I just wanted to do a little homage to the trash apples of 2023. It seems it will have been a very good year, and some of these trees may not have many years left. I find them, I get to know their fruit, then I lose them and have to mourn them a little, each one.

There was once a golden delicious in an untended strip between the sidewalk and the street—subdivisions on both sides, but this tree clearly predated them. I ate and pressed and baked with its fruit for four or five years, non-consecutively. Amazingly, it spent the last of its strength just a year or so before the bulldozers took it. I think it suffered one too many late winter storms. No more those apples forever.

They were good. Small, few, but very sweet, tangy, balanced, great for blending with.

I am particularly aware of these losses, the preciousness of these trees, because apples won’t survive climate change without adapting, their growing regions changing, some growing regions being inevitably lost. I read about new “climate hardy” breeds being developed, of course. But what we’ve got around here is from a long time ago, before the subdivisions.

These I get from a tree at the edge of a parking lot between the post office, a taco place that used to be a thai place, and a four lane highway. It makes the most beautiful abandoned apples I’ve found, I think because they are acidic as hell and thereby deter pests. Kid calls them “fire apples”. Got to have acid for good cider, and a lot of the abandoned apples that grow around here are fairly insipid, scions of heirloom red delicious.

These are from a “new” (to me), old abandoned orchard, on a piece of land that was just made public in our wealthy and therefore picturesquely rustic neighboring township. As you can see, they’re ugly as the day is long, but big, firm, juicy, and delicious. I used to get apples like these but smaller, more crowded and desperate, from a tree in an abandoned hillside orchard now heavily overgrown with autumn olive and invasive bittersweet that competed with it for light no matter how hard I pruned and hacked. I used to scramble high up into it to pick, at nominal risk to life and limb and incredible personal reward. That tree hasn’t produced for years now. I miss it…but this “new” orchard! It’s overrun with bittersweet and autumn olive too; I’ve got the thorns in my hands to show for it, but the trees are heavily laden, even this late in the season, and the cider from them—my mouth waters in anticipation. Late season apples, they say, are the best for cider. I’m going back today to take a little care of them.

This is the crowning achievement of the year, from that same new, old orchard. I think this has to be some kind of real heirloom cider apple, a bittersharp. Ignore that dark stain and look how beautiful. It looks like a Baldwin, with that starry pattern, but it is ripening far later. Maybe it’s that spot—between a dirt road and a swamp, in the fields behind the middle school—maybe its microclimate has been colder this year than all the rest? But a firmer, dryer, earthier apple I have not had in a long time. Since I lived in the Pioneer Valley, in fact. The tree is so tall and thin I only managed to reach two with my twelve-foot telescoping picking pole. This is the other one.

I could stand to bring a ladder, but I’m not sure I’ve got that kind of carrying capacity in me. We’ll see. I am pretty strongly motivated. Watch this space; perhaps I’ll report.

The apple is dead, the apple is dying, long live the apple.

Cheers.