Bad Apples

 

As the season for harvest arrived, the little apple tree in our front yard was finally yielding.  It's a dwarf Fuji, planted as a sapling half a decade ago, and it's really not done much up until this year.  

Last year, there were apples, but a historic drought meant they were half-sized, with flesh the flavor and consistency of balsa wood.

But this year?  After a spring in which the tree was spangled with blossoms, I carefully pruned away about half of the newly growing fruit, allowing the plant to pour its energies into what remained.  That, and a good season of rain?  They did the trick.  

It yielded several dozen nice plump apples, of the size one might expect to find at Harris Teeter or a farmer's market.  I'd expected, as the apples had matured, that they'd be devoured by the neighborhood squirrels, the same critters that take about seventy-five percent of my tomato crop each year.  But none of them were touched, and I never had to go charging out of the house to roust a brush-tailed bandit from the branches.

The why of that seemed obvious.  The apples looked terrible.  There were plenty of them, sure, but by the time they reached maturity, they were all covered in a mottled blackness.  It started slowly, but the further into the season we went, the worse they looked.

I wasn't quite sure the cause, but as I don't spray any chemicals on my plants, I thought it might possibly be some form of blight.  A mold, perhaps?  But they didn't seem to be rotting, at least not so that I could tell.  There was none of the softness of decay.  They were plump, full, and looked a bit like they'd just finished a shift in a West Virginia coal mine.

Which was another possibility that occurred to me, to be honest.  Wave after wave of smoke from Canadian wildfires have swept over the region again this year, and coupled with the ambient particulates already floating about in this urban region, these filthy fruit would have received coating after coating from months of airborne pollution.

A bit of Googling, though, brought me to the conclusion that it was not that.  Instead, it was likely sooty blotch, a fungal infection that spreads over the surface of many fruit, particularly in moist conditions.  

I was curious, though, as the apples reached their fatness.  Might they be edible?  Reddit said yes, totally. Just wash them.  

So I picked one, and brought it inside.  The skin was foul, but unbroken.  I put it under the kitchen tap, and with water running slowly over it, took a bristle brush to it.  Scrubadubdub, I went, for a couple of minutes, working my way over every square millimeter of the fruit.  

At the end of the process, that same apple looked like this:

It looked perfect.  And when I cut into it, it was tart and sweet, the flesh firm and crisp.  There was no taste of anything but apple.

It's easy to judge the worth of fruit from their surface, to look at a coating of schmutz and grime and let that first impression mislead us.  Ye shall know them by their fruit, said my Master.  Sometimes, you need to give that fruit the scrubbing of time, patience, and effort to get to the sweetness beneath.