Apple surprise

 

We all know I'm kind of about apples. I think every house and apartment block in the area (city) (state) (nation) (world) should be surrounded by apple trees, with chickens and ducks running around underneath them, dodging the drops and then cleaning them up, and people coming indoors with bushel baskets of the things.

Apples and many other tree fruits can be hard to raise organically, and I often remember that my dad took a little sapling with him from our place here in Oregon in his camper truck, en route to Florida, only to get in a ruckus with border guards in Arizona because they didn't want him to cross their state with it (he won, kicking his case up through three layers of supervisors).

We bring in apples by the wheelbarrow load around here, and have done so since our thirty-somethings were five-somethings.



 

(By the way, buy your wheelbarrow in the 70s and it will last forty years ... )

We dry apples,



 

freeze bags of slices, make applesauce and apple butter,



 

juice and vinegar and cider,





and do just about everything except store them the way we store potatoes. Well, we do that too, but we don't count on it, because we don't spray, and we're not far enough from the neighbors to have returned to a balanced ecology on site, the way Greenpa has.


So this year I only kept a half-bushel of "keepers," more than half expecting, as usual, that worms would hatch in the cores and spread throughout, and the whole mess, an apple at a time, would be tossed to the chickens for a protein-rich winter snack.


But this year, not a worm.


Not one.


Zip, zilch, nada.


What's up with that?