Based on the last week’s blooms, it looks as though at least one of the Anna Apple branches I grafted to my Gala will take.  The buds cracked the protective wax coating and burst through with ease.

What an amazing ability: No organ/limb rejection, no immune-suppressing pill regimen — just, “Thanks for the new branch.”  And now, when apple season comes around, as it has, this single tree will bloom different blooms and produce two varieties of apple that have little in common besides a capitalized Latin name.

I’m still waiting to hear from the several pear grafts, and the other Anna, but there’s promise in this first endorsement of my freshman effort.

I have been dutifully waiting for the apple trees to go dormant so I could do a little grafting.  However, in my waiting for the last leaves to drop I forgot something that I have gloated about on several occasions this winter: the character of my hometown.  In San Diego we don’t really get frost, I can grow most things most times of the year, and some trees that shed their leaves in the fall and winter elsewhere never quite do so here.

My plan has been to graft a few branches from the Anna Apple tree in my parents’ yard onto the Gala Apple in ours.  It performed so well last season that the load of giant, delicious apples left it permanently deformed.  Our Gala Apple produces, but is not nearly as successful.  And grafting seems like one of those skills it might be handy to have.

However, when I stopped by my parents’ place two days ago to borrow a tool or three, there was their Anna Apple — in full bloom, bees buzzing everywhere.  Having read nothing about grafting, I watched a nine-minute YouTube video on saddle grafts, then drove back the next day and cut the last two branches that hadn’t yet budded out.

The steps for completing this type of graft are few and relatively simple: After sterilizing a pair of pruning sheers and a sharp knife, I cut a few three-to-four-inch pieces from the Anna Apple, referred to as scion wood, including the tip of the branch; then I trimmed a few inches off of a Gala Apple branch, making sure the thickness, or caliber, of the branches at the cuts was roughly the same; next, using a sharp knife, I split the Gala Apple branch with an inch-long cut down the center; using the same knife I carved the end of the Anna Apple branch into a “V”.  After all the cutting and carving, all that’s left is to insert the Anna Apple “V” into the Gala Apple center cut, tightly wrap the joint in surgical tape (or any adhesive tape that will break down in the sun), and then paint the grafted piece with wax to keep it from dehydrating.

The graft should be shaded for a few weeks.  If, at the end of that time, the scion branch begins to bud out — success.

It’s too soon to tell if my grafts will take.  But the process of grafting seemed to go off without a hitch. I ended up grafting two Anna Apple branches onto our Gala, and four D’Anjou Pear branches onto our Bartlett.  Grafting saves space on a small property, since many varieties of edible trees require a pollinator, or second tree.  The same effect can be accomplished with a few grafted branches.

The experience of grafting felt like visiting a place you’ve read about in National Geographic.  This integral agricultural technique has been practiced for thousands of years.  So, it was like applying ancestral knowledge — despite having acquired the know-how from a YouTube video by a guy named Tom.

I came across the phrase that heads this entry in the writing of Eliot Coleman, a pioneering organic farmer.  Coleman farms in Maine, where the less than 10-hour days the phrase describes are not only low on light but also bitter cold.  The Greeks crafted the myth of Persephone to explain why their lands were less fruitful in the winter months.  According to the legend, Hades abducted Persephone and took her to the underworld to be his queen.  In her anguish, Persephone’s mother (and goddess of the earth), Demeter, refused to allow the earth to grow and fruit, essentially starving all of humanity.  Zeus negotiated the girl’s release, but a trick of Hades required that Persephone live with him part of the year.  Thus, when mother and daughter are reunited, there are bountiful harvests, but when Persephone returns to the underworld each year, all is barren.

San Diego doesn’t suffer under Demeter’s sorrow — a fact attested to by the fat, out-of-season squash that hang from my garden beds and the stubby watermelon that recently decided this would be a good time to set fruit and grow.  But those are a long way from edible.  As are the beets, lettuce, beans, carrots, and peas.  My next harvest will come in the traditionally barren months between November and February.

