Orchards and Fruit

Overview

Orchards and fruit are the wealth of the Leeward Folds. In every fold the orchards take the warmer slopes, stepped up from the valley floor on dry-stone terraces and watered in turn from the cistern at the fold head, and orchard work runs the Halfling year from pruning to picking to drying and pressing. Fruit fresh and dried sits at every Halfling table, and dried fruit beyond the counted reserve is what the Folds send out along the Lee Road and the coast road. Elves grow fruit too, in the planted understorey of the Crownboughs, and gather it wild in the Elderweald.

Appearance

Fold orchards are kept low. The trees are pruned to the height a Halfling can reach from a short ladder, broad and open-centred, their trunks grey and fissured with age, and set in rows along the terraces with the retaining wall at their backs to hold the warmth. In spring the warm slopes of a fold turn white and pink with blossom in the space of a week, and the hollow hums with bees. By late summer the branches bend under fruit and the smell of a fold is fruit on the drying floors, warm stone, and the faint sourness of the presses.

Apples

The commonest tree: round-headed, with soft grey-green oval leaves and pink-flushed white blossom. Fold apples are small, firm, and many-coloured, from russet to green to striped red, and the best keepers are hard and sour at picking and sweeten in store through the winter.

Pears

Taller and narrower, white-blossomed a week before the apples. Their fruit is tear-shaped, green to golden-brown, grainy and juicy, and keeps less well; most pears are dried or pressed.

Stone fruit

Plums and their kin take the warmest, best-sheltered terraces. They blossom earliest and so suffer most from late frost. Their fruit is purple, red, or golden, bloom-dusted, soft, and quick to spoil, and nearly all of it is split and dried on the floors.

Forest fruit

In the Elderweald the Wood Elves gather what the forest lets fall: wild crab apples, sloes, haws, brambles, and berries along the clearings and streams. In the Crownboughs the understorey is cleared and planted with orchard rows, and the canopy gardens bear fruit trained along the garden-walks.

Habitat and Range

The orchard belts of the Leeward Folds are the great fruit country of the far side; Halflings also keep orchards in similar terrace worlds elsewhere on the far side. Orchards need the stillness of the Lee Wall's shadow for blossom to set, and good soil held in place by the terrace walls. In the Dry Folds on the margins, where the cisterns failed, grey-green thorn grows where the orchards should be. On the cradle-web, fruit is grown in the Crownbough understorey and gathered in the Elderweald.

Behaviour and Temperament

Fruit trees bear more one year and less the next, and a heavy crop left unthinned breaks branches. They need bees to set fruit, a still spring for the blossom to hold, and steady water through the summer for the fruit to swell. Neglected, they grow tall, crowded, and barren within a generation.

Life Cycle

A fold tree is grafted onto hardy rootstock, bears after a few years, and is kept bearing for generations by pruning in winter. Blossom comes in spring, fruit sets after the bees have done their work, and picking runs from late summer into autumn. Old trees are replaced row by row, never all at once, so that no terrace stands bare.

Uses and Dangers

Fruit is eaten fresh in season, dried on the drying floors for the winter and for trade, and pressed for juice, cider, and preserves. Orchard leagues share labour, presses, and drying floors across neighbouring folds, and orchard tally houses count what each terrace yields, so that everyone can know how much must be held back. Dried fruit travels the Lee Road to the Rimward Basins and the escort trade of the High Scars, and the coast road to The Counted Lee, where Gnome harbours take it as orchard goods in counted loads. A fold knows before it picks how much fruit a declared approach can take.

Its dangers are slow. One late frost on a still spring night, pooling in the hollows, can take a year's blossom. A run of dry years thins the harvest and leaves the question of whether to water the orchards out of the reserve. Fruit picked for an approach window that then moves is fruit lost, and the Counted Lee Timing Feud was fought over exactly that.

Lore and Belief

Tamsel the Season-Weaver was born of the orchard folds' devotion to the turning year, and wears autumn orchard-fruit in their wreath; in autumn they appear old, in crimson and brown, smelling of woodsmoke and stored fruit. Halflings tell of the Long Summer, when Tamsel held the summer form for a whole year: the warmth never broke, the fruit never stopped, the soil wore out, and the winter after emptied a fold's stores to the last measure. No fold elder needs to explain why that tale comes out at every autumn count.

Where It Appears

• Places:
• Peoples:
• Gods and magic:
• Timeline: