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You are here: Home / Garden Chats / We Have Apples

We Have Apples

by John Cole|  August 25, 20227:35 pm| 45 Comments

This post is in: Garden Chats

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After years of pruning and waiting, we finally are going to have an apple crop here at home crap home. Are they the prettiest apples? No. Am I having to pick them a couple at a time as the birds start to get at them, yes. But they’re real, they aren’t loaded with chemicals or coated in wax, and they taste delicious.

We Have Apples

I wonder how many people realize this is what apples look like when you grow them yourself on a tree that provides shade and home for birbs and whatnot. The ones you see in a store all come from carefully manicured orchards, and hell, out of every apple you see in the store prolly 3 are discarded for other commercial uses because they are ugly.

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Reader Interactions

45Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    August 25, 2022 at 7:39 pm

    You’re a regular Johnny Appleseed.

    ETA

    Here comes Johnny Appleseed 

    Stomping over Anne Laurie.

  2. 2.

    SiubhanDuinne

    August 25, 2022 at 7:40 pm

    I spent many childhood summers on a farm in central Michigan. There was a smallish apple orchard, and the apples we picked from the tree (or from the ground as windfall) looked very much like the ones in your photo. Not beautiful, no, but tasty as all get-out.

  3. 3.

    Another Scott

    August 25, 2022 at 7:41 pm

    Looking good.

    Honeycrisp?

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  4. 4.

    SpaceUnit

    August 25, 2022 at 7:41 pm

    Those apples look like they lost a fight.

  5. 5.

    JPL

    August 25, 2022 at 7:41 pm

    Next, we’ll find out you have applesauce…

  6. 6.

    Ninedragonspot

    August 25, 2022 at 7:42 pm

    Apples!  I’m finishing the last of Tuesday’s Poulet à la Normande tonight (chicken w/ apples, calvados, hard cider).

    I’m in San Francisco, so August feels much more like autumn than September will.

  7. 7.

    Scout211

    August 25, 2022 at 7:46 pm

    My peaches look a little like that.  I have to fight the birds every year and they always end up looking a little beat up.

    But my goodness, they were yummy this year.

  8. 8.

    John Cole

    August 25, 2022 at 7:47 pm

    @SpaceUnit:  They did- to the birds.

  9. 9.

    Math Guy

    August 25, 2022 at 7:50 pm

    We made the best applesauce I’ve ever had with apples that look like that.

  10. 10.

    SpaceUnit

    August 25, 2022 at 7:51 pm

    @John Cole:

    I was only teasing.  Some apples are made for cobbler and pie.  Congrats on the crop.

  11. 11.

    OzarkHillbilly

    August 25, 2022 at 7:52 pm

    Last year I got my first crop of apples, and yeah, they weren’t half as pretty as what I get at the store. But tasty? Oh, yeah. This year my apple crop got killed by a late frost. C’est la vie. There’s always next year.

  12. 12.

    geg6

    August 25, 2022 at 7:58 pm

    We have some variety of green apple trees.  The apples are as ugly as yours but are wonderfully tart.  They make wonderful pies and applesauce because they stand up well to all the sugar.

    However, the local farm/orchard just a few miles down the road have the most beautiful, perfect apples of several varieties.  Their peaches are also fantastic and incredibly perfect-looking.  And don’t get me started on their beets and sweet corn.

  13. 13.

    Baud

    August 25, 2022 at 7:59 pm

    I stopped eating apples a long time ago because they were tasteless.

  14. 14.

    trollhattan

    August 25, 2022 at 8:00 pm

    I was discarded after removal from the tree.

  15. 15.

    steppy

    August 25, 2022 at 8:00 pm

    Excellent job! Fruit trees are the final frontier for Maj (mrs. steppy) and myself. We have done pretty much everything in gardening, canning, dehydrating, beekeeping but not that.

    We got a late cold snap here that pretty much wiped out the apples and stone fruit.

    You know what they look like? Real apples. It doesn’t matter one little bit what they look like, especially if you cook them down for applesauce.

  16. 16.

    SpaceUnit

    August 25, 2022 at 8:01 pm

    @Baud:

    Apples = the Melania Trump of the fruit world.

  17. 17.

    Dan B

    August 25, 2022 at 8:04 pm

    Lodi is a fantastic pie apple variety.  It’s a light green.  Birds don’t bother it much because it’s not red.  There’s an older variety that my mother loved, as did I and my brother and father.  What people don’t realize is these make pie and sauce that is astonishingly fragrant.  It is one of the most fragrant pies ever.  It has no need for cinnamon although a tiny bit is fine

    BTW What variety are your apples, John?

  18. 18.

    Baud

    August 25, 2022 at 8:08 pm

    @SpaceUnit:

    I didn’t realize apples were so unhappy with their life choices.

  19. 19.

    Mike E

    August 25, 2022 at 8:11 pm

    We had a crabapple tree behind our colonial twin that I had to rake up every year until we moved to an apartment when I entered high school. It produced a shit ton of sour fruit which attracted wasps that gorged on them to the point of drunkenness…our neighbor tried to make applesauce (not bad) and a couple of pies (ugh, why) but the extra labor proved to be not worth it.

