Today in the orchard
After a brief pause the apples are now insisting to be picked. The rush is on. We get occasional mini-respites during apple season, giving us enough time to blink a few times, and then in comes the next frenzy. Today we picked the bulk of the Grimes Golden, Pomme Grise, Sweet Sixteen, Norton Greening and lesser amounts of several others.
“Grimes” is probably one of the most important of all apple parents. Its child is the internationally famous Golden Delicious (GD), itself one of the most sought after and used apple-parents in the world. (Gala is just one of the numerous children of Golden Delicious.)
Grimes is southern apple (West Virginia) that was adaptable enough to northern areas to be grown a century ago in orchards here in central Maine. Our trees are grafted from scionwood I cut from an old tree just up the road. Grimes fruit is a bit more blocky and less conic than GD. It has the same yellow skin as GD, although the surface has an chalky-opaque quality to it, almost as though it was russet (which it is not). It is excellent for both fresh eating and cooking. It has one characteristic that is considered a flaw in the commercial orchard world. Around the beginning of October it begins to drop fruit daily. It doesn’t drop all at once (which would be a signal to hustle out there and pick it), and it doesn’t hang on for you to harvest at your convenience. It just starts dropping one or two fruits at a time like water dripping from a slowly leaking faucet. Although we don’t mind using drops, in an age when selling drops is forbidden, this can be a real problem. So we let them drop for a few days, collect them off the ground for us, hope the rest are ripe enough, and then pick them all… today.