Grow It In Maine

Apples in autumn

Wed, 11/25/2015 - 11:00am

What a great year for apples this has been!

Citizens have been “picking their own” in orchards all over the state. From the many varieties grown here, apples are being turned into juice (and pressed into cider) or used for pies and apple sauce. Jars of apple jelly are readied for gifts or for sandwiches and breakfast toast.

Apple butter is another delicacy: spiced, sweetened or plain. Next month, Santa may add an apple to the toe of a Christmas stocking.

To add to a trail mix, or for a simple snack, core, peel and slice apples to dry. Use an electric food-drying oven or dry on cookie racks in a warm oven, though that has never worked for me. Or take a clean organdy curtain, tack apple slices to it and hang it on the outdoor clothesline to dry in sun and wind.

Many years ago in another state, town neighbors with a maple sugar house and an orchard would boil syrup in early spring and in the fall, use the boiling equipment to cook home-pressed cider to jelly stage. The apples supplied their own sweetener. Cider jelly is tasty; most diabetics can use it.

“What do you do with the pomace?” (the cider-pressed apple pulp), I asked the jelly-maker.

“We take it into the woods for the deer,” she replied.

I thought of my less-than-fertile community garden plot.

“Would you let me have a load?”

Several days later, her truck appeared. We shoveled the pomace onto my plot. I spread it over the ground and let winter transform that new kind of mulch into compost.

Next season, after I’d turned the composted pomace into the garden soil, my vegetables grew well, for a fine harvest. I wouldn’t add pomace for several years, however; who knows what little animals would find a new source of winter food?

Some apple trees bear heavily one year, then rest up the next. Such trees are called “biennial.” Be thankful for this year’s remarkable harvest.