  20. 20.

    Miss Bianca

    August 25, 2022 at 8:12 pm

    @John Cole: what kind of apples are they?

  21. 21.

    mrmoshpotato

    August 25, 2022 at 8:12 pm

    Do you headbutt the tree to make the apples fall?

    Any Camp Lazlo fans here?

    Apples. -Clam

  22. 22.

    Dan B

    August 25, 2022 at 8:13 pm

    @SpaceUnit: There are hundreds, if not thousands, of apple varieties that are fantastic.  Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and several others are crap or have been turned into crap by commercial growers.  The big 5 commercial apples are like Melania, like most comics are to literature, like soaps as opposed to classic TV shows, etc.

  23. 23.

    Miss Bianca

    August 25, 2022 at 8:15 pm

    @Dan B: And tart apples are best for making cider. With the added bonus, as you pointed out, of being less attractive to birds, who like sweet things as much as we do!

  24. 24.

    Andrya

    August 25, 2022 at 8:17 pm

    There’s an upside to the commercial insistence on “pretty” fruits and vegetables.  I’ve sorted donated fruit/veggies at my local food bank- the purpose of the sorting was to distinguish between fruit/veggies which are simply ugly and those which are moldy, starting to decay, or otherwise unfit for human consumption.  Apparently, food banks benefit significantly from the insistence on “pretty” fruit and vegetables.

    Bonus bit of humor:  on three occasions, I have “passed” ugly tomatoes whose protrusions were visually obscene.  Can’t have that in the local supermarket!

  25. 25.

    SpaceUnit

    August 25, 2022 at 8:18 pm

    @Dan B:

    Yeah.  I actually like golden delicious pretty well tho the quality and flavor seem to vary quite a bit.

  26. 26.

    TaMara

    August 25, 2022 at 8:23 pm

    One of our city parks was part of a farm that the city absorbed. They left the apple orchard, and everyone is invited to pick organic apples each fall, and they are the best apples around. There are about 4-6 different varieties. Not pretty, but so tasty.

  27. 27.

    H.E.Wolf

    August 25, 2022 at 8:24 pm

    One of my grandfathers grew up on (several) farms in the early 1900s, and as an adult taught orchard techniques at a small East Coast boarding school, in addition to his classroom teaching.

    In retirement, he would critique each year’s autumn apple crop at his local grocery store. :-) He would have loved the resurgence of heirloom varieties in the past few decades!

    I think of him every fall, when the heirloom apples show up at our local grocery store, and in his honor I try all the ones I’ve never heard of before.

  28. 28.

    Jay

    August 25, 2022 at 8:33 pm

    Always grew VF5 root stock, ( apple graft on an apple stock). They grow slower, are later to mature, but last for 50+ years and are less likely to rot.

    Always pruned properly, root pruned, dormant oil in early spring and fall.

    Once the trees started blooming, pruned the excess blossoms.

    Once the fruit started to form, bagged it in clear, vented plastic bags. Kept molds, bugs, birds away.

    ”Perfect” looking fruit. The biggest problem was dealing with the end result. When I lived at the Elgin St. House, off of a 75 year old Golden Delicious tree that was long there and long neglected, in the “best year”, I had to deal with 450lbs of apples in 2 weeks, all of which had to be “dealt with”, before they went soft. 10 hours at work, come home, peel, chop, bag and freeze 75lbs of apples. But it made the best apple/blackberry pie ever. (Himalayan Blackberries, an invasive species, but any place in the Lower Rainland with water, from mid August to late September, you can fill a 5 gallon bucket in half an hour, just pick above where dogs can pee).

    Luckily the Winestiens and other varietals at the time were young(ish), and didn’t have anywhere the volume, and came ripe later in the season.

  29. 29.

    HinTN

    August 25, 2022 at 8:40 pm

    out of every apple you see in the store prolly 3 are discarded for other commercial uses because they are ugly

    Yes, but thankfully it’s cider or sauce. Commercial growers ain’t stupid, at least the few I knew.

  30. 30.

    HinTN

    August 25, 2022 at 8:42 pm

    @geg6: They spray.

  31. 31.

    HinTN

    August 25, 2022 at 8:45 pm

    @Dan B: Golden Delicious are not crap, they’re just delicate. Red Delicious have been over bred for their looks.

  32. 32.

    Dan B

    August 25, 2022 at 8:59 pm

    @HinTN: The Goldens here are usually halfway to Styrofoam.  I wouldn’t be surprised the better ones are exported.  In Seattle it seems we get the ones that have bern in cold storage for a year or more.  But there are hundreds of fantastic varieties that outshine Goldens except for not looking perfect – some of which may be due to spraying, etc.

    I took courses in heirloom and new fruit varieties and then followed local fruit shows and clubs.  I’ve probably tried several hundred kinds of apples and pears.  At the fruit show Red and Golden Delicious were never provided as samples.  They would have seemed tasteless by comparison.

