Sleep, Creep, Leap
Solving the Puzzle of Perennials
by Gowan Batist
After a decade at Fortunate Farm, I still haven’t harvested fruit from trees I’ve planted here. I grew up next to the ocean on land we shared with my grandma. She grew beautiful apple trees—whose branches I would climb—plus many colors of rose bushes and rows of raspberry vines, all without deer fencing. My best memories of childhood have the smell of sweet, slightly fermented fallen fruit and the hum of bees. I always thought I would have a garden like hers when we moved onto our own farm.
There were a few ancient, hollow-trunked apple trees that still bore fruit on the farm when we arrived, but they have mostly since blown over in winter storms. There was a red plum totally taken over by its rootstock and climbed by gorse, and a pear, which in the early days never fruited due to lack of a pollinator. Not knowing what variety it was, in about 2016 I grafted several scions I got at the Boonville Seed and Scion exchange, hoping that one of them would be compatible with the main tree. The tree did make fruit after that, but a hard woody Bosc type that never ripened. We are so close to the ocean we can hear the seals and smell the salt, so maybe that isn’t surprising.
Between the two barns on our driveway stands a towering chestnut, a Chinese hybrid, which blooms heavily every spring and makes thousands of spiny burs, filled with flat, empty nuts. Legend has it that there used to be a pollinator tree, but that it cracked in half and died long before we arrived. I planted a mix of chestnut seedlings from Burnt Ridge Nursery in 2015, and the few that survived the deer are just now beginning to flower. I don’t know if they will be able to pollinate our huge tree, but I have hope.
The reasons why we didn’t plant many perennial crops like fruit trees and cane berries are these:
1) We are very close to the ocean, with salty soil and few chilling hours, meaning many fruit trees won’t do well here.
2) Our soil is very sandy until about 3-4 feet down, where it becomes an impermeable layer of Graywacke sandstone. In winter the ground is very wet, which rots tree roots. In summer, the sandy soil drains nutrients and water a bit too well. Adding organic matter buffers both of these effects, but takes time. It’s also harder to work around perennial plants when planting cover crops, grazing sheep, and spreading mulch.
3) Our farm is absolutely covered in two very aggressive non-native plants: Holcus grass, also known as velvet grass, and gorse. Many native plants I initially transplanted were lost to overshadowing by both. Plus, working around the transplants makes dealing with the gorse much more complicated and expensive.
4) The deer. For most of the farm’s history we have not had an effective deer fence. We have mostly grown crops that are deer resistant, such as dahlias and pumpkins, and accepted some loss of our kale and beets. Attempts were made. In 2015 we valiantly encircled the growing area in 10 foot t-posts and hung black plastic deer mesh. The deer responded by sprinting straight through it, leaving vertical, deer shaped slashes. We were never able to afford metal fencing, and so after also trying ultrasound devices, motion activated sprinklers, lights that flashed at night, and lines of electric fence only to watch the deer casually stroll through it all ... we gave up. Annual crops on our farm actually coexist with the deer fairly well. Our strategy is to plant enough to handle some loss, and there’s a lot of forage for them surrounding us. So as frustrating as it could sometimes be, we adapted and accepted. Fruit trees and berries were the exception to this rule. Deer would walk right past the most succulent native forage to kill our baby trees and strip our raspberry canes. We planted them, we lost them, we relented.
Initially we ordered rootstocks wholesale, and eagerly read about varieties of scions (thin branches of fruiting wood pruned off of mother trees) available for free annually at the Seed and Scion exchange. I grafted so many baby trees, and found out that I could endlessly recycle the rootstocks. If you top graft a scion into a rootstock (basically a rooted stick) you end up with a section of rootstock stick left over from above the graft. This stick would grow new roots if planted in the right conditions, enabling a new top graft the next year. I made a 10-pack of rootstocks into about 30 small apple trees in this way, before a deer ate all my rootstocks, too.
I love grafting fruit trees. In the early days of Fortunate Farm, I envisioned rows of semi-dwarf trees acting as demarcations between growing field areas—a living hedge that could block wind, bear fruit, and feed bees. I read Mark Shepherd’s book, Restoration Agriculture, and watched videos of how he transformed his former commodity crop farm into a thriving polyculture. I even met him at a conference. I attempted to follow his method of STUN: Sheer, Total, Utter Neglect. He planted trees and other perennial shrubs, gave them very little care, and then whichever ones survived he planted more of. I tried this but had no survivors. I was prepared by his book and lectures for a low success rate, but having no successes to build off of was deeply demotivating.
