It’s October (still); that means there have been things I’ve been doing other that writing.

I’ve been raking leaves and cutting deadwood out of trees.

I’ve been sneaking in that last bit of painting when the rain stops.

I’ve been picking things out of my garden, peeling, cutting, cooking.

I’ve been picking apples.

I’ve been picking apples.

I’ve been picking apples.

We had, when we moved in, one super-productive apple tree that had been overgrown, so made a lot of tiny tart apples.

Over the last two years (last year was a horrid apple season in this corner of the world; we got a warm bunch of days in March, followed by a cold snap and a day of 6″ of snow), T has been trimming the tree, getting into proper apple shape. At the end of this year, it really looks properly like an orchard tree.

But then, when he was cleaning out the hedgerow (he’s been cutting grapevines out of everything for two years now; they choke out anything they touch), he looked up.

And realized that those green round leaves… were apples.

We’d known we had one apple tree in the hedgerow.

(note: this is what Wikipedia thinks a hedgerow is. Around here, it’s a lot more haphazard. Think of ten feet wide, length of your property long of planted trees allowed to go wild, underbrush, thorns, and trouble. But it slows the wind right down!)

And that apple tree turned out to be two, hung with so many small apples that it looks like an interior designer’s idea of “apple fronds” or something.

But it turns out we have FOUR.

We gave a 55-gallon barrel of apples to a friend for cider. We’ve been giving away copy-paper boxes of apples to anyone we can get to take them.

And we’ve been cutting, coring, cooking down, saucing, and canning apples.

And canning apples.

and canning apples.

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