Happy Birthday to Me!

One thing we don't have on the Farm in the city are fruit trees. We do have wild blackberries, if we can get to them before the kudzu covers them, blueberries, and a Concord grapevine. So this summer, when my Mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I said "Apple trees!". I ordered them from Stark Brothers, a nursery in Missouri that has a really good reputation, wide selection and some educational materials . They guarentee their trees for a year after purchase.
The tree I was after is what Mom calls an Early Transparent or Lodi; in my opinion it has the best apples for applesauce, making a tart, almost white sauce. Of course I had to have a pollinator, most apples aren't self fertile, so I also ordered a BraeStar, a type of Braeburn apple that is a crisp eating apple that stores well. The Lodi comes in early, mid July and the BraeStar is supposed to be ready in October, so I won't have all the apples to deal with at once. However, dealing with the apples won't be a problem for about three years, and who knows what else I'll be picking/eating/cooking/preserving by then!

So how does one plant an apple tree? First things first, figure out how big the tree will be when it is grown and what else you might plant in the area so you don't have your apple tree shading your blueberries. I have one dwarf and one semi-dwarf tree, so I have a spread of ten and fifteen feet for each of them, and that is about the height they will be. The plan for the Farm is to have, from southwest to northeast, berries, grapes, and then fruit trees, so the apple trees go on the northwest side of the lot, about thirteen feet apart. Then, dig a big hole. A really big hole.This one is about three feet across and a foot and a half to two feet deep. As I was digging I separated the dirt out into three piles; sod, topsoil and subsoil, or clay. This is so you can fill in the hole upside down, sod first, then topsoil then the clay. I learned this from the information Stark Brothers sent with the trees, by putting the nutritious topsoil on the bottom with the roots of the tree, it gets more of the good stuff, and doesn't have the clay baking around the roots later. I put in a small layer of sod, with the roots up, made a little cone of topsoil  set the bare root plant on top of the cone, and then filled in the area around the roots with topsoil and sod. I also mixed in some compost to help add nutrients and keep the soil loose. After filling the hole about 2/3 the way full, I stepped on the soil to compress it some and get the air pockets out, then filled it the rest of the way with topsoil and clay, making sure to leave the bud graft about two or three inches above the soil. That knobby part on the tree just above the mulch is the graft.

The last few steps are easy, cover the soil with mulch to keep the plant from getting either too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter and to preserve moisture. Normally this would be the time to water the tree and give it some liquid fertilizer, but we had two inches of rain a few days ago, and I am afraid that the roots will get waterlogged, so I am going to wait a day or two. Then I provided some protection for the little tree from critters, mostly our rotten dogs, I don't think bunnies come in this part of the yard since it is fenced, but the dogs do, and they like to dig! I used a piece of wire fencing that we have used for tomato cages and various other garden tasks to support or protect our plants.

So there it is, the beginning of the orchard on the Farm in the City, may they grow strong and fruitful.

Sun dried apples

We went and picked apples with friends a few weeks ago and I am still trying to figure out what to do with the bushel that I picked. I know, a bushel? Without a plan? But they were so delicious and the price was right and we drove out in the country to get them and what if I wanted more and didn't have time to go get more? So, I have made two quarts of  apple juice/cider, which lasted about two days, and have given away some, and I feel too lazy to make applesauce yet. I have been wanting to try drying fruit and thought this would be a great opportunity, but little did I know it would be such a pain to find the stuff to do it! One would think a piece of screen and something to cover it with to keep the flies off would work, but of course the more I read about food drying, the more difficult it appeared! Regular screen isn't good, it has toxins in it, food grade screen is required and is difficult to find, even online. Cheesecloth is good to cover the fruit, but more difficult to find locally than I anticipated. So I ended up using my oven rack to lay the apples on, Renee gave me a lead on a local source for the cheesecloth and I ended up with this:

That is two apples on half of the cheesecloth, I covered them with the other half and set them out in the sun for about four hours. This is what they looked like when I brought them in:

Yesterday, I set them out before I went to work, and of course, it is the only day it has rained in ages, and it poured for an hour before I got home, so I had partially rehydrated apples. I put them in the oven for about half an hour at 170* to dry them out a little so they didn't mold. I hoped that one more day in the sun-without rain- might finish them off. I changed things up a little, I put the apples on cake racks on a black cookie sheet with the cheesecloth over them. That worked like a charm!

At this point they are completely dry, just like you would buy in the store. I didn't add any lemon juice because we don't care if they are brown. If it looks like there are fewer apples rather than just smaller apples, you would be right, we kept sampling at each stage. I need to get more cheesecloth or a piece of muslin so I can do more at a time on the oven rack. We found that laying them directly on the cake rack caused them to pick up a bit of a metallic taste, so I won't do that again. Other than that, I think the experiment went well. I'm going to try again tomorrow!