…the crabapples drop.
This is the path I take to work, which is bracketed by some crabapple trees on either side, and at this time of year it is covered with little red crabapples.
It gets swept occasionally, but those are extraordinarily productive trees, and my walk is through that squishy, slippery mess. I tend to step in the barer spots, so I kind of dance my way across it, but bicyclists go straight through the middle, leaving a trail of flattened apples. What you can’t see in this photo is the sickly-sweet smell of rotting sour apples, or the tremendous swarms of flies and wasps gorging themselves in a gluttonous orgy.
It’s not pleasant, but soon enough it will be replaced sheets of snow over ice. I prefer the rotten apples.
Drink more cider.
Ugh… Thanks for reminding me. Sure, the temperatures and humidity levels become much more tolerable and there is a colorful flourish at the end, but for me Autumn is just the prelude to the cold, dead, dark, dreariness of winter.
Late Spring and Summer are still my favorite times of the year.
Practically grew up on a property with a productuve crabapple tree on it. I was told they were that sweet, but little me didn’t care. I also didn’t care that they were a little chalky or mealy. They were crabapples from the crabapple tree!
I knew that tree nearly half its life. It didn’t survive the big, traumatic drought in CA, but by that time it was well into its non-productive senescence. So, I mostly miss the tree when I think on its loss.
That’s a waste of good food. Our founder’s grandmother used to make really great crabapple jelly from the fruit harvested from the tree in her backyard.
@2 Akira MacKenzie wrote: for me Autumn is just the prelude to the cold, dead, dark, dreariness of winter.
I reply: Yes. But, I think you will agree; we have already been living in a LONG cold, dead, dark, dreary, murderous winter under the magat-in-chief and the plutocrats and sheople that (allegedly) got him elected.
Please stock up on bird food for the winter now that the temperature is dropping.
This reminds me the voice actress for Miss Crabapple in The Simpsons has passed away.
(Also, Origa, the singer in some famous music in the Ghost In the Shell franchise passed away some years ago. Everyone I listen to dies.)
Some pre-industrial people would sacrifice their chieftain to the gods if events seemed to require it. Hmm…cold weather, war and high costs…
Be happy it’s not female ginkgo fruit. Or maybe they don’t grow this far north.
That’s one of the (few?) good things about having groundhogs around: they eat the fallen fruit, reducing the amount for yellowjackets.
Not yet.
Reading this, I now have the memory of the taste and texture of my grandmother’s crabapple preserve. I never liked the damned stuff but since it also triggers memories of her kitchen I’ll put up with it for a while.
dennyk, :)
Nice!
I’ve got 2 crabapple trees* in the yard. I hate mowing around them in the fall.
* My departed dad told me they were crabapple. I think they might be regular apples. Smaller fruit than you see in stores, but bigger than any other crabapple I’ve seen.
Speaking of fall… next No Kings Day is October 17.
May the orange lump and his enablers fall.
Ginkgos are perfectly hardy and set fruit here in the southern part of Minnesota… the fruits smell like parmesan cheese
We see three aspects of life here: Plantae, shedding the fruits. Animalia, rushing to eat the crabapples. And fungi, breaking down leaves and other plant matter.
Leaving eukaryotes behind, bacteria everywhere.
Do any Archaea thrive in oxygen-rich environments?
Two crabapple trees in the garden of my childhood home – they do indeed make a delicious jam. Youngest sib and I were the only ones small enough to climb up without breaking branches, so it was our job to fill little (think sandcastle) buckets and lower them down on a string.
Huge pail of crabapples simmering for hours, then the mush was strained into sterilised jars making a beautiful clear jam.
I only learned many, many years later – after my parents were dead, in fact – that when the jam came out opaque, it was to conceal the timers sent in jars of home-made jam to my parents’ friends in the ANC, explosive devices for the use of, way back in the years of the anti-apartheid struggle.
@prairieslug
Where I grew up, (way south of here) ginkgo fruit smelled like a vomit-dogshit medley.