Apply Dapply, a little brown mouse,
Goes to the cupboard in somebody’s house.
In somebody’s cupboard, there’s everything nice:
Cakes, cheese, jam, biscuits – all charming for mice!
~Beatrix Potter
On the fall agenda, there are a few perennial must-do items, and apple picking is one of them! We’ve picked at a few different places in the past few years, and when we discussed where we’d get our apples this year, we were torn between three options – going back to Crooked Run, the Loudoun County orchard we visited last year; checking out the scene at Butler’s Orchard, where we picked blueberries; and trying out a new location. Since we want to pick pumpkins at Butler’s, we decided to look for a new spot for apples, and Steve hit on Waters Orchard, which is right next door to Butler’s. As always happens in the fall, I’m behind on posting our family fun, so this was a few weeks ago – but a few turns of the way-back machine and here we are!
The first thing we saw upon arriving at the farm was a big tractor with a large hayride wagon attached to it. The boys had to check it out.
And since the Jonagold apples were on the far side of the orchard (still walkable, but you know) we hopped on for a ride.
Rollin’ with the homies…
We all had fun, but a certain someone had the most fun.
So excited he had to make “kindergarten face.” Oh, brother!
The hayride was over way too soon, but it was fine, because we found ourselves at the Jonagold apples! This was the first apple orchard I’ve ever visited that had the apple trees trained. I really liked it – made it much easier to get to the fruit.
The hardest thing about picking at Waters Orchard was refraining from picking every single apple – they were all gorgeous. I don’t know if it was the trained trees, the fact that we came right in the middle of picking season instead of at the very end, or just a good orchard – but their fruit was really nice.
Peanut has been a pretty reliable picker for awhile now (both of apples and other fruit and flowers when we’ve checked out various pick your own farms throughout the year) but this was the first time that Nugget was legitimately helpful.
When did he get so big? Hold me.
Peanut was all business. She was a picking machine and kept up a constant stream of chatter about her baking plans. It seems we will be making applesauce and pie and apple cake. We might need to pick more apples.
I really wanted them to stand together for a picture.
This was the closest I could get them to stand to each other.
When is Mom going to be done with the pictures? (Never, kids. I will never be done.)
After we’d half-filled our bags with Jonagolds, we walked back to the front of the orchard to pick Hudson’s Golden Crisps. I’d never heard of them, but I was sold immediately when I read the orchard’s description of them as having “a pear-like flavor.” Asian pears are my absolute favorite fruit, so anything that even approaches mimicking them is clearly on my must-try list.
Also, they were gorgeous. I started asking one of the orchard employees where they were, then cut myself off and said, “Never mind – I see them.” She laughed and replied, “Yeah, they stand out.”
Verdict?
Absolutely delicious.
Thanks for a fun family morning on the farm, Waters, and thanks for the half bushel of deliciousness! Fall baking, here we come…
Did you go apple picking this fall? What are your must-do fall activities?
Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians #1), by Kevin Kwan – I really enjoyed this fun romp through the highest of high Singaporean society. Rachel Chu, all-but “ABC” (American-Born Chinese) little knows what she is getting into when she accepts her boyfriend’s invitation to spend the summer with his “traditional” Singaporean family and be his date to his best friend’s wedding. It turns out that the wedding is the biggest society event in the country and that Nick is heir to a massive fortune and the most eligible bachelor in Asia. As Rachel navigates the treacherous waters of Nick’s disapproving family and the legions of women who will do anything to snatch Nick away from her, Nick’s cousin Astrid is dealing with her own private heartache – oh, and Nick’s mother Eleanor and her Bible study group are determined to get rid of Rachel once and for all. Great literature this is not – but good fun it is, and I am anxiously awaiting the movie.
It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis – I had been waiting and waiting – months, in fact – to cycle to the top of the library wait list and take home Sinclair Lewis’s eerily prescient classic. In It Can’t Happen Here, Lewis illustrates, with terrifying specificity, how Fascism could take hold in America and what the consequences could be. The book was written in 1935, when Fascism was on the rise in Europe but most Americans were blissfully ignorant of the fact, and was Lewis’s wake-up call to a sleeping public. But after the 2016 election and everything that has happened since, it seems all too frighteningly real. Lewis paints in shuddering strokes the picture of an American politician who rides into power on a tide of Populist resentment and then proceeds to grab power from left to right until he has created a dictatorship and Fascist kleptocracy with himself as the center and primary beneficiary. Sound familiar?
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel – This was another one that had been on my list for awhile. Fun Home is Bechdel’s memoir of growing up in a funeral home, her relationship with her father, and her coming out as a lesbian. It’s really engagingly written and drawn, and a fascinating glimpse into another life. (I also know that Bechdel’s work has helped a lot of people on their coming-out journeys, and I think that is really something to celebrate and admire. She has lent her voice and her cartooning skills, and used her platform, in such an admirable way.) I found Bechdel herself to be an engaging and lovable figure in the memoir, and was completely fascinated by her relationships with her parents, and her father in particular. (I also loved the little glimpses into the library of her dad, who was an English teacher and avid reader, and the connection that Bechdel’s own enjoyment of reading gave them – complex and tenuous as that connection may have been.)
The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence, The Porcupine Year, Chickadee, Makoons (Birchbark House #1-5), by Louise Erdrich – Somehow, I only just learned of the Birchbark House books, thanks to a social media post. Someone in my Twitter (or Facebook?) feed wished for a Native American series akin to the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and another user piped up, “There is one – the Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich.” I immediately dashed (well, cyber-dashed) to my library’s website and reserved the entire series, and I spent about a week and a half tearing through them, laughing and crying and making mental notes about how to make pemmican and preserve seeds (useful information, I think). I laughed a lot, and cried a lot, too. The books follow the life of Omakayas, a young Ojibwe woman, from girlhood through adulthood and motherhood. Omakayas means “Little Frog,” and she was so named because “her first step was a hop.” Adopted as a baby, Omakayas grows up as a treasured daughter, granddaughter, sister and friend. Her life is not without hardship – her family is torn apart by smallpox in the first book (a scene in which I cried floods while reading and floods more while telling a work friend – our firm librarian; hi, Susan! – about the book) but is not without its joys, either. Had these books been published when I was a young reader, I know I would have devoured them. As it is – I devoured them.
covered in flour 