At Cloverworks Farm, we raise lamb as an enterprise plus chicken and ducks for our own use. We also have some wild foods on the farm – you may recall that a few months ago, we were hastily picking a variety of berries. Now is the harvest time for our apples, crabapples and rosehips.
We are overrun with apples this year. In all seriousness, we have literal tons on the trees, and they are more than I can physically pick or utilize. We are considering getting some clean tarps and gathering all we can to bring to local cideries. We considered cider presses, but I don’t think we can justify adding another significant enterprise to our farm at a time of year when we are already fraying at the edges with hay and breeding season planning.
We have had an embarrassment of apples this year. Last year was a poor year for apples, but this year has made up for it and then some. We have thousands of apples, some small and scrawny, other juicy and snackable. It feels a shame that I can’t pick every one – I hate to think of them going to waste in any way, since I imagine we even have more than the wildlife can handle.
We have one particular tree that is clearly not a wild field-apple. It has a dwarf habit, an identifiable graft, and the juiciest, best apples in the whole place. I feel a special connection to this tree, so I carefully protect it from the sheep. This year, it has already given at least five bushels of apples, while more apples await on the top.
I feel guilt for the apples that have hit the ground. Wasting a food resource is anathema to me. Feeding apples to livestock feels fine, but leaving them to rot on the ground feels so painfully wasteful, but yet I cannot physically cope with the tonnage of apples here. That said, I have made and frozen several pies, I have donated apples to be made into cider, and I intend to have a little cider made so we can add yeast and enjoy the consequences.
We also have rose hips on hand. I juiced these rose hips with crabapples to make another batch of my favorite jelly- crabapple rosehip. The rosehips lend a floral richness to the pungent crabapples. Crabapples grow right under our deck.
Not everything I put up in the last week has been my own – I traded apples for these tomatoes, which proved to be absolutely wonderful in flavor. Just a little tomato puree in the freezer to help beat the winter blues later on.
