The biggest late crop we have are our apples. They are able to withstand a freeze of up to -6 degrees Celsius, and cold weather actually helps sweeten them up. Luckily at our farm, one of the girls worked as an apple picker for several years before being taken on at Klippers Organics. For this reason, she has pretty much been put in charge of taking off the fruit because she is 1) fastest and 2) least likely to bruise the fruit. Nevertheless, we do have so many apples, that we all did get a chance to take part in the fun.
I have learned that you need to flip the apples off the tree keeping the stem on the apple. If the stem is removed, the apple dries out much more quickly. Also, when we are clearing the trees - that means removing all the fruit at once - we wear harnessed apple picking bags that strap across our back and have notches to hold up the bag when picking at a variety of heights, depending on how much apple weight you are strong enough to carry, and then release the bag into the big tractor-moved bins for storage. Like most of the fresh products here, bruising is a concern, as bruises reduce the lifespan of the apple. So when you are picking, we've been taught to get into the habit of placing the apples in the bag with the back of your hands to the bottom of the bag. This prevents you from dropping the apples into the bag, especially when you are trying to go fast, and causing them to bruise by hitting one another.
Another trick I learned from the apple-pro is to pick as much weight as you can at the top of a tree when you have to be standing on a ladder, them climb down and fill you bag to the brim with apples from the bottom of the tree when you have your two feet on solid ground again. Personally, ladders freak me out, especially when you are carying a sack of heavy apples strapped to your front, so I tried my best to stay on the ground. Being tall was very beneficial in this quest.
When we are not clearing the trees, we take the time to spot-pick apples that are ripe. Though this is more labour intensive process, in terms of sales, it gives you the advantage of being first at the market with a certain crop or variety of crop. What this means in turn, is that the consumer gets used to bying that product from you, because you had it first. So it can be argued that the time investment is worth it. Spot picking is much more challenging especially when you don't know the varieties very well. You don't pick just on size, but on colour too. So for certain apples, such as the Muzu, they were picked when they had a yellow to pink blush on them.
If you pick an apple too early, the sugars haven't fully developed and the fruit flesh is still quite starchy. No one on the farm is particularly an expert at knowing the starch level in any given season, and for growers that sell to the packing house, Cawston Cold Storage, they receive free testing of their fruit sugar content so that they know exactly when to pick for the packing house. Then we call the neighbours and find out what they were told :) Convenient.
As far as I know we have harvested (in this order) Shamrocks, Cox Pippen, MacIntosh, Gala, Spartan, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Muzu, Granny Smith, Fuji and still to come off are our Pink Ladies.
My favourite apples have been the Cox Pippen, Muzu and Fuji. I know I like Pink Ladies, so I will be eager to try them too! We don't have any Winter Banana apples on the property, but I have learned this year that I like them a lot too.
Apples need to be kept in the cooler in order to have them keep over the winter. However, because we have so many apples, 1) there is no way that we would be able to sell them all before they start to go and 2) we don't have the space to store them all! So we process the fruit.
With the excess apples we make both apple juice and dried apple chips. For both we have external companies that do the processing on behalf of the farm, so we need to get the apples sorted for juicing or drying. A juicing apples is one that is small, mis-shaped or severely damaged. A drying apple is one that is large to excessively large because they will then be a decent size once all the water is dehydrated from them.
For home processing we have collected many of the apples that dropped to the ground before we could get to them or while we were picking. There are also the bird pecked fruit. Apparently the birds like apples as much as we do, and they have seriously done some damage on some of the fruit.
Tomatoes! Death becomes you. The tomatoes are dead. The frost earlier this week did them in, and we are happy. A couple of people here still tried to salvage a few last tomatoes to extend the tomatoe sandwhich addictions they have developed over the last few weeks. And others yet were trying to nab a few for seed saving purposes. But for the most part, we are done with them. (Side note - to save tomato seeds you crush the seeds out of the flesh of the tomato, cover these vegetable innards and let them ferment which deactivates the compounds that would allow the seeds to sprout. So when you actually collect the seeds, you are getting them out of a goopy, foul smelling, fermented mess you have let sit for weeks.)
