Apples, and Apple trees

 One of the post retirement activities I've been enjoying is increasing the apple production we have. This is driven by California generally having fairly bland sweet cider (Why do they think Gravenstein makes a good sweet cider I'll never know.) and Megan's ability to ferment a delicious hard cider.

The Sierra property had historically had an orchard.

And aerial photo graph from 1945. Our portion of this expanse is the in the upper left corner of the orchard.

And of those there are 11 that are still alive and on the land. One is a crab apple, the other 10 we think are Winesap have had very inconsistent production. Most have produced zero to like 10ish apples in an one year. Two of them (marked G and Junimo below) have produced around 100 pounds of usable apples in at least one year.

The collection of old trees (marked with letters) the seeming wild tree by the pond, and the 6 new ones I've planted.

These trees have been neglected for a large number of years so the current state of biannual production or no production is not unexpected. Additionally apple trees usually only have a functional span of a few decades. They do look very pretty though, especially when flowering.

On the other it's not great to have trees lying in the middle of your trees.

This is Karl the apple tree, Karl has many pet logs.

Or to surround your trees with Manzanitas.

This is Junimo and her collection of Manzanitas, she did produce 100 pounds of apples last year.

So I've been visiting and clearing and splitting and burning. And things are much better now.

Junimo can breathe much easier now.

Karl was convinced that it didn't need all of those pet logs.

And now those logs are useful firewood.

So with step one out of the way for four of the trees (G and I, while not yet named, also had competing trees cleared out and dead brush removed.) This summer will be a heavy pruning of these 4 to bring the size under control and try to encourage a revitalization towards more apples.

While F becomes to pretty tree to sit under and listen to bees.