Aine washes apples to be cut and pressed into cider.

We're regaining our balance after a whirlwind of apple events. The first of these was a visit to a small orchard about an hour northeast of Seattle, started three decades ago entirely from grafts of our family's Vashon orchard (some of the original trees have since died on Vashon). We enjoyed a few hours of apple discourse and sampled the varieties at hand. A number were quite excellent, including Early Golden, Liberty, and 20 Ounce Pippin.

The pinnacle of the season was our family's apple cider pressing, held on Vashon at what is now my aunt and uncle's house. Their property hosts the counterpart to our own orchard, and has wonderful trees such as Esopus Spitzenburg, Northern Spy, and Wealthy. There are others, of course — many of our young trees are grafted second-hand from stock that originated on Vashon. Although their orchard began around 1900 as an order of 100 trees from Stark Bro's Nursery, it is now diminished to twenty or thirty specimens in varying states of health.

Still, this year was a banner year for apple production in Washington state, and the Vashon orchard was no exception. All the trees looked healthy and were bearing heavily. We'd been saving boxes of our own apples and brought over about 20 cardboard boxes brimming with fruit to press. About thirty friends and family gathered to partake in the year's harvest ritual, and we ended up pressing around a gallon of cider per person participating. Our family's two antique cider presses had been dramatically repaired and rejuvenated in the past year, so we were able to have both running simultaneously as the event stretched from late morning until dusk.

Intergenerational cider pressing!

We ended up bringing a few of our apple boxes home, along with one of the cider presses. We've done two single-varietal apple pressings since then; the first of which used our "Goat Yard Apple," (pictured above being washed by Aine) which we deemed unsuitable for eating. Although we were hoping it would serve better in cider, it remained insipid — not sweet, sour, or flavorful enough to be enjoyable.

Our next attempt used apples from our Tompkins King trees, which we prize highly as eating apples. This pressing was much more successful, and produced a cider with sprightly zing and a good balance of tart and sweet. We only pressed 1 ½ gallons of the Goat Yard cider, but ended up producing six gallons from the King and saving half in the basement to become hard cider.

King Apples lined up on the orchard ladder.

The King tree, along with Gravenstein, Yellow Gravenstein, and the tree we'd been calling Baldwin, has just about finished dropping its apples. The Roxbury Russet is just getting started, and we're looking forward to pressing quite a bit more cider with friends before the season is over. After a few more pressings, our basement may be depleted and give up the heady smell of apples.

The last apple event we attended in October was the (Kitsap) Peninsula Fruit Club's Fall Fruit Show. On display was a staggering assortment of apples — hundreds of varieties! — and the invitation to try them all. We didn't manage to try them all, but we did sample many apples that we'd been curious about and others that were recommended to us. I won't attempt to offer tasting notes on all that we tried, but here are a few highlights.

Apples We May Graft for 2013

We all agreed that the Nutmeg Pippin, which we'd never heard of, had exceptional flavor and a strong, crisp texture. The flavor, far from suggesting just nutmeg, was complex and spicy and very interesting. We're hoping to plant some of these.

The Reine de Reinettes (poorly translated from French as King of the Pippins) was another complex and delicious apple.

Ashmead's Kernel, like both of the previous apples, had an unusual, unique flavor and an intriguing spiciness. Quite delicious.

Universally Disliked

Perhaps only one of the apples on display was roundly panned by our panel of four apple critics. The Pitmaston Pineapple did not taste at all of pineapple; furthermore, it was wholly unpleasant in taste and texture. We're hoping this was a bad specimen, because it had nothing whatsoever to recommend it. Worse even than our own Goat Yard apple!

King Apples on the tree.

Under the Roxbury Russet

Apple Identification, Part II

In September, Dr. Bob Norton tasted and identified some of our apple varieties. We had him revisit his assessment of some of these apples, and offered him a few more.

The apple he'd previously identified as either a Baldwin or a Ben Davis was now overripe and determined to be neither. He and Jean Williams, another expert, thought that this favorite apple of ours might be in the Jonathan lineage (but had no specific thoughts on which exact apple it might be).

The apple previously thought to be a Roxbury Russet or Rhode Island Greening had just come into ripeness and is now confirmed as a Roxbury Russet. It is indeed good for eating as well as baking and cider-making — yum!

One of our unidentified apples — which we call the "Woodshed Apple," wasn't positively identified by Bob and Jean as a known apple cultivar. I'm still investigating whether it may be a Tolman Sweet or a White Pearmain, which are the closest I've tasted.

Another of our unknown (and not yet ripe) apples was identified as a Winesap. This tree, unfortunately, is fairly heavily shaded by taller trees — cherry, birch and cedar. Still, it has a good-sized crop of small apples and we'll have opportunity to enjoy this well-regarded antique apple.

Honeybees appreciate the clusters of tiny blossoms that make up a Sunflower.

Now it's October, and autumn has become truth. The parched fields of summer hear the promise; they know their thirst will be slaked. The fallen leaves are no longer scattered and solitary — they drift and mound together in piles for the chickens to scratch beneath the old orchard.

Life prevails. The pregnant moon and crisp evening air, the looming wintry winds and little deaths haven't slowed the colorful assembly of fruits, flowers and vegetables in our garden. The tomato plants spill their fruit recklessly; we'll be enjoying their profuse and flamboyantly-pigmented bounty for a long time yet.

A bowl of fresh-picked tomatoes and peppers.

Sola and Aine Gardening

Our kitchen becomes more and more crowded with the season's harvest. The forest of bok choy and chard we planted has grown tall and we're now freezing a considerable surplus of leafy greens for the leaner months. Adding to the pile are baskets of onions and potatoes that have recently been dug up.

The richness of the reaping brings me to think of my favorite harvest event of the year: our family's apple cider pressing on Vashon Island this coming weekend. Our basement is filled with boxes of apples and permeated with their sweet cidery scent.

It has been a generous year to grow things and watch them ripen. The wheel is turning, though, and my mind turns to battening the hatches against winter, setting in the stores, and working indoors.

Red-Leaf Lettuce glowing in the afternoon sun.

Barred Rock and Black Star chickens sharing a muddy winter meal with Ice, our Arabian gelding.

Rhode Island Red Hen

We're gradually finding our way as poultry keepers. We got started by adopting the flock of thirty-two hens that were squatting on the property when we moved in. Since then we've raised mail-order chicks, hatched some of our own, and now have a motley flock of about 70 eagle-resistant chickens.

We've lost a handful of the older hens to sickness; maybe they ate something they shouldn't have, or perhaps something blew in on the wind. We don't know how old they are, so it's possible they were just reaching the natural end of their life. Speaking of natural ends — to have any hope of our chickens paying for themselves, we need to impose some limits on our flock.

Rustle the Rooster

Because we hatched our own eggs, we have ten roosters providing a constant soundtrack to our bucolic fantasy life. They're not the only extra mouths we're feeding. Our older hens have slowed down. Chickens are most productive in their first year of laying; by their third or fourth year, laying becomes erratic. With this in mind, we've been posting a Craigslist ad for our "spent" hens and pesky roosters. So far, we haven't had any nibbles for the roosters, but a couple did come by the farm to acquire three of our hens. They were just getting started with chickens, and were hoping for hens who would lay some eggs.

After warning them that we couldn't confirm whether these hens still laid at all, that they were old, and that they were more susceptible to illness, we agreed to the sale: one Barred Rock, one Rhode Island Red, and one Black Star. They called us the next day to report that the Black Star had already laid them an egg! I'm chuffed that some of our chickens will have such a nice retirement.