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Becky, Heather Kelly, and I rented the zipcar and drove out to
Red Apple Farms in Phillipston, MA to harvest our apples. We have
searched in vain for an organic pick your own orchard around
here but Red Apple does IPM, is in a nice location, and has a
decent selection of apples. We picked about 160 pounds of
fruit, of 8 varieties but particularly focussed on cider
apples with some poundage of good eating and cooking apples as
well. Apple picking is up near the top of the list of
excellent virtues of fall in New England (along with such
things as having several weeks of not freezing in a sub-zero
wasteland or lying awake at night in your own stickyness
in the heat and humidity) , and shouldn't be missed. Making
cider is about the easiest way of disposing of massive
quantities of apples, and thus makes picking more fun since
you can pick a buckets full without worring about subsisting
on a diet of pure apples for months to come.
Heather gets into the Spirit
These trees have ridiculous amounts of apples
Hmm... whats this? An apple?
We took our little old lady cart to the orchard to roll our
harvest back to the zipcar.
Waiting for the slow pickers
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Ben and Alexis are lucky enough to have a boutique pick your
own orchard and cider brewery near their place in Lebanon,
NH. The orchard is called Poverty Lane, and they have grafted
many varieties of heirloom cider apples onto old apple
trees. So they took in 160 or 200 pounds of fruit with great
names like Foxwhelp and Kingston Black.
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All in all, I think we ended up with the following inputs:
- Kingston Black
- Foxwhelp
- Harry Masters Jersey
- Rhode Island Greening
- Yellow Newton Pippin
- Yarlington Mill
- Russet
- Cortland
- Baldwin
- Rome
- Mac
- Crab
After picking, we let the apples mellow for a week, as
described online in the rec.crafts.brewing group and in the
Proulx
& Nichols book.
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Design partially original and partially ripped off from other websites
by Holly Gates
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