Lots of Apples

It has been a good year for fruit.  We harvested about a bushel and a half of pears off of our two small(ish) pear trees--after not realizing one of them was definitely ripe and had all ready dropped half of it's fruit. The apple trees have, by far, outdone the pear trees though.  It's been an excellent year for apples.

In early September, we harvested roughly a bushel and a half of apples from my Ida Red apple tree.  It is the first one in  my orchard to be ready each year.  It is my favorite for making applesauce with, as it is sweet enough I don't need to add any sugar, yet it has a slight tartness also.

The next tree is the Cortland, with it's deep red skin and bright white flesh.  Also good for sauce, it's kind of a back-up in case the Ida Red has a bad year.  It makes good pies, crisps, and baked apples too.  This year I kind of dropped the ball on my Cortland tree, getting preoccupied with other stuff and not keeping an eye on how quickly it was ripening.  Probably half the crop from that one went to the deer, the rest, at least a bushel, made it's way into storage until I can get them processed. Depending on how much applesauce we want, I might try my hand at canned apple pie filling with the Cortlands.

Following quickly behind the Cortland, and the one tree I don't really care all that much for it's fruit, but planted it as a pollinator for some of the others, is the Red Delicious.  That tree outdid itself this year.  We picked well over two bushel of apples from it.  I'm thinking I will make juice out of them.

Not quite ready yet, but very soon, as it's an October apple, is DH's favorite, the Granny Smith.  We've picked up over a dozen drops lately, but haven't harvested the tree yet.  It doesn't produce quite as well as the red varieties, but still looks to have at least a bushel-worth of apples hanging on the limbs.  These make really good pies, but also store very well in the cellar, so are designated as DH's 'lunchbox apples'.  Typically they stay nice and crisp down in the cellar until around the beginning of March.

Last weekend, DH and I had K3 and Toad 'help' us to harvest some of the apples.  K3 was surprisingly talented with the apple picker, and really got into the idea of picking apples.  It was hard to get her to relinquish her tool so that her brother could have a try at it.  It was also difficult to get her to stick to one area of one tree until all the apples in that spot had been removed.  She mostly wanted to go from tree to tree, choosing what she though was the best looking apple on each.  She was pretty intent on filling a grocery bag with apples to take home to her mom and dad.

Toad, being younger and shorter, couldn't aim and balance the apple picker quite as well.  He got a few low-hanging apples on his own, but mostly had help from Grandma (me) steering the picker.  I think he better liked helping Grandpa (DH) collect the bruised dropped apples from the ground and tossing them into the tractor bucket to be hauled away from the orchard (where they were attracting yellow jackets).

He did put a few salvageable ones in my 'use right away' basket (where most of the California Horse's treats have come from this week), as well as pick a really big Red Delicious to take home.  He proudly told his dad "This apple is as big as my head." when DS1 came to get them later in the day. It was actually only about half the size of his head; very large for an apple.

Toad's big apple

Meanwhile, my garage currently smells deliciously of apples, as that is where all the baskets and bags are being stored while they await their turn in the canner.