It’s full-fledged fall around here. These past couple weeks have been pure heaven for fall-lovers like me: The colors are changing, the days are sunny but there’s a nip in the air, I’ve broken out the wool socks, we’ve made soup with one of the massive squashes in our garden, and apples are ripe and ready for the pickin’! And pick we did:
Saturday morning we headed out with a few friends into the neighborhood to poach apples from peoples’ yards.
That sounds way more bad-ass than it really was. Explanation: The apple trees on our property are in their off year {apple trees naturally produce fruit every-other year unless they’re manipulated via pruning to produce every year}, so we called around town asking neighbors if they’d be okay with us picking some of their apples. The answer was ‘yes’ in every case. We ended up only needing to visit two trees, and we filled the whole bed of the truck!
No husbands were harmed during the climbing of this tree….
We headed back to our place to eat lunch, press cider, and play a little touch football in the field. I made the winning touchdown. I’m not even going to re-structure that sentence to sound less gloat-y. It was a big moment for me. Sadly there is no photographic proof.
This year’s cider is sweeter than last year’s. It’s incredible how different it tastes depending on the mixture and variety of apples you use. We pressed 16 gallons of cider from all these apples, some of which will be fermented into apple cider vinegar and hard cider.
A toast to my favorite time of year: May the nip in the air remind you you’re alive, make you snuggle closer to the one you love, and provoke a feeling of gratitude for the simplest pleasures and privileges in life- the roof over your head, the food in your belly. Happy Equinox!
