It's Apple Picking Time

D has come up with some clever solutions to harvesting the apples.

Sometimes you can reach them.

Note the apple bag - more about that later in this blog entry.

But some of the trees we have are "Standard", which means they can be 20-30 feet tall!

This tree we have named Eastern Star and this year it is loaded with apples!

They are a good cooking and eating apple.

To get the high apples down, D made a "panking pole".

This is made of a cut-down narrow hoe put into a lightweight antenna pole.

Here is a three-second flick of the pole in action.

 It's not really lightweight, as you can imagine.

Notice the tarps spread under the tree.  We do not want to use fallen apples for cider - they would be ok for cooking - but since cider is not pasteurized, it is better to avoid contamination with critter droppings.

 The gorgeous red apples on this tree are "Belvedere".   About half are reachable, the rest will need panking.

Check out the apple gathering system.  The apple bag is made of the top 8 inches of a five-gallon bucket.  Sewn to that is a feed-sack.  The straps are webbing from a lawn chair.  Pretty clever, I think!

And another efficient set-up is this gathering pail.
It consists of a 30 gallon galvanized trash can, a square of plywood with a center hole and bracing, the top 8 inches of two 5-gallon buckets.

 The bottom bucket piece stays in the plywood.  A feed-sack is pulled up.  The second bucket piece is reinserted to hold the feedsack.

The gathered apples are poured into the feedsack held in the bucket.  

When it's full, remove the top bucket, gather the top of the feedsack.  Remove the plywood and take the full sack out of the bucket.

Definitely a lot of ingenuity.  

And quite economical.

A great combination! 

Now it's ready to load the apple sacks on the tractor bucket for a drive to the cider house.