Apple Tasting
Started: 2024-09-30 21:10:07
Submitted: 2024-09-30 22:42:24
Visibility: World-readable
It's fall again so we went picking apples
This fall we went apple picking at Gizdich Ranch, located in Santa Cruz County on the other side of the Pajaro River Valley, past Watsonville, at the base of the hills that ring the valley. We arrived early in the afternoon, parked at the end of a tiny dirt road in a dusty parking lot packed with cars (many of which looked like they had driven from the other side of the mountain to participate in our local agriculture), and headed into the orchard, laid out on a gentle slope descending along both sides of a dusty path.
We walked past several rows of apples marked as not ready for harvest yet, and nearly-empty rows that looked like they had recently been planted with new saplings, as an investment to pay out over the next decade. We stepped into the rows of gala apples, bright red on the trees under the partly-cloudy sky.
This year I decided that we should visit the orchard early in the season, but not on the first week. The orchard opened on the 14th, so this was the third weekend it was open for picking apples. This seemed to be a good strategy; the first apple trees in the rows had only a few small golf-ball-sized apples, but as we walked down the row the apples left on the trees were larger and easier to reach and we were all able to pick a satisfying number of apples.
The biggest challenge when picking apples was making sure not to pick too many. We turned back before we reached the end of the row of gala apples, because there were as many as we wanted to pick, in an interesting variety of sizes. I tried to pick the largest apples I could, which often meant I had to reach as high as I could to pick apples that other people couldn't reach. These apples were on the small side by grocery store standards, just the right size to fit in my hand, the size of a baseball, enough for a a refreshing treat, not monstrously large like some of the softball-sized apples we find at the grocery store.
We picked a few fuji apples from the next rows, then headed down the hill to pick the larger mutsu apples. I didn't remember seeing this particular variety on our previous visits to the orchard. We skipped the newton pippin, an heirloom variety that's a bit musty by modern standards (and is apparently best for cider anyway, which wasn't what we were interested in today).
Back at home Kiesa set up the three varieties of apples we picked at the orchard (on the bottom row), plus three varieties from our farm share (on the top row, with the caveat that not all of them were obviously identifiable from the tags we were given at the farm share pickup). The farm-share apples on the top row were crisp and fresh, but the gravenstein in the middle was disappointing. The gala and fuji are popular grocery store varieties, but they were fresher than we usually get (having been picked about an hour before eating) and tasted better as a result. The mutsu was the most surprising; it was almost tropical, with notes of pineapple and mango.
I spent an afternoon getting a bit closer to the food I eat, which seems appropriate for the fall harvest season.
