One of my favorite activities.
But if you have to do it for a living like I have done, its damned hard work.
I have to laugh how leftists have to revise the way things are to enjoy ordinary activities. I respect apple orchard worles. These leftists look down on them.
My aunt Esther had an apple tree, a pear tree, a quince tree and a mulberry tree.
The apples on the apple tree were wormy and never suitable for eating. To produce edible fruit, the tree would have to have been sprayed. The other trees produced edible fruit.
One uncle had pretty his whole city lot excluding the house and walkways covered with food-growing plants. My aunt Bertha spent a lot of time canning in late summer.
A dying way of picking apples.
The future is high density orchards using small trees staked and wire guyed with drip irrigation and fences to keep out deer. With this sort of setup, no need for tripod ladders - a cart that is driven by pickers has room for four pickers at two different heights is used to pick.
The orchard across the road is about 25 years old and will be torn out in a few weeks. They don’t even need to wait 3-4 years and plant other crops before they put in a new orchard. They will use GPS geolocation of where the rows of the current orchard are and plant new rows in between. Including root stock it will about $21,000/acre to put in the new orchard.
We planted 8 apple trees. Great harvest this year but cannot beat the coddling moths. Regular spraying, dormant oil in the winter, picking up all the dropped fruit and getting rid of them so not to attract bugs and insects.
Any suggestions?
“autumn industrial complex”
That is a perfect analogy to the Fall assault of pumpkin spice everything.
A local micro beef producer has joined the Autumn Industrial Complex this year by taking a couple of acres of roadside pasture and putting in gravel parking and building shops out of storage containers. Pumpkins and corn stalks everywhere with a farmer’s market of fall produce along with baked goods, hot cider and pumpkin spice everything.
Open on weekends only for the next month he’ll be making more than he does selling a cow a week.
The Israelis have bred four or five types of apples that will prosper in the southwestern desert heat, as long as they get water and nitrogen fertilizer, a single backyard tree can produce a LOT of apples. They do not need a freeze to blossom.
Yep, this useless story is from Vox, all right.
It’s not just here that Apple picking is a deal. Italy, too, has a huge apple culture. In the fall folk come from all over to pick apples and enjoy festivals.
So many that hotels are sold out.
After Apple-Picking
BY ROBERT FROST
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
This guy completely fails to understand the agrarian roots of American society. He needs to experience a very cold and lean winter without work, welfare or a full pantry. Maybe two or three years like this… with some hardcore scavenging for survival. He also needs to work, I mean physical labor, outside for a full winter. Then he will perhaps begin to understand the importance and meaning of growing and gathering your own food.