Happy Apple

the artist in me loves the patchy texture...

We are happy to have lots of apples this year--it doesn't matter they are covered in soot blotch and flyspeck! Those fungi are harmless and wash right off.  Last year, we didn't get a single apple due to the frost that killed all the blossoms.  

The weather people are predicting an early hard freeze tonight which won't be good for the apples or any other crop. We are picking as much as we can and hoping for the best!

Speaking of the frost, the great poet Robert Frost claimed he didn't spray his apple trees and neither do we. A lovely link to his apple poems and the Robert Frost Stone House Museum and Orchard may be found here.

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.