The start of August means the start of lots of apple picking here at Coppertop. We actually were inspired to get a head start on the picking last week when we noticed our two Yellow Transparent apple trees were dropping apples all over the orchard. These dropped ones were bruised, so they went straight to the hens.

Yellow Transparents are known to be some of the earliest apples which I noted last year, but we think our extra-warm weather sped up the harvest. The branches were heavy laden, to put it mildly.

The folks at Big Horse Creek Farm in North Carolina are experts at varieties of apples, and they wrote up a great story about the origins of Yellow Transparents here.

In the past week we’ve given up putting apples in my harvest basket and have instead filled FIVE huge buckets of beautiful apples.

What follows picking are many hours of peeling, slicing, cooking, and canning. Some great, fresh apple pies also follow, if one has the energy after all that work. One applesauce shortcut is to slice the apples into pieces away from the core and cook them before putting them through a food mill to remove skins and and any hard parts of the core that made it into the pot. This works well and saves time, but I will say we enjoyed the very best applesauce from the apples I peeled before cooking last year.

My companion during the long hours peeling on the deck:

And today’s deck view, which even makes apple peeling feel grand: