A Good Year for Apples

I must admit, I was a little sad last year. I didn’t cry or anything like that, but I was heartily disappointed. The reason for this, of course, was that it was a terrible year for apples in our little corner of the world.

The previous year the apples were raining down on us from the firmament, as well as the branches they were on because the weight of the apples was too much for the branches to hold them. I was happy that year. There was apple sauce, apple cider, apple pie, apple crisp, apples just to crunch on, and probably about nine other apple type things for all of us to enjoy.

The whole point of this blog post isn’t to live in the past, as much as I enjoy picturing myself repeatedly throwing hand fulls of apples into the air and doing the criss-cross applesauce dance or as vividly as I recall sitting forlorn at our dinner table last fall, resigned to eating a second helping of mashed potatoes instead of moving on to apple tarts. The point of this blog post is to look towards the future, which the present is using two-thumbs up to point at. What I mean by that is that it is looking like a fantastic year for apples.

The reason that the future is so bright for the apple crop this year was the lack of frost in the last couple of weeks. If you recall, only a week or two ago, apple trees all over were in their full-blooming beauty. Because the trees did not get to put much energy into producing fruit last year, many of the trees had an overwhelming amount of flowers on them this year. Everywhere I looked, I saw the (mostly) white blossoms covering apple trees. It was during this critical time that we didn’t get a frost. The flowers survived and many of them were pollinated, and now there are little baby apples on the trees.

Now we must hope (and pray) from here that we don’t get too much rain, causing an increase in rot– or too little rain, causing the fruit, and our hope for a good apple season, to shrivel up and die. But as things are going, I am starting to drool over all of the apples I may eat.

We should not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. The lack of frost also positively impacts many other fruits. Strawberries, blueberries, cherries, peaches, apricots, pears, and what have you also dodged Jack’s bullet. It will still be a couple of months before I am biting into a fresh apple from the backyard, but it will only be a couple of weeks before I am biting into a fresh strawberry from our patch.