Honey and Apple Harvest

The bees filled a few frames of the top super. They also had capped honey in the super that I gave them to clean up. I extracted three quarts and a half pint for me and left the other super for them. There are lots of bees in the hive so no doubt they will need plenty of honey to get through our cold winter.

This late honey was also light and incredibly delicious, bringing the season's harvest to twenty-six pounds and a half pint. Celebrating my good fortune, I baked a loaf of honey white bread in the Sun Oven and spread it liberally with this golden goodness. Bliss.

Not only did I get all the honey, but the two apple trees gave me the first real crop ever. Lissa and I canned 9 pints of apple pie filling. I put up 27 pints of applesauce, filled the fridge crisper drawers with these lovely Criterion apples for eating, and still have a few to pick. This is part of the crop, after I thinned it early on. At the last, I had to prop up the limbs with cut branches to keep the slender limbs from breaking under the heavy loads.

The faces of the apples were a bit grimy from the road dirt, but they cleaned up nicely.

The Criterion apples turned out to be the best I have ever tasted in my life, absolutely fabulous. They are a keeper, literally and figuratively. I got the tree from Miller Nurseries in the spring of 2008. After ordering fruit trees and strawberry plants from Millers for many, many years, we were aghast to learn that last year was the final one for the mail-order nursery.

Looks like I now have a hard-to-find variety of apple to go with the unnamed red one that was here already. The fence is to discourage stray cows. They damaged another apple tree that I planted with the Criterion in '08. Even though it is beyond recovery,  I hadn't the heart to cut it down. When it produced one very small red apple, I thanked it profusely and didn't mention its terminal condition.

The apples are all due to the bees's pollinating work on the blossoms in the early spring. I believe they really love my organic acres as much as I love them.

While the bees will have plenty of stores for the cold months, the grasshoppers continue leaping from spot to spot. How something with so few survival instincts could become so plentiful this year is a mystery. They heed not the shorter days, the turning leaves or morning fog. Winter is dead ahead, like a massive iceberg from which there is no turning.

This indolent grasshopper whiled away some time, sitting on the deck railing, watching me read a novel. Perhaps she enjoyed listening to the Respighi that I had on the CD player drown out the gunfire from the Skeeters. Obviously not a Prepper, she had all the time in the world to spare.

Finally, I shooed it away. Its continued scrutiny of me was somehow unnerving. It made me feel I should get up and dehydrate, can and freeze even more vegetables and fruits.