It's Apple Time!

     Do you remember last Spring, before we even bought our farm, we were posting photos of all the gorgeous trees in bloom.  Well, it is now apple time and we are finding the apples and the crab apples

and trying to educate ourselves as to the varieties.  Yesterday I spend an hour or two wandering the farm, picking apples up from the ground, or pulling them from the branches to feel, smell, and eventually taste them.  I determined a few things:  we have a lot of apple trees; no one has pruned them in years, the neglect is appalling;

Most of the apples look like this - suffering from fungus or insects or disease - I am still investigating

Some trees are healthier than others

 we have many different varieties of apples; the deer seem to have gotten to all the ripe ones at easy picking levels; if the deer have not gotten to the ones on the lower branches, it is not luck, it is because they are not ripe.

These are ripe and sweet, but I need a ladder for this tree as the deer stripped the lower branches already

 I tasted a lot of sour apples yesterday!
     Apple trees are amazing things.  This tree is completely hollow - there is actually a hole at the base on the other side, which you cannot see in these photos, yet it is still bearing fruit!

An amazingly resilient tree

The hollow goes all the way through

The opposite side

  So this weekend we will spend some time at the farm with a ladder, some baskets or bags, and this coming week the house will smell of apple butter, apple sauce, and possibly pie!