  33. 33.

    Jay

    August 25, 2022 at 9:09 pm

    @SpaceUnit:

    one of the unique things about apples, is that they are highly adaptable to a huge variety of conditions and relatively easy to hybridize.

    The English took apples with them every where they went, so a Golden Delicious is quite different from a Himalayan Golden Delicious, a Maine Golden Delicious or a Wet Coast Golden Delicious.

    Over what is a relatively short time frame on the evolutionary ladder, apple strains were adapted to local conditions.  This changed minor aspects from texture, flavour and season, locally. Then you have terroir. The dirt the food “eats” effects the flavour. Not all dirt is the same.

  34. 34.

    SpaceUnit

    August 25, 2022 at 9:18 pm

    @Jay:

    We get the Safeway Golden Delicious here.

    They’re not too bad.

  35. 35.

    WaterGirl

    August 25, 2022 at 9:24 pm

    @Baud: I’m gonna take Cole’s side on this one.  John loves the On the Road posts but he HATES that the submitted-but-not-published posts show up in the Dashboard with the other posts.

    And we have an 8-part OTR series coming up, and we just had 5 of new OTR posts submitted right before Anne Laurie put her post up, so that likely camouflaged Anne Laurie’s post.

  36. 36.

    Jay

    August 25, 2022 at 9:26 pm

    @Dan B:

    on the Wet Coast, Goldens have to be a local varietal, still hard and green, are still sour, and are best used for baking.

    once yellow, pretty much done, soft and pulpy.

    at best, a 3 week window.

    Parents used to have one of those multigraft varietals,

    Buff, a Golden X used to bite all the windfalls, jump as high as he could to mark fruit still on the tree, then spend the rest of the day crunching them on the lawn. I maybe ate one or two apples off the tree, but it required some tricky climbing.

  37. 37.

    Jay

    August 25, 2022 at 9:33 pm

    @SpaceUnit:

    when we lived in Kamloops, there was an Orchard that would bring a box of Winesteens into the Farmers Market for me.

    Most years, they “cracked”. Wet spring, then drought, then fall rains, so other than me, they went for cider.

    they knew I didn’t care that they were ugly.

  38. 38.

    Ken

    August 25, 2022 at 9:47 pm

    @Jay: As I recall from Michael Pollan’s “The Botany of Desire”, apples do not breed true.  Even if you pollinate a tree from itself, what comes from the seed may differ wildly in color, size, and flavor from the parent stock. This is why varieties are propagated by grafting, or rooting cuttings.

  39. 39.

    opiejeanne

    August 25, 2022 at 10:16 pm

    @Dan B: We have one early harvest apple, William’s Pride, and a couple of Melrose trees. Both are delicious, but the fruit from Williams Pride is beautifully fragrant, like perfume, and they were getting pretty beaten up so picked the last of them this afternoon.

    The Melrose won’t be ready for a couple more months but there aren’t a lot of apples on either tree.

    We do have one other tree, an Akani, that we bought for cheap because the nursery had lost the tag but were able to identify it for us when its first apples ripened. It has a small crop of beautiful apples, still green, and the birds have started in on it already.

  40. 40.

    Jay

    August 25, 2022 at 10:33 pm

    @Ken:

    yurp.

    the Brit’s carried grafts, then grafted grafts from the “better” trees to new root stock.

    there is an idea, that all plants are the same,

    plants have a bunch of ways to adapt and change, not involving pollination, cross breeding or grafting. Fungi and bacteria help.

  41. 41.

    Park Pgirl

    August 25, 2022 at 11:52 pm

    Those apples are begging to be lovingly folded into hand pies.  Convenient size, perfect for tucking in the chest pocket of a pair of bib overalls.

  42. 42.

    Mnemosyne

    August 26, 2022 at 1:40 am

    Ugly apples make great pies. And cakes. And cobblers.

  43. 43.

    Chris T.

    August 26, 2022 at 3:33 am

    Note that apples were used for making cider—the alcoholic kind, which was safe to drink without refrigeration.

    In other words, “Johnny Appleseed” was the guy bringing hard liquor to town. Now you know why everyone celebrated!

  44. 44.

    Chris T.

    August 26, 2022 at 3:35 am

    @Ken: Also, most naturally-cross-bred apples are inedible. When you get one that’s actually good, that’s when you start grafting like mad.

  45. 45.

    Nancy

    August 26, 2022 at 9:33 am

    At one point in my lengthy career, I was a produce inspector for the USDA. We got good training, a lot on ethics.

    I was in orchards and at a processing plant. Workers shovelled up the squashed fruit. Someone said it went for cider. I never drank regular cider again.
    The beautiful apples are for show, not taste in most cases. They make a pretty picture.
    Your apples look like they taste good and they look safe for the wildlife. If you want shade and a home for the birds, I assume that you aren’t spraying them. They will look like this and the birds and pollinators will thrive.
    Yay for you, Professor Cole.

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