Harvest: Picking Apples

          The day after I helped crush grapes for wine in Seattle, I went to an orchard on Vashon Island, off the coast of Seattle, to help harvest apples for cider at Dragon's Head Farm. If at T2 wine cellar I was transported to the Middle Ages of France or England (see last week's post), here I was transported to the mythological land of Hera, whose golden apple tree was guarded by the Hesperides, nymphs of the evening. Since even nymphs can't be trusted not to taste apples, Hera hired the dragon Ladon to guard the guards, so to speak. Ladon is often depicted with multiple heads; thus the name of Dragon's Head Farm. Although none of the hundreds of apple trees in the orchard seemed to be entwined by a dragon—the only creature in the orchard was a large and very friendly dog—I did keep my eye out for Ladon when I snuck an apple into my mouth.

          Actually, there wasn't much time to eat apples because there was so much picking to do. The dozen or so adults and six or eight children who had come to harvest the apples were given small light-weight bins, like milk cartons, to put the apples in, as well as apple-picking aprons for a couple of people and one rolling scoop, with a long handle like a rake, that rolled over the apples on the ground and scooped them into its wire net with efficiency. When our bins, aprons, or scoops were full, we poured the apples into one of the two large bins that Wes, orchard owner and cider maker, drove between the rows of trees and then, when they were full, to the cider yard.

          The trees were small and the apples were small, so if you had an apron and could stand and pick, the picking was fast and easy, but most of the apples were already on the ground, where the picking was also fast and easy. The best method was to squat and scoop all the apples you could reach, three or four at a time, into your hands and toss them into a bin, then crawl a few feet forward and do it again. Wes, with his big hands, could pick faster than any Ladon could have seen. After emptying a bin into the wagon, the picker would leapfrog over other pickers to the next tree with apples on the ground and work there. Every once in a while someone would give the whole tree a good hard shake, bringing apples down like rain. When the squall stopped, pickers would move in and start picking apples off the ground again.

          Although the sky was cloudy and the air chilly, we warmed up with our exertion, and it wasn't long before coats and jackets littered the row. We chatted companionably as we worked. When I picked on the other side of the tree from the children, I caught snatches of their 'tween-age conversations: "Sandra didn't study at all for the history test." "Did you know that the sun is going to explode? Maybe not for millions of years, but it is going to explode." The children picked apples for a good long while before they lost interest and wandered off on their own.

       In late afternoon, with both sides of two rows of trees harvested, the day's work was done. Dragon's Head Farm owners, Wes and Laura, were ecstatic. "This is the best way ever to harvest apples," Laura declared. I thought so, too. We had picked 9000 pounds of apples for no telling how many gallons of cider. The work had been its own reward, but we were also well rewarded after the harvest with Laura's good salad and coconut-lentil soup, eaten around a beautiful walnut-slab table. As we left to return to our respective homes, Laura and Wes gave us paper bags and told us to fill them from a bucket of their best eating apples on the front porch. Ladon, they assured us, was nowhere around.