Today in the orchard
I took off three days from the orchard to work on construction projects around the farm. Living on the farm requires one to be a Jack of all trades, even if it means the ladder remains in the shed now and then. Meanwhile the apples do continue to ripen and some are dropping. We’re moving towards the final period of picking. By the end of the month, all the apples will be off the trees. The storage apples—the keepers—will go to the cooler and then, as soon as the root cellar gets cold enough, we’ll move them to the root cellar. Ideally we’d leave them to ripen on the trees, but we just can’t do it. They would freeze and then rot. So, instead we wait as long as we dare, and then we pick them all and let them finish up ripening inside over the course of the next few months.