €100,000 per acre.
You might expect that with so many growers in such a small area, that people might have difficulty selling their crops. This is not the case however, as growers are very well organised. There are thirty co-ops which are owned by all growers and run by elected grower boards. For co-ordinated marketing there is also an umbrella co-op that looks after this.
This structure means that all the profits from packing the apples go back to the grower. This is in stark contrast to many countries, where one or two large packers can offer growers any dismal price, knowing that the grower has no option but to sell to them. These large packers then pocket handsome profits while the producers are squeezed to the limit.
In Sud Tyrol, the co-operatives not only pass back the profits from packing fruit to their growers, they are also involved in making further products like frozen apple pieces and apple juice. Thus, the more profitable elements of the business with more “value-added” products help pay to keep the producers in business.
For someone like myself, coming from Ireland where the co-op’s were formerly involved in many more areas of agriculture such as meat processing, and where this is now in the hands of one or two private firms, I could not help but wonder had Irish farmers made a mistake by opting to deal with private companies instead of co-op’s. Perhaps it is not too late for beef farmers to follow the lead of the milk producers, and put their faith in the co-operative movement.
Finally, about Italy, I am pleased to note that although they grow very beautiful apples there, none I tasted while there was quite as nice as the top-quality Irish grown apples I am used to. I always think that while it’s difficult to grow an Irish apple, it’s also difficult to beat an Irish apple.

Cahir Farmers' Market

The farmers’ market in Cahir is continuing to do well. Along with organic beef, lamb, chicken and pork, all sold by the farmers who produce them, there is now a fantastic range of fish sourced by Pat Hartley.
Pat is a former restaurant owner and chef, and therefore, as well as getting the best of fresh fish, you will also get a recipe, and perhaps some of the sauces that he sells from his stall too. And, if that is not enough, Pat also has Bridgestone-award-winning fish pies for sale.
As always, there are fresh vegetables and lovely baked products for sale at the market too. Take the time to visit on a Saturday between 9am and 1pm. Cahir farmers’ market is open every Saturday.

Bulldozing history and landscape

By Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times of March 16th, 2004.
A hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus wrote of an island far to the north of the Mediterranean world.
Drawing on now-lost accounts which were hundreds of years older still, he described this island with a "mild climate" which lay "beyond the domain of the Celts".
Here, he claimed, was the birthplace of Leto, mother of the sun god Apollo. For this reason, he wrote, the sun god was venerated there in a "splendid enclosure" which contained a round temple. His account hints at a cult of rebirth involving the sun, the sky and the wind in a mythic ritual of impregnation and regeneration.
Diodorus's account may have nothing whatsoever to do with Ireland and Newgrange. But it just might be a translation into the terms of Greek myth of what were even then ancient rumours of the great round temple that is penetrated by the sun during the winter solstice, giving birth to a new year and renewed life. Since the sacred complex at the Boyne Valley was as ancient in Greek times as the ancient Greeks are to us, it is not at all fanciful to think that some knowledge of its cults and power had made its way into the classical cultures of the Mediterranean.
Move forward 2,000 years and there is another extraordinary testimony to the radiant potency of the culture whose holy places stretched between the Boyne Valley and Tara. Everyone now knows about the sun's entrance into the Newgrange tomb.
But when the site was being excavated in the 1950s and early 1960s, there was no reason to suspect such a thing. The occurrence is unique to the place, and the aperture which allows the light to enter had been hidden for at least a thousand years. Yet the archaeologists who were conducting the excavation were told by locals that some such phenomenon was connected with the mound. A vague but truthful memory had lingered over generations.
Does any of this matter? Not in the straightforward, simple sense that getting to work and earning a living and coping with the stress of contemporary life matters. It doesn't put food on the table or money in the bank.
But in a broader sense, it is important. Some kind of respect for the wonder and fragility of human survival has become almost as necessary to us as food and shelter. We can no longer take our species for granted and we need to be reminded of that fact or else risk extinction.
And it matters in a more local way, too. A society that has changed as rapidly as ours and that has such an awkward and unresolved relationship to its history needs to be reminded that the past is both long and deep and that nothing ever really goes away. Adopting the way archaeologists view the world - as a set of layers, some closer to the surface than others - is the only healthy solution to our society's neurotic swings between obsession and amnesia.
All of this is a way of saying that the plans to drive a big motorway through this sacred landscape are the epitome of the crass, vulgar values that now holds sway here. The M3 will not go through the Boyne Valley, but it will bisect the spiritual centre of the world of those who built and used the Boyne Valley monuments. It will include a huge 34-acre floodlit intersection a kilometre from the Hill of Tara which has been, as D ith h g in puts it, "a sacred centre from time immemorial".
As a stellar array of national and international scholars wrote in a recent letter to The Irish Times, the Tara/Skryne valley which will be cut in two by the toll road, is "one of the most culturally and archaeologically significant places in the world ... it holds a special key to understanding the continuous progression of European civilisation".
The motorway will be of dubious value, and a number of perfectly sensible alternatives have been put forward. But it will be a nice little earner for private investors. The taxpayer will put up at least half of the €680 million cost, but whoever puts up the other half will get a 30-year licence to charge two separate tolls along its 47-kilometre length. The profits will be vast - probably double the size of the investment.
The decision to press ahead with this monstrosity is in itself an eloquent statement of contemporary Irish values. A few decades ago, there was a living memory in Co Meath of things that stretched all the way to prehistoric times.
Now, memory itself - the sense that there are layers of meaning both literally and metaphorically beneath our feet - is a bloody nuisance. There is money to be made and the prospect of cutting a few minutes off a journey. Anything else is an irrelevance. People, history, cultures, landscapes, the delicate web of connections that binds us to one another and to the earth, are so much debris to be bulldozed aside.
When the Taoiseach loftily dismisses all infidels to the great god of motorways as "swans, snails, and people hanging out of trees" he gives voice to a deep contempt for anything that can't be measured in tonnes of concrete and loads of money.

