English apples are for autumn. They're for apple pie and apple crumble, homemade and warm from the oven, melting in your mouth. They're for custard, they're for blackberries, they're for scrumping in September, they're for eating too many at once and getting tummy ache. They're for stewed fruit on a cold night in October, November, December. They're for Devon apple cake and apple muffins and a billion other baking projects. They're for taking huge bites from whilst reading a Victorian novel in an armchair.
Basically, I love apples.
My brother and I picked ours the other day, on a hot July afternoon.
I thought the apples looked pretty in their basket. Check out the monster (last photo) which was almost bigger than my hand and weighed over a pound.
I was twelve when we bought the apple tree. I remember feeling very bored on a gloomy rainy day in late summer, being dragged around a garden centre, whilst my parents took hours and hours to make a decision on a tree. And it looked rubbish anyway, a stumpy, runty thing slotted wonkily into the earth. But now it's huge, big enough to climb and full of green healthy life. (It also seems to be a popular spot with spiders, else I'd always be up there.)
It produces a lot of fruit. And not much can beat a home grown apple.
How bizarre to have apples this early - I've seen a few trees weighed down with them this month too, and just assumed they were a 'different' kind of apple of something! Apples in July does seem quite incongruous.
ReplyDeleteYour pictures are lovely - the top one, with the sun, looks almost as if you were picking limes, which would almost be less weird!