Don't sit under the apple tree

Because apples will fall on your head. This year looks like a big year for apples in our yard. That's a good thing and a bad thing. The good part is that there will be lots of apple tarts, apple sauce, and apple jelly (and who knows what else) later in the year. The bad part is that there will be thousands of apples on the ground that will have to be picked up each time I want to cut the grass.

Two of our apple trees. The tree in the upper left of the picture is a tilleul (linden).

There already are hundreds of them on the ground, but they're small enough that the mower will just chew them up. When they get bigger, the mower can't handle them and I have to go around filling the wheel barrow a few times before cutting the grass. I dump the apples in the compost piles and by the following year they've turned into soil that goes back into the garden.

By the end of the season I'm usually so sick of picking up apples that I just rake and roll them right into the empty garden plots where they can rot over winter, completely bypassing the compost piles (which are already full by then).

We have four apple trees in the yard. There was a fifth, but it was dying and I cut it down a few weeks ago. There are two in the photo above. Each produces a different variety of apple and I don't know what they're called. Not pictured is the big daddy apple tree which is just to the right. It drops the most apples by far.

Even with all these apples, one of our neighbors has four or five trees outside his fence next to the vineyard that are different from and (in my opinion) better than ours. I sneak over during early morning walks with Callie and pinch a few every now and then for pies. Shhhh... don't tell.