Earlier this month, my wife and I took a drive up to Thurmont, Maryland, to go apple picking. Thurmont is north of Frederick, not far from the state line with Pennsylvania. It’s a remote part of Maryland that I didn’t really ever drive through or think about, until my parents suggested a toll-free, light-traffic route to New Jersey that passed through the area via U.S. 15. It’s a very pretty drive, and very rural despite being only about 20 minutes from Frederick, which is home to 70,000 people. Frederick is growing rather strongly, but so far it has not sprawled out as much as the region’s other large population centers.

Anyway, the apple orchard was fun, and the apples were some of the best we’ve had. They were also quite easy to reach and pick, due to a really neat growing method that I have never seen before, despite picking apples at a number of different orchards.

Actually, I wasn’t even sure at first that they were normal apple trees, because the trees looked like this.

Almost like rows of grapevines in a vineyard! Here’s another view.

They’re sort of espaliered—I don’t know much about gardening, so that might not be quite the word—or trained to grow relatively flat and vertically along the ropes rather than out, where a lot of fruit ends up too high to pick, or deep inside the tree. A lot of fruit goes to waste, it’s messier, and you need those imprecise metal claw pickers on the end of long poles to reach the top.

I asked one of the owners, who was sitting under a tent near the orchard, what exactly I was looking at here. She explained, in more detail, what I just summarized, and then said something interesting that inspired the title of this post.

She said the orchard had been needing more fruit due to picking demand, but that the available land had all been planted already. So what they did a few years ago was pull out the older trees, which took up much more space, and replanted nearly twice as many trees, with more easily accessible fruit, trained along the fences.

In other words, they upzoned their orchard. (Upzoning, while it might sound wonky, simply refers to increasing the allowable density on a given lot, under the zoning code.) They used smart design to get more out of the same piece of land. The owner even described this as “growing up, not out,” which I found fascinating. That’s exactly the language that you’ll often hear to describe densification versus sprawl in the built environment.

I think this is important, because it underlines the fact that this “up versus out” question is not just a land use question. The idea of increasing density on existing land is not unique to urbanism or land use, in other words; it’s just one specific application of a general piece of organizing and design wisdom. What other ordinary things that have nothing do with land use are such examples of “upzoning”? Think about it. I will too.

One more thing. This happened, when I put a few too many apples in my bag. Look at the handle.

I asked for a replacement bag, and the same woman with whom I’d chatted about the growing methods said that lots of those bags had broken. Back in 2020, their usual bags had gone out of stock, and they ended up with a poorly made or defective batch from a different manufacturer. This was one of those odd supply chain issues caused by the pandemic. She said that all sorts of supplies and packaging that they used on the orchard were difficult to come by, or very expensive. I wrote awhile back about various manifestations of supply chain issues and the labor crunch, and this is an interesting one to add to the list.

But the bigger takeaway here is that an apple orchard in rural Maryland provided as good a distillation of the basic logic behind upzoning and density as I’ve ever seen.

Related Reading:

Waking Up to the Joy of Clock Radios

The Path of Most Desire

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