Farm machinery, By Willem Traas

In the newsletter of winter 2003, you could read about the history of Moorstown castle. This time I write for people with an interest in machinery. And so I go back to the time I lived in Holland.
The first tractor my father and I had was an Allgayer (made by Porsche). It had a one-cylinder 12 horsepower engine. It was a bad yoke. Sometimes it bolted like a horse. Somehow the pedal would get stuck and you could not stop it. I remember once when it would not stop, my father was going around the back of the shed and turning around the old pear tree, hoping that it would run out of diesel or some other miracle would happen to stop it.
The Allgayer came to its end when it finally blew up. The engine cracked.
After that we had a Renault. The Renault was a 2-cylinder 20 horsepower tractor. It was a good tractor. We bought it in 1956, and it is still there. My sister has it and it is in working order.
Other growers had Massey Ferguson’s, Grey Fords, Allis Chalmers and Fiats. The Allis Chalmers were brought from America after the Second World War to help farmers in Europe. They ran on petrol and were very reliable.
Some growers could not afford ordinary tractors and had little two-wheel machines with handlebars for steering. The first ones were Planet’s and Trusty’s. Others were Agria and Bungards. The Planet was very popular but the Trusty could only be trusted to drive you mad. It had no reverse gear, so if you got stuck against a tree or bush you had to remove the tree or bush to go forward!
These little machines were used for transport, rotavating and mowing. On our farm we had a Bungard for rotavating and an Allen for mowing. The Allen had fingerbar for cutting and no reverse. It made a terrible noise and nobody knew about ear-protection. I worked with it for years and am slightly deaf on account of it.
In Holland we had motorised sprayers since 1936. Before that people sprayed from a barrel like the fire brigade used to, one man pumping, one man spraying.
The motorised types at that time were Hardy, Douven, Solo and Munckhof. These sprayers were pulled by a horse or the tractor and had their own engine for pumping. They had two hoses attached so two people could spray at the same time. Like a better equipped fire brigade with one driver and two sprayers.
The smaller growers had to carry a sprayer on their backs called a knapsack. In Ireland the poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote about spraying the potatoes with bluestone and lime using one of these. The chemicals would be mixed with water and pumped out by hand. Gardeners still use sprayers like these.
That is the way fruit growers in Holland were mechanised. When I came to Ireland I left the machines behind. When I came to Ireland there were many similar old tractors here. If you like you might still see them at a vintage rally.
However, I still would like to get the Renault tractor here sometime. My sister said that I could have it, and it would be handy to cut the grass on our campsite.



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