My Journey in Agriculture
How a Kid from Los Angeles came to Love Apple Trees
The Giving Grove is excited to introduce Ryan Watson, our newest team member with a passion for urban agriculture and community greening. With over a decade of experience transforming urban spaces into thriving gardens, Ryan brings his expertise in orchard care and sustainable farming to The Giving Grove, where he will continue his mission of growing food and fostering community connections. Check out his fascinating journey from legal assistant to apple farmer in this blog post!
Want to learn more about The Giving Grove straight from your inbox? Consider subscribing to our quarterly newsletter!
Ryan Watson harvests heirloom apples credit: M'hammed Kilto
The Journey From LA to NY
Hello, fellow tree lovers! My name is Ryan Watson, and I’m the new Orchard National Operations & Education Manager for The Giving Grove. As I get started in this new role, I’d like to share a bit about my journey and how I came to love fruit trees.
I’ve kind of always been a plant person. As a child of a single mother, naturopathic doctor, growing up in a principally Oaxacan neighborhood of Los Angeles, going to farmers markets and surrounded by backyard gardens, I had plenty of farming influence around me. As a teenager, I grew vegetables in pots on our small balcony- no matter the space's limitations, for me, plants provided a sense of wonder and connection to the larger world. What a wonderous feeling it was to pick a free piece of fruit from a tree!
After years on a waiting list (urban land access can be a serious obstacle!) I became a member of my local community garden, Ocean View Farms. This lush oasis, filled with monarch butterflies and vibrant greenery, showed me how public green spaces can transform individuals and provide a sanctuary amidst urban chaos. From then on, public green spaces became my refuge.
Though plants were always a passion, my professional journey had a more conventional start. After studying Political Science & History, I moved to Brooklyn in 2011 and started a job as a paralegal, with law school in sight. However, after a year I realized the legal path didn’t effectuate the change I was seeking to achieve. In the evenings, I found myself spending hours in the community garden or wandering by vacant lots, dreaming of their potential. I decided to pivot from law school and pursue urban farming— a pathway that felt truer to myself.
From Legal Aide to Urban Farmer
As it would happen, in the fall of 2012, a property developer who had purchased the historic Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, released a request for proposals seeking a one-year community project on the former parking lot of the factory. While the building permitting process took place, the project would be able to remain without paying rent or utilities. We were fortunate enough to be one of the projects chosen.
What began as a one-year temporary project grew into seven years of operating a public community space and urban farm, North Brooklyn Farms. We transformed the once vacant parking lot into a green oasis that hosted thousands of visitors, as volunteers, at events, and farm-to-table dinners. It was a testament to the power of green spaces in connecting and uplifting communities.
North Brooklyn Farms showed me the potential that a green space has to transform and connect a community. After successfully converting a parking lot into a green space and seeing the potential there, I had dreamed about transforming what was previously an overgrown pasture into a productive land that supported a community with local, organically-grown, nutritious produce.
Aerial image of North Brooklyn Farms
From there, my pathway to apple growing and orchard management was rather serendipitous. In 2015, I moved to the Sullivan Catskills, just a few hours outside the city (most notable for being the site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival). That season was the biggest wild apple harvest in a generation. Everywhere you turned, the trees were sagging with heavy fruit. This region, once home to a thriving apple industry, introduced me to the beauty of heirloom apple trees. The Catskills region, at the turn of the 19th century, once claimed more than 14,000 named varieties of apples.
It was there that I fell in love with the gnarled, sometimes almost a century-old apple trees. Every season, during blossom week, we would find abandoned orchards of forgotten trees camouflaged by the forest that had grown around them or new varieties of wild seedling trees growing out of the cracks of the rock walls. It was that fall I found myself on a hillside collecting wild apples from an old farm, watching deer run along the hillside as the sun set over the fields. As I pressed my first cider of wild apples that season a deep emotional connection to apple trees developed. Since that season, I’ve never turned back.
Ryan Watson stands in field at Wild Russet Farm
Wild Russet Farm is Born
In 2017, my wife Ashli and I started Wild Russet Farm in Jeffersonville, New York. We planted 14 heirloom apple trees (on Antonovka rootstock from Fedco) in an old pasture field, starting our first orchard. And it all grew from there. One winter, I learned how to graft. I spent most of February & March collecting scion wood and would then sit in front of the wood stove and graft new orchard trees for our nursery. We added peaches, pears (European & Asian), plums, sheep, chickens, semi-dwarf trees, even some dwarf trees, and every vegetable we could grow. And always, more interesting varieties of apples. Being surrounded by wild seedling apple trees, I was fascinated by the variety of genetic potential apples exhibited: every shape, color, taste, and texture, each seedling tree being unique to itself.
Working with apples has taught me about the intricate relationships between plants, soil, and fungi and our relationship with those delicate and complex natural systems. As a cidermaker and orchard manager, I learned that cultivating the trees also meant bolstering the microbial ecosystems that support them. That holistic approach reshaped the way I approached farming and life as a whole.
After almost a decade of learning about apples and holistic orchard management, I wanted to share what I had learned with others. And even more so, I wanted to reconnect with using plants to make an impact on people’s lives and our planet. I was so fortunate, and once again serendipitously lucky, to find a shared vision and such an incredible team at the Giving Grove. It is truly powerful to see what people working together with a shared mission can achieve. I'm so excited to be a part of this mission. I’m so looking forward to all the potential that there is to achieve and to help bring that shared dream to fruition!