It occurred me to me as elf-sized Early Transparent apples kept dropping from the tree and I kept happily gnawing them up that perhaps those weren't June drops after all. Perhaps they were merely apples ripening early and small.

For the sake of comparison, I'm showing two apples of the same variety from our less-high-density dwarf tree beside one of the "June drops." The former are bigger and greener, making it more obvious that the elfin apple is actually almost a little over-ripe. (The mealy texture of the last few picked off the ground proved the same point.)

So my new conclusion is that I didn't thin the flowers on that high-density Early Transparent enough. It probably could have used some manure too, but the neighboring high-density Red Empire is bulking up its (fewer) fruits much more gamely, pointing to a variety-specific thinning problem.

Next year, I'll thin harder. But this year, I'm enjoying eating my mistakes.

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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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