Apple Picking

Apples have been a bit of a baptism by fire. I had an apple tree in Springville, but it was little, and the apples ripened really early. Since moving into the Elk Ridge house we have at least 4 apple trees, one of them is HUGE, and all of them will need a really thorough pruning in the spring. One of them is a tart apple, one of them is a Pink Lady apple, the other two I have no idea, and one of those is the HUGE apple. The apples are sweet on the huge tree. But I have no idea what kind, so I don't know when to harvest. Things I've read say to wait until after a frost, but more and more apples are falling to the ground every day. And lots of what's on the tree have codling moth damage. At any rate, I know that next year I need to prune, and spray. But I have no idea what to do with the fruit this year. We talked about building a cider press, which would be so cool, and I totally want to do, but there are other things that need to be done on the house and the cider press just isn't taking priority.

We've been having storms at night. Rain and wind. More and more apples keep falling off the trees. So I decided we were just going to pick apples and keep them in boxes on the back deck. The kids came out to help me, and they created their own system. Lincoln and Ivan climbed high up into the tree and passed apples down to Adelia, who was up in the tree but not as far, she passed the apples down to Ollie, who was just barely up the trunk of the tree, and he passed them to Ruby who put them into five gallon buckets. I filmed, and held the ladder steady, and emptied buckets into boxes and brought empty buckets back. All in all we picked 25 gallons of apples (five 5-gallon buckets). I juiced some, in my steam juicer and got 4 quarts of apple juice from it. It took an entire day for four quarts. Not sure exactly what I'll do with the rest.