Apple-Culling Time

This is the time of year when, feeling like King Herod getting ready to massacre the Holy Innocents, I pick up a pair of scissors and go out to cull the apple crop.

Apple blossoms grow in clumps of five or six or even more, and on years when there's been plenty of sunshine and the wind has been still and the pollinators have done their job, every one of those blossoms becomes a baby apple.  Infant apples are adorable.  Plump and green and darkly pink, the size of my smallest fingernail, they thrust themselves up on their stems towards the light, towards life, towards the future.

And then I come around with my scissors.

Sometimes among the five or six siblings in a clump there is a clear winner, a plumper, healthier apple to which the others must be sacrificed.  But often all the apples are similar in size and future prospects.  Then I must choose at random which one will live and which will be severed from their stems, fall to the ground, and be gobbled up by my little red dog, Bisou.

I don't like these choices.  They make me feel like some irrational deity wreaking havoc on harmless beings.  They also make me wonder if there is some invisible demiurge poised above me, enormous scissors in hand, ready to cull me.

Besides, I dislike getting rid of all those potential apples.  The purpose of culling is to enable the tree, instead of producing a large number of stunted, gnarly apples, to concentrate its energies on fewer fruit so that these may attain their full glory.   But all kinds of misfortunes may yet befall the apples that I spare.  They may be knocked down by winds, pecked by birds, attacked by fungi.  It is entirely possible that, at harvest time in the fall, I will end up with only a couple of apples.  Wouldn't it be smarter to leave them all on the tree?

But I ignore my doubts and continue sniping with the scissors.  It takes a while to find all those tiny apples.  This is where I'm glad for the severe pruning I do in February or March.  I keep my trees so small that I hardly have to raise my arms to reach the highest branches.

I'm barely into the second of my four trees when it starts to rain again.  After a worrisome dry spring we're finally getting rain, but it's stormy, scary weather with lightning and thunder and precipitous drops in barometric pressure.   This sends Bisou onto my lap and me into the arms of CFS.

I try not to fret about the unculled trees, the unweeded garden, or the unmade bed.  Instead I close my eyes, breathe in, breathe out, and visualize the water table slowly rising.

Culling

Despite the supposed scarcity of honey bees, the majority of blooms on my two little apple trees managed to get fertilized. When the petals fell off, each former flower cluster turned into a cluster of baby apples, five or six to a cluster.

If left to their own devices, a lot of these infant fruits would wither and drop from the branch, but even if only a couple remained per cluster there would still be too many clusters and too many apples for the tree to nourish, resulting in an undersized, unhealthy crop and possible damage to the tree from too much weight on its branches.

So every year, after blossom time, I go out and, armed with nothing but my God-given fingernails, cull the apple crop.

This is light, pleasant work, especially since, true to my European heritage, I believe strongly in pruning, and the tops of my semi-dwarf trees are within comfortable reach of my outstretched arms. Slowly I part the foliage, looking for apple clumps. If any two are closer than six inches, I pinch off one. And for each clump that I leave on, I look for the plumpest baby, and I get rid of the rest.

The job is soon finished, as I only have the two little trees, but every minute that I'm culling apples I think back to the time, many years ago, when I culled...baby rabbits.

This was back in the 1970s, when, having read in The Mother Earth News that rabbit meat offered a higher-quality protein than even chicken or fish, I decided that I owed it to my husband and children to raise rabbits for our table. You couldn't go wrong with rabbits: they would fatten on yard and garden waste; they made the best compost in the world (with which to grow more veggies, to feed more rabbits); and they reproduced in the proverbial manner.

I had grown up, in Spain, on my grandmother's home-grown and -processed rabbit meat, and I remembered that it was delicious. I wasn't ready to tackle the slaughtering--something my grandmother accomplished quickly and without fuss--but the rabbit man who sold me the pregnant New Zealand Red doe assured me that he would be glad to do the job for me.

The girls and I had fun feeding the big fluffy doe green treats from the yard in addition to her rabbit chow. We gave her lots of water and made sure her cage was sheltered from the sun. And a month later, just as the rabbit man said they would, the bunnies came--twelve of them, pink and hairless and hungry.

I went back to the original article to read what to do next. And what came next was culling. A doe, even a big one, could only successfully raise a maximum of eight rabbits, so it behooved the rabbit husbandry-person to cull the litter at the earliest possible moment.

I was, I thought, serious about raising rabbits, as I was serious about most everything in those days. My vision of homesteading on our 1 1/2 acres was as solemn as it was heartfelt. I was determined to escape the tyranny of agribusiness, and felt it my duty as a mother to feed my kids stuff that I grew with my own hands, whether they liked it or not. As for culling the baby rabbits, was I a real homesteader, or was I just channeling Marie Antoinette?

Back from teaching my classes the next afternoon, I parked the girls in front of Sesame Street, got into my jeans and boots, and strode to the rabbit cage. The mother was eating, so I had clear access to the nest box. There they were, all twelve of them, squirming in a cloud of fluff, their heartbeat visible under their paper-thin skin.

I took a breath, closed my eyes, and reached into the nest. I carried the four bunnies into the chicken yard, set them down on a brick, grabbed another brick, struck...and, leaving the remains for the hens, ran into the house and poured myself a glass of sherry.

And that is what I think about every spring, the whole time I'm culling apples.