Eventually I started just grafting and giving away the small trees. Nothing I did to keep them alive where I lived seemed to work—wire cages got collapsed inwards by deer. Gorse and Holcus grew up through the layers of cardboard and mulch that I surrounded them with. The cool wet coastal conditions didn’t help either. It seemed that this just wasn’t the place.
As someone who is not related to the Gowan family, but whose first name was inspired by their apple orchard, I found this deeply, and a little bitterly, ironic.
In 2022, I moved into a different house on the same farm, a shuffle that better fit the needs of our family at the time. With the move came a new yard. My partner wanted fruit trees, and optimistic that being close to the house would protect them, we planted them. Deer defoliated them nightly, despite our very loud motion-activated impact sprinkler. The deer would shred the trees while simultaneously being pelted in the butt by jets of water. We built a robust deer fence around just our yard. We were able to justify the expense of fencing the smaller area since it would also keep our child out of the shared driveway. It worked.
For the first time we have lush, abundant perennial growth. We remove gorse in this protected area by hand and mow the Holcus. So far the deer haven’t figured out how to get in. We used sheep wool covered by mulch to buffer the soil around the roots. We planted apples in the lawn, elderberries in a hedge around the fence line, citrus trees in the warm sun trap against the greenhouse, kiwis and runner beans on the frame of an old chicken coop, thornless blackberries, hedges of raspberries, blueberries, currants and strawberries, and a big stand of gangly purple tree collards that look like an illustration by Dr. Suess. Better late than never, we had the beginning of something that looked like my childhood garden.
Sleep, Creep, Leap is a well-known saying in the gardening world with no definitive attribution. It refers to how a perennial plant establishes itself. The plant focuses the first year on root system development, without much to look at above ground. In the second year some above ground growth becomes more noticeable. In the third year the plant leaps, shooting ahead. Growing is not a neat algorithmic process. It doesn’t happen at an even rate, but it gallops and rests. I can see the same truth applied to our toddler, who seems to fluctuate between rapid visible periods of growth, and more internal resting and reflecting times.
In 2025, we are in our first Leap Fall on our corner of protected farm land. In the big field, the corn and beans still get grazed, the deer taking their share and leaving enough for all of us. On our one little acre, we have an incubation space for baby and perennials alike, and both are outpacing our expectations.
We chose fall-bearing, (also called everbearing) raspberries because they don’t need a trellis. Their canes stand firm and upright on their own. Instead of bearing fruit on their second year growth like June-bearing raspberries, they bear on the green growth of the first year canes. This means they can be mowed to the ground in the fall and will still fruit again the following year. I planted the raspberries according to the layout my grandma planted hers, also within sight of the ocean in Mendocino. What I didn’t remember at the time was that she planted June-bearing types. I remember the vines as fairly spindly, with a slow rate of spread, the rows planted 6’ apart. Each fall she would clip the last year’s canes and we would haul them to the brushy compost piles at the edge of the orchard, where the land sloped down towards the headlands to the beach. Then we gently trained the green new growth onto the trellis. It was all very orderly.
Either our sheep wool and compost are a more nutritious bed than she gave her canes or the fall-bearing varieties are built differently. We planted our rows 6’ apart and now there are no rows, only a green thicket as impenetrable as a dense jungle of bamboo, in which our toddler likes to pretend to be a tiger. My grandma said she grew berries so “I’ll never lose you kids”—because we would always be found picking them. With our berries, losing the toddler is a very real possibility. We’re going to have to reconsider our bed spacing this winter, but I’m loving the wild profusion, the absolute lack of efficiency of it all, the luxury that is a human scale rather than a commercial endeavor, and our kiddo, stained with juice from head to foot, in the middle of it all. It’s hard to reconcile the tiny dormant twigs we planted a few years ago with all this verdant growth. The canes are thicker than my pointer finger and stand straight and tall, higher than my head. It seems a little implausible how much our kid has grown in the same amount of time, too.
The elderberries’ umbels, wider than my head and cream yellow, coat me in pollen when I stop to breathe them in. The elderberries we planted from 3” plugs are now taller than I am, reaching their lacy compound leaves almost to the top of the fence, and our little bare root apples are spreading and widening their branches.
I used to think I couldn’t have this here, but the truth was that I just couldn’t have this everywhere. We had to pick one sheltered spot, smaller and closer to home. We had to put the upfront expense and effort into real fencing, deep mulching, and drip watering. The results have been overwhelming, and we’re eating berries. If I’d tried to do less in my twenties, I’d probably have more done now. This farm has been a particularly strict teacher in some ways, and I’ve been a particularly slow student, but some of the lessons are finally paying off.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist following sheep around the skeleton of a boom town. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed with a baby on her back, propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or meal prepping baby food with local bulk food via the MendoLake Food Hub.