Oh, a small dream come true. I just made a marvelous apple pie out of apples from one of my own apple trees! There are two on my small property. One is clearly McIntosh, and that's the one I made the pie from. These are the old-fashioned, wonderfully crisp and tart-sweet flavorful kind that big commercial growers long ago seem to have ruined. Not the best pie apple for its texture, but what the heck.
The other tree I think is cortland, but it got blown down in a nasty windstorm early this summer. Although one small part of it continues to have green leaves and ripening apples, there's probably no way of saving it.
I assumed when I bought the property last year that these trees (as well as two lovely pears) were purely decorative, since apples aren't supposed to grow well without lots of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, etc. That's turned out to be true of the pears. But the apple trees, with no treatment at all by me except for some fertilizer spikes I pounded in around them last fall, and surely no treatment in years by the previous owners of my house, are producing lots of small and somewhat deformed but otherwise mostly pest-free and wonderfully tasty apples.
This part of Vermont is serious apple-growing territory, with many small to medium-size orchard operations, two that I know of in my town, and apple trees in lots of yards and even along roadsides.
So I'm off to study up on organic apple growing... I'd greatly welcome any advice on the subject in comments to this post.
2 comments:
congratulations, Jane! That pie must taste wonderful. I have made a lovely pie from Macs, though Cortlands remain my fave.
There's a great resource from Fedco about growing apples (check their site for the title, which escapes me at the moment).
No idea if this is any good, but it sounds promising for further investigation (and possible interlibrary loan): http://www.herbsandapples.com/orchard/edge.php
Thanks, Laura! For some reason, I always forget to check Fedco for this kind of information.
One thing I have learned is that you will not get apples from a single tree, you have to have two, usually of different varieties, so I'm hoping the busted Cortland tree can hang on while the crabapple I put in near the house this spring gets to the point where it can perform that duty.
It's a little silly, in an area that's rich with apples of a hundred different old-fashioned and new varities, to insist on making pies with small, deformed McIntosh, but there's something unequaled about using your own rather than buying from somebody else.
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