Today we emptied the cooler of several dozen bushels of apples and sorted out fruit destined for cider, compost, possible sale and our own use in the coming months. It wasn’t a banner year on the farm, but we do have a lot of apples. Most of what we have on hand now are not true storage apples. They’ll keep for another month or two but not much longer. We’ll begin picking the earliest of the winter keepers tomorrow. The rest we’ll pick over the next ten days or so. We want to leave them on the trees as long as possible. They won’t be ripe when we pick them, but they’ll be closer than they are now. They’ll continue to ripen in the root cellar over the next few months. We hope to still be cooking apples in early June. By the end of October everything should be off the trees, and we’ll put away the picking buckets and the ladders for another season.