An Apple A Day

Well, even that wouldn't be enough to keep up with the fruit that falls from our five apple trees. Starting in mid-summer we see a few apples fall from the trees daily, until late summer when it seems like a deluge.

I try to rake up the apples on the path into neat piles that are easier to pick up.

Once the apples are big, they have to be picked up from the ground before I can run the lawnmower. When they're green, they're not ripe enough for the mower to just make applesauce of them, so we trot out the wheelbarrows and pick 'em up by hand. I don't know what varieties we have, but one of our neighbors also has five trees and each is a different variety from any of ours.

One bin of apples headed for the compost heap.

Most of them end up in the compost bin - they decompose rather quickly and keep the compost going. Some of them go outside the gate into a huge pile that's used by our end of the neighborhood to discard yard waste. And a precious few go into pies and applesauce for us. Most of the apples are partially consumed by insects, and most people in town have access to their own or to their neighbors' apple trees so you can't even give surplus apples away.

Callie's coveting of the compost pile prompted me to put up this little fence barrier.

I've been trying, with no success, to train Callie to pick up an apple and drop it into the wheel barrow. She just looks at me quizzically as if to say, huh ? Are you nuts ? But then when nobody's looking she'll pick up an apple and cart it around the yard, into the house, wherever, so she can chew on it.