Apple quest

After a week of unseasonably warm weather, a dousing of nearly three inches of rain, the weather has turned a bit unseasonably cold. Yes, you can average our weather, but the great mid-west of North America never gets average weather. So Saturday was going to be a bit cool and maybe a bit wet, and this is a university town, so football, and homecoming, so best to get out of Dodge. All in all, a good day for an apple quest to southeastern Michigan. Locally the early varieties of apples did well, and the Jonathons and Jonagolds were excellent, and the Phactors recommend you try Crimson Crisp if you get the chance, but the later varieties just did not fair so well. Thus if the Phactors were to have Northern spies, it would take a quest to the Tree-Mendus fruit farm in Eau Claire, MI. They have over 200 varieties of apples under cultivation, quite amazing diversity, and you get tastes! The Phactors managed to beat the homecoming parade out of town, and then it drizzled on us all the way to Michigan. Hungry and hoping the rain would let up, the Phactors stopped for lunch in an Applebee's. But it didn't. Still you don't drive 4 hours to get your favorite apples and just give up. Perhaps you have gathered that most of the apples are U-pick, and nothing quite like a cold, drizzle to make it an adventure. The dear woman working the orchard outpost should get a medal for remaining cheerful doing a rather miserable job while someone else got to make the mulled cider by the barn's fireplace. Not to be deterred by the cold and rain, the Phactors picked apples, 4 half-bushels and fortunately northern spies are largish apples so you don't have to pick so many to fill a bag. Now here is the question. If you were picking some of these apples for friends, how much above the purchase price do they owe you for the transportation and picking in miserable weather? As the trip neared it's end the rain finally stopped. So checking the score, the Phactors are squashed up (from a field trip 2 weeks ago) and appled up for the fall and winter. Next up, what you do with this bounty.

Desperate measures, expensive measures

When you get desperate enough, cost becomes no object.  Well, price is an object, but you don't mind spending a premium price to get what you want if there's no other way to get it.  In this particular instance TPP and most especially Mrs. Phactor want Northern Spy apples.  Usually we can get some at a boutique hobby orchard about 50 miles away, but this year an early warm spell followed by a freeze doomed the local apple crop almost totally.  Our favorite source in Michigan had a poor crop of this variety and are sold out of what they had.  So some online shopping identified a source not too far from where TPP grew up in upstate New York, some real apple country.  Now it may sound ridiculous to pay $100 for a bushel of apples, but these are Northern Spys, and if you think  you know quality apples and haven't tried one of these, you are in for some revisions.  They are crisp, firm, juicy, sweet-tart, and have a complex apple taste.  They store well and stand up well to baking.  They are Mrs. Phactor's favorite pie apple.  Of course if you think about the alternatives, the price isn't so bad.  Alternative one: do without.  Not a good alternative.  Alternative two: drive to Michigan on an apple quest.  Estimated cost: fuel $80, meals $60, lodging $80, apples $35, two days required.  Now of course there are other pleasant things associated with the trip (wineries), and the load of apples would be considerably larger than a bushel, but in general TPP is feeling pretty good about this purchase, its delivery to his door, and a piece of apple pie will make him feel even better.  BTW the Northern Spy has been difficult to grow, but now a dwarf variety is available, the Nova Spy, and the apples have retained the Northern Spy quality.

Tale of two trees

Gardening is one of those enterprises where you always have some successes and some failures. One of this years successes was the first crop of apples from a relatively new tree of a relatively new variety, a Nova Spy. As the name suggests this is a new variety of dwarf apple tree that supposedly captures the singular apple quality of the Northern Spy, an apple of some renown for more than a century. So it was with considerable anticipation that the first apples produced by our three-year-old tree were harvested, and how nice it is to report that the apples are true to form, largish somewhat irregular in shape and green with streaky red, very recognizable as a spy, and it has the spy flavor, that sweet tart taste with all sorts of fruity highlights. How fantastic that this new variety seems to have solved the spy problems of being big, slow-growing, full-sized, slow to bear trees as the only source of a superior apple, so maybe this excellent apple will become more popular again, and more avidly sought by people other than a few apple fanciers. But in the negative column on the same day as the apples were harvested, a 3-yr-old Japanese maple up and wilted, a nearly certain sign, given the time of year, of verticillium wilt, and the consequent death of the tree. A redbud died a couple of weeks earlier in a similar manner. So that's the long and short of it.