It's been about five months since I've eaten a significant amount of store-bought fruit, and when the Virginia Beauties finally ran out last week, I went into withdrawal.  (Remember, I'm a fruit snob and think grocery-store fruit, for the most part, is insipid and barely worth eating.)  We used to have a fruit stand which provided fruit a notch above the grocery store (if not up to my exacting standards), but the fruit stand didn't open up this year, so we'd need to drive over an hour round trip to find moderately-edible fruit.  Or so I thought until I remembered that the little town twelve miles away had opened up a farmer's market a couple of years ago.

The first thing I saw upon entering the farmer's market was apples --- jackpot!  I browsed through all the vendors and ended up selecting at least a few apples from each of three sellers.  I've yet to taste the Virginia Beauties from the lady to the left (I got a pound, curious to see if they taste at all like my homegrown morsels), but have already sampled two kinds of Winesaps and an Arkansas Black.  The latter is a milder apple than I usually like, but I'm curious to see how long it will last in storage (reputedly "forever") and whether the apple-grower is right when he says the flavor will improve over time.

The Winesap comparison was more interesting.  The guy shown above sold us both Winesaps and Arkansas Blacks, both of which he grows conventionally (with sprays).  And the apples did look beautiful!  But in terms of flavor, they merely matched what you'd find at a moderate-to-good fruit stand.

In contrast, the Winesap apples shown at the top of this post came from an old-style organic farm, meaning that the standard-sized apple tree had been there longer than the farmer had owned the land, and that all he did to the tree was to pick the fruit.  Although smaller and less aesthetically appealing than the sprayed apples, these old-style Winesaps were delectable and I wish I'd bought more than one of the $5 baskets pictured.  They nearly matched the flavor of my homegrown Virginia Beauties.

I plan to put our bushel-plus of apples in the fridge root cellar and eat to my heart's content for at least the next month.  In the meantime, I clearly need to put more thought into fruit that does well in winter storage since the more summer fruit we grow, the less inclined I am to go back to bought offerings after our homegrown stores run out.  Some of the slack will be taken up by our pears and Virginia Beauty as they come into their prime, but Mark and I are quite frugivorous and could probably use some more winter keepers.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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