Saturday was too beautiful to stay around our own yard, and with the loss of much of my tomatoes, we needed to get out and do some serious food gathering.
Every fall, usually starting later in the month, we start going to our favorite local orchard every weekend until the apples are done. Their website is here:
http://www.minnesotahomesteadorchard.com/index.html
Well worth the drive out. They do not charge for you to just head out in the orchard or to park the car (which drives me nuts to see at other orchards).
Our favorites, the Fireside and Cortlands are not ripe yet, but Zestar, Harelson, Honeycrisp and a few others are ripe and we spent an afternoon playing and gathering apples.
Nearly all of the trees are over 30 years old. The wide branches are sturdy and well suited to the kids reaching for the perfect apples they cannot reach from the ground. Hayrides are free and good lord are the apples wonderful rounds of heaven.
After I took this photo, something rather rare happened for us. Another family picking apples offered to take a photo of all of us together. <smile> It is not often that I am not the one behind the viewfinder.
So now we have a couple of bushels of apples to make into apple sauce and dried apple slices this week. It will be something we do every week until the snow flies.
Hello my friend.
Thanks again for making this blog at the same time so personnal and universal.
I could not resist to share with you this week’s discovery, seeing these apples in the hands of the girls.
I had an extremely lucky week. Suzanne and I were travelling in the country in search of antiques, we found a great shop and stopped there. Suddenly, parking the car under a tree, I realized it was an apple tree. A very old one, obviously more than a century old. The apples were like no other I had seen, big and healthy and of a yellow that was streaked like crazy , with big bumps in the streaks like it the streaks were lines with bigger dots in them. Something unique, my words might fail at describing it but my eyes will ALWAYS recognize that special configuration.
I asked the lady owning the antique shop and she confirmed it was her father’s apple tree, but it was in fact older than that, more than a century old, which was obvious, the tree being so big and starting to loose it…
I searched for heirl;oom apples like crazy and then came upon a site of a small organization preserving a few old apple cultivars, and BANG, there was the picture. Exactly the one. To the point where my love, who knows nothing about apples, said: it cannot not be that one, it is so different from all others.
Then we got into the description of the fruit: red streaks on yellow backgrounf, large and flattened, with a very distinctive honeyed flavour and just a little acidity, a unique taste.
It is called ST-LAURENT D’HIVER (St-Laurence winter) and is a daughter of the FAMEUSE(a Quebec apple called SNOW in English), like the Mc Intosh is. It was the second most popular apple in the Quebec orchard area at the end of the 1800’s with the FAMEUSE, both were replaced by the MAc, also a daughter of the FAMEUSE.
The darn apple is so good and so sweet, the ol’ mother of the lady makes SWEET apple sauce out of it without adding sugar.
It is THAT good. Like eating a blend of Mac and some sweet honeyed flower petals. It disappeared because the Mac was better for transportation. There are only a few of these trees growing in Quebec now, and even our genebank does not have it.You got to graft one of these my friend, you got to….
And this is the second apple discovery this year. Sorry if I hid number one from you, I did not know you were into fruits….Last fall I came upon an old apple tree in CAP-À-L’AIGLE, on the very northern shore of the St-Laurence river, were it is COLD in winter.
The area was the first canadian resort area for rich american coming to fish salmon and see whales in the 1800’s. They brought with them a Minnessota apple, the WEALTHY. This one was developped by a Minnessota orchardist who bought a full bushel of apple seeds from Russia to find one that would make it in Minnessota( y’a know anything about that place? )
It turned out Wealthy was darn frigging good. I knew absolutely about nothing until last fall, when I spent a week in the area. This old apple tree was there on a property, obviuosly very old and unattended. I asked the owner if I could taste the apples, he said yes, told me the tree was just thewre, nobody taking care of it. The apples were of medium size but almost all perfect. Like the St-Laurent.
The taste was hard to describe. Suzanne and I were fighting over descriptions: I was saying banana ftertaste, she was saying strawberries. e picked a whole bag of them.
Once at her sister’s home, I opened the TV on the local channel and there was a story about the orchardist making cider out of a century old family orchard on l’ÎLE-AUX-COUDRES, just in front of BAIE ST-PAUL, the birthplace of Cirque du Soleil. The owner was describing the very unique taste of WEALTHY in therms that were exactly ours.He said it gave a distinctive taste to his artisanal cider, BTW very popular in Quebec, all across the province as opposed to many small local ciders I looked it up on the net and the description of the tree, the apple, its taste reminescent of strawberries and banana was there.
The canadian genebank, once I described them the tree and the apple, asked for scionwood of THAT tree. They have Wealthy already, but scionwood from such a northern grown tree making good fruits without any help is quite valuable…Want in???
Until I had stock to graft it to, and a bit more knowledge as to how to graft one, what I would be most interested in would be a handful of seed to harden off in the crisper of the fridge for me to start crossed trees this next Feb.
Deanna you truly are amazing! I love what you’ve done with the elppas, and I think even kids like to have fancy apple -tizers every once in a while! I used to do elppas and peanut butter for my kids, but I had for some reason sort of forgotten about it. Liv, my daughter, is a competitive dance and I’m always looking for snacks that will keep her fueled during her long days. With a jar of almond butter in our fridge, these little treats will be going to the competition team try outs today! Hopefully they will bring good luck along with some fuel!