Apple Pie Season

I have been picking up useable windfall apples for several weeks already, but now the Northern Spy apples are starting to ripen by the basket load.  These are hard, tart pie apples that do not keep well at all.  By the time they soften and sweeten enough to be tasty to eat on their own, they are too soft for pies.  And then they get mushy on the outside so that they are impossible to peel anyway.  I have already given away several bags to people who look forward specifically to having the old fashioned and hard to find Northern Spies.

  We have two trees and I bag the apples to keep them from getting Sooty Blotch.  Oddly enough, over the years I have noticed that the unbagged apples show less and less of the blotch to the point that this year I don't really see any at all. I wonder if that is a result of bagging so many of the apples each year.  Have I killed it off?  Starved it out?  Or is it more to do with our dry weather?   I usually bag about 130 apples on this tree but this year I bagged 150.  The cool, wet June meant that I had almost no June drop at all.  The few bagged apples that dropped, I just reused those bags on remaining apples so that I went into harvest with a record 150 bagged apples.

The second tree is rarely as productive.  This year I did not bother to bag any apples on the second tree, but it still produced pretty well.  All of my apples survived two significant hail storms. There are a few scabby spots or mishappen apples.  Lumpy and bumpy.  The bagged apples showed the least damage.

The better tree is underplanted with thyme which cushions any windfall apples well enough that they don't bruise.  But once they start to color up well, I go out each morning and put a little pressure on the ripest looking ones to see if they want to come off.  If I let them all fall, the rabbits will have ruined most of them by the time I get out there in the morning.  This year I thinned and bagged those 150 apples without even getting out a step ladder.  But, there are still good apples high up in the tree.  I put my apple picker head on the 12 foot telescoping handle for our roof rake and now I can reach anything.

I have often weighed in apples over 16 ounces, but the more apples you leave on the tree, the smaller they are.  I still get a few really large ones around 12 to 13 ounces.

I have already run a batch through the dehydrator and made one apple pie.  It looks like I will be processing some of these for pie filling the freezer.