APPLES

APPLES.
Joan brought us some food the other day. Included, was an apple from Manny’s tree. It had a great appearance. I kept looking for the little black dot, which was a sign that a worm had visited. I didn’t see any. When I cut it open, there wasn’t a worm - or evidence - inside either. (The apple tasted very good!). The reason that I was so worm-conscious, is that we used to have a golden -delicious tree in our back yard. I was on a first name basis with the worms, when I cut the apples open.
The tree bore great fruit for many years. Besides being a tasty eating apple -, I used them for apple pies and apple sauce. The tree was in among some junipers, so that the gathering of the apples was quite labor intensive. I wasn’t able to pick many of them. They ended up on the ground - under the junipers for compost, or food for wildlife.
The tree eventually picked up a disease, as I didn’t spray it. The apple crop was very small, and the quality was poor. Jeff, our yard man, suggested that he cut it down (for a fee). He said that he could use some of the wood for the ball-point pens that he was making. So, he talked us into it. While I miss the tree, and the apples a lot, the empty space is gradually being filled by the adjacent large-pine tree. I hired an Arborist a few years back, and at that time, he said that we should cut down the adjacent pine tree, as it was crowding out the very nice apple tree!
I grew up with apples - back in Michigan. While we didn’t have our own apple tree, there were plenty of apples (spies; Baldwin’s; great northerns and others) grown around the local area. Quite a few apple orchards had cider mills. We would drive out to one of these farms in the fall, and buy a couple gallons of cider plus a bushel of apples. We had to drink the cider fairly soon, or else we would have had cognac! We ate a few of the apples right away, but we wrapped the others, individually, in newspaper, and packed them back in the bushel basket. We stored them in the cold-cellar in the basement (along with the canned fruit; jellies and jams; and grape juice.) The apples stayed surprisingly fresh-like all winter. My Mother also used them for pies, apple sauce, apple cobbler, and apple butter and baked apples.