Plant the Damn Apple Tree

Ria Windcaller

August 24, 2026

🎧 Listen to this editorial: Ria reads Plant the Damn Apple Tree in Cider Chat Episode 512. Listen below or find Cider Chat wherever you get your podcasts.

https://ciderchat.com/podcast/512-plant-the-damn-apple-tree-special-edition

Plant the Damn Apple Tree

You’re checking this essay out because you’re thinking…maybe.

Maybe this might be worth a moment of my time. Or maybe…

We will make it. Or maybe we won’t. Period. End.

Redundancy at its best…and yet final.

There is something about that word maybe, isn’t there?

Because look at the news.

Cideries closing. Businesses contracting. Wildfires. Flooding. People in our community dying. We are constantly being tested by the weather gods, reminding growers and makers that we mere mortals don’t have nearly as much control as we’d like to think we do.

Sheesh. The shit has been hitting the fan lately.

And in case you’re new to Ciderville, we’re a niche group. Instead of obsessing over Elvis, the Grateful Dead, fungi, crochet or whatever freaking niche you’re into, we obsess over apples and their entire pomological world of wonders.

Which means when something changes around here, we don’t necessarily like it.

Except, of course, we want change.

Just not that change.

Yeah. Messed up. I know.

But that’s this wild, wonderful world of all these special spots out there in the great beyond that we call Ciderville.

And maybe that’s part of what draws us here in the first place.

Can I?

Can I grow this apple here? Can I graft that onto this? Can I ferment this differently? Can I make a living doing this? Can I take something that grew on a tree, crush it, let microorganisms have their way with it and make something freaking delicious?

Can I make it work?

Would You Choose Otherwise?

Consider this.

Historically, about half of new employer businesses in the United States make it to five years. Roughly a third make it to ten. At fifteen years, you’re looking at about a quarter.

So when I hear about a cidery closing after 10 or 15 years, of course I want to know why. That’s my job. What’s happening with the market? Costs? Distribution? Weather? Succession? Were the owners simply exhausted?

Yeah, I’m interested.

But there’s another question rattling around in my head lately.

Knowing all that, would you or I choose otherwise?

I don’t think I would.

I say that as a serial entrepreneur, which I’m not necessarily suggesting is a good thing. It’s just apparently who I am.

Wondering whether an idea sitting in my head can exist in the real world and actually be of value is what gets me out of bed each morning.

Somehow we convince ourselves nobody told us that anything worth doing is going to take a ton of mental, emotional and often physical toil.

Except, of course, everybody told us.

We just did it anyway.

I ran one business for 30 years. Somewhere along the way, apparently deciding I didn’t have enough going on, I started Cider Chat at the height of my international consulting career, when I was actually making a living wage and then some.

Now, eleven years later, I’m still wondering where the hell the click is.

That magical moment when the thing you’ve been building finally becomes whatever you thought success was supposed to look like.

Now see I had the definition wrong.

The Other Ledger

I’m a businesswoman. I know how to look at the numbers.

There are days when I look at the number side of the ledger and get pretty damn pissy.

And scared.

Eleven years? Seriously?

But then there’s the other ledger.

And that one isn’t numbers.

It’s people.

People all over the world who answered my emails and picked up the phone. People who shared what they knew because I was curious enough to ask. People who let me into their lives and, somewhere along the way, became friends.

That’s not nothing.

That’s freaking immense.

And through those people I’ve gotten to see their special spots in Ciderville, corners of this world I probably never would have found otherwise.

An apple tree got me here.

Go figure.

So yes, sometimes I’m tired. Sometimes I don’t feel particularly valued. Sometimes I’m scared about where all this is going.

And I also know I’ve had opportunities and tools at my disposal that many people don’t. Both things can be true.

The trick, at least for me, is getting out of my own way.

Buckle up, buttercup.

When I look at that other ledger, what I see is abundance.

That Poster on the Wall

I had a big, colorful poster hanging in my workshop during my Tundra Equipment days.

Tundra Equipment was my first business venture. I designed and made what I called flying tarps, big tarps with mosquito netting for group camping. My workshop was in an uninsulated New England barn with a huge cutting table where I could spread everything out and rip through 100-pound rolls of material.

I was also a wilderness adventure instructor back then, and the poster showed a rugged mountaineer standing on the side of a cliff. Very much the kind of thing I would have stuck on the wall in those days.

Funny thing is, I can barely remember the picture.

But I remember the words. Or at least this is how I’ve carried them with me:

“Working towards abundance, there’s no time for scarcity.”

Those words hit me then and, for whatever reason, never left.

I choose abundance even when life feels really empty and scarcity rears its ugly head.

I’m not prescribing that to you.

I’m just telling you what’s gotten me this far.

Plant the Damn Apple Tree

Which brings me to the apple tree.

Plant the damn apple tree.

Because really, what are you waiting for?

Better weather? Good luck with that.

A predictable economy? Let me know when you find one.

Certainty that your business, orchard, next batch of cider, or whatever you’re working on is going to succeed?

Well, there’s that word again.

Maybe.

Maybe the tree thrives. Maybe the crop is spectacular. Maybe the cider turns out exactly as you imagined. Maybe the business runs for thirty years.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Either way, you get the time in between.

And that’s the part I keep coming back to.

What are you and I doing with our time?

Mother’s Wisdom

When my mom was still here I used to ask her about getting older. What’s it like to be 30 years-old, 40, 50, 64?

There was one day when we walked down through the woods behind my home to a stream. At the time she was a young 88.

I remember sitting there with her and feeling that we probably weren’t ever going to sit together beside that stream again.

I think we both knew it.

We didn’t need to say it.

I asked her about aging many times before, and I would ask her again as she approached 100 and then sailed right past it.

Her answer never changed.

And she was a woman who had some time to consider the question. And hers had not been an easy life.

Still, her answer remained the same:

“I wouldn’t want to miss a second.”

Sheesh, talk about setting the bar high Mom!

This is all to say, that…

I don’t have a neat answer for any of this.Or how to deal when I see friends shuttering the doors to their cidery or tasting room or hearing about another natural disaster.

All I know is that.

I’m here.

You’re here.

There’s still time on the clock.

Why This Matters to Ciderville

And, maybe this was never about whether Ciderville, or any of us, lasts forever.

It’s what we do while we’re here.

That’s the deal.

Life is hard.

Deal.

As for me, I’m going to keep asking Can I?

And, I’m going to keep looking for abundance.

And when in doubt, I’m going to plant the damn apple tree.

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