By Jean Schneider

Last year I looked at our old apple trees, loaded with rotten apples again. Ugh. My husband and I spent the previous two years diligently picking rotten, wormy apples off the ground. The trees had been more of a nuisance than a benefit; if we weren’t picking up apples, we were running over them with the mower. But we love the trees and the shade they provide, so we would never consider cutting them down, no matter how many apples rotted beneath them.

Looking more closely, I noticed the apples looked pretty good and there were lots of them. There were big apples everywhere! How did I not see this until they were almost ripe? What would we do with all these apples? We were used to having a rotting-apple problem, not too many big, beautiful apples.

I wished I had paid attention to the trees a bit sooner. As I weeded in the garden I heard a snap, then crashing sounds. I looked just in time to see a small section of the tree rip off due to the weight of about fifty apples.

I needed a plan for dealing with all these apples. Instead of buying apples at the farmers’ market to make applesauce, I would use ours. Okay. That took care of two bushels. It wasn’t even noticeable. I dried apple rings, too. Another bushel; again not noticeable.

I started panicking, but why? Who cares that some apples will rot? This had happened every year and it never mattered. This time was different; all the apples were edible. Wasting perfectly good food was bothering me. 

A friend came to dinner that night and I asked him to take some home. He happily agreed, as his mother was looking for some apples for pies and sauce. He left with two bushels. Again, the trees looked just as full as before.

It was time to start phoning. The parents topped the list. After my mother and mother-in-law took more than a bushel between them, we got a better idea of how many apples there really were – about 22 to 25 bushels.

I remembered a woman in my knitting group who preserved food. I called her. She was excited. She wanted to juice some apples and her husband had wanted to make cider for years. I told her our ladder would be out under the trees; she could pick anytime she wanted.

Cider….Hmm. My husband made wine; why not apple wine? He started preparations, but found he needed a cider press. We wouldn’t buy a press for one freakish year of good apples, but a Madison wine supply shop rented presses. My husband learned from the shopkeeper that we didn’t need perfect apples to juice them. We could have been juicing all along! Who knew? We spent an entire evening pressing apples for wine and juice. Sampling the juice – oh, it was heavenly – we wondered why didn’t we think of this before.

This year’s apple crop looks almost as good as last year’s. We are better prepared for our perfect and not-so-perfect apples, having already planned an apple-pressing party. Friends and neighbors will come to our potluck, bringing their jars to fill with fresh apple juice to take home. While sharing our harvest, we hope to build a sense of community from our little orchard.