Apples

I have been digging trenches in our yard this summer for our watering system. I know it is not technically "summer" for a few more days, but we've had "summer" weather for a couple months now. We have needed to get all of our trees on drips for a long time now. I am actually really surprised that I haven't killed everything in my yard already, with having to hand water every single tree and shrub each week during our killer summers. With us being so busy this year, I really need to have everything on drips because I can't water everything as often as is necessary. Anyway, while I was digging the trenches for our apple trees, I happened to look over at our too-young-to-grow-fruit apple tree. The poor thing was laden with apples. Everywhere. There were branches that were bending over and resting on the ground. There were branches that had 10-15 apples on a single branch! I was really amazed at all the apples on our 2nd year tree. I also noticed that some of the branches on the top were snapping from all the weight. The apples weren't quite ripe yet, but I didn't want to take the chance of snapping all the branches when we start having our summer storms in a couple weeks. I ended up picking all the apples from the tree. It took overflowing 2 huge kitchen bowls to collect all the apples. You can see that it could have easily filled up 4 large kitchen bowls with all those apples from our teeny five foot tree.

What's even better is that the kids tried eating a few of the mostly ripe apples and they all loved how sweet they were. They actually have a really good flavor. I am so excited for when the tree gets to be a little bit bigger and stronger and the kids will get to go outside and pick apples and devour them straight from the tree, much like I did with peaches when I was young.