Apples

When the seