Resources

Start By Telling the Truth by Melissa Madden

October 14, 2020

This article was originally published in Issue 11 of Malus. Copyright 2020 Melissa Madden. For a print version, please subscribe to MALUS here!

This is the third in my series of pieces on the Finger Lakes National Forest in upstate New York for Malus. In the first I sang my ode to the Beauty of Edible Wildness (Issue 7, 2019). In Issue 9 (2020), I focused on the history, the where and how this place went from being occupied by the peoples of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to U.S. government owned land grazed by cows and used by human visitors for recreation.

This piece is about reconciliation and reparations. Why? Because I am goddamn grateful to be a farmer. Because I love wild spaces and I know that I can go to them whenever I wish. Because when I left my own farm, I still had a place of abundance to sooth my wounds and to stay involved in our cider culture. Because I am aware that my love of access to public and private lands for apple growing and cidermaking rests on centuries of theft of lives and land…

A Brief (and potentially erroneous) History of the Finger Lakes National Forest Apple Commons by Melissa Madden

May 9, 2020

This article was originally published in Issue 9 of Malus. Copyright 2020 Melissa Madden. For a print version, please subscribe to MALUS here!

Last fall I wrote an ode to the abandoned orchards of the Finger Lakes National Forest (FLNF) and to its uncultivated food bearing plants. I seek to explain why this place is full of apples gone feral.

The Finger Lakes National Forest lies on the backbone between Seneca and Cayuga, the two largest of the Finger Lakes. Both lakes eventually open to the St. Lawrence Seaway via Lake Ontario. The 1954 construction and control of this immense hydrology connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, fulfilling a colonial dream of linking the interior of Canada and the United States with western Europe…

On the Beauty of Edible Wildness, Prologue and Introduction by Melissa Madden

January 2, 2020

This article was originally published in Issue 7 of Malus. Copyright 2019 Melissa Madden. For a print version, please subscribe to MALUS here!

I want to take you to a place. It is not on a map; it is not a farm. It is a blurry boundary between wildness and cultivation, neglect and intention. Here live feral flavors. Here live the stories of the humans who came before and how they left or were driven from this place. These tales are written in Fall’s fruit.

To visit this place requires a bumpy drive and a hike, and a certain dedication and a high clearance vehicle. The road washes away with each heavy rain, and today it is bumpy with relics of past construction–a concrete chunk four feet long sticks vertically six inches up into the road. When I can’t find a truck to borrow, I hump my pack in…

A cider expert says it’s time to take a hard look at the history of racism associated with cidermaking.

— BY OLIVIA MAKI for CIVILEATS.COM

May 10, 2019

Jupiter Evans was born in 1743 on a Virginia plantation. We don’t know too much about his life and it is only speculated that his last name was Evans—as with so many stories of slaves, whose lives were minimally documented. Evans was born the same year and on the same plantation as Thomas Jefferson, whose father owned Evans and his family. Jefferson and Evans grew up together and played together as children. When Jefferson turned 21, he received Evans as a gift from his father. Evans traveled with and worked closely alongside Jefferson his entire life…