For us, these typically plentiful times are our Persephone months, and it’s hard to blame the gods.  Sure, I could invent some tale to explain away the troubles my warm-season crops suffered, but it seems more practical to chalk it up to inexperience and do better.  I mean, if we’re flush with fruits, vegetables, and nuts next summer, I’m not going to give credit to the gods.  I’m going to say, “I did it!  Look what I did!  It was me!”  So it hardly seems fair to dump these fruitless times on Hades because he thought some girl was smoking hot.  Nor on a goddess that grieved.  The problems with my warm season crop were not Greek.  They were more local than that.

I did it.  Look what I did.  It was me.

We’ll eat better.  Soon.

There’s something to that feast or famine adage.

So, what does 1,000 calories really add up to?  It’s about the same as drinking six cans of Pepsi.  Or eating two Big Macs.  Or three Snickers bars.  However, because homegrown food is so damn healthy, the calories accumulate at a bit slower pace than processed food (I’ve really missed an opportunity here to infuse everything with corn).  To reach this milestone we ate six strawberries, 10 grapes, 27 Husky cherry tomatoes, two asparagus, one clove of garlic, five basil leaves, one Beefsteak tomato, four small Purple Viking potatoes, and three-and-a-half medium-sized Gala apples.  We shared half that last apple with friends, enthusiastically.

I am happy with our first month’s calories, even though they fell short.  Potatoes, again, are a trip to pull from the earth.  And satisfying a snack-time craving by stepping off the front porch and snapping a ripe apple off our tree has a sense of heritage to it, and excellence — especially in the afternoon, when the apple’s sun warmed but crisp and tastes like chewing cider.

It’s been a tasty first thousand.

We had my folks over for dinner a few days ago.  I served up a Caesar salad with Husky cherry tomatoes from the garden, which went well alongside my wife’s excellent meat loaf and baked mac and cheese.  But my mom one-upped us with her homegrown contribution: a pie stuffed full of Anna Apples from the tree in her and my dad’s front yard.

The tree produces phenomenally well for only having been in the ground two seasons in an area of San Diego that gets no frost and about as many chill hours as you’d expect for “America’s Finest City”.  But the Anna likes heat, having originated in Israel, and doesn’t require the dose of cold that most apples do to flower and set fruit.  This season the tree nearly bent itself to the ground with hundreds of huge apples.  In the winter I’ll try my hand at grafting with a few branches from this tree.  We have two Galas that are doing better this year but aren’t nearly as fruitful.

Mom left us the pie, and I’ve been eating it all week and thinking about the community benefit of home-growing.  Civilizations of the past have always organized around the production of and exchange of food with neighbors.  It’s only recently that people have become completely detached from such sustenance networking, and, for the majority, completely lost the capability of producing their own food.  Despite this distance, we still come together around food — it’s just not food we’ve had a hand in.  Why not make it something we’ve grown and shared?  There’s a lot of potential in such exchanges, both in terms of relationship building and quality food production.  Maybe one yard’s good for squash but not for apples, one is all shade and another all sun, maybe one person has a green thumb but no yard and another space but can’t grow.  In each relationship there is potential for cooperation and food.  Figuring out such relationships involves getting to know people nearby, which is good for the neighborhood.  And, like most things, increasing the amount of homegrown food (the most local kind) is easier and more fun with friends and family.

There is a certain autonomy for a community that produces part of its own food cooperatively.  It means that for some portion of a meal people can opt out of the market or the restaurant for their food — two places that often offer little transparency in terms of how the food is made, where it comes from, and how it is grown.  Without home-growing there is little chance of changing the practices that are problematic in industrial food production, such as heavy use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides, because the industry has an ace: People have to eat.  And it is hard for people to hold accountable an industry they rely on to live.  Much like pharmaceuticals.  People are as likely to stop taking their meds as they are to stop eating.  Protesting a practice while funding it is not effective.

But it’s not all about protest gardening.  Sometimes you just get good pie.