Applegeddon!

September is here, and there’s been a noticeable cooling and loss of daylight hours. We finally have tomatoes — about a month late — and our orchard decided to ripen all at once. That means I had to pick pears, peaches and apples in one feel swoop. That’s really strange, but it’s been kind of a weird growing season. 

On the bright side, our Gala apple tree is having a best-ever bumper year:

That’s just a portion of the apples I’ve picked so far. The tree is still covered:

It’s also hard to tell in the photo — since everything around the tree is also green — but this is no longer a dwarf apple tree. I can only reach about halfway up, so we’re officially in standard territory. We’ll need to bring out a ladder to fully harvest these apples.

We definitely planted a dwarf tree, but over time it looks like the root graft ended up in contact with the soil. This can cause the grafted stock to take root and override the dwarf root stock, and I guess that’s what happened here: This tree is big.

It’s also so laden with fruit that the lower branches are bending under the weight and dragging on the ground. Kirk had to use a sawhorse as an emergency prop for the worst offender:

Now that this tree is so big, we’ll have to cut back these lower branches when we prune the tree in the winter. 

While it’s not easy to harvest fruit from those tall upper branches, it’s hard to complain about all the extra apples. I see loads of apple sauce, cobblers and pies in our future — and maybe some Pennsylvania Dutch apple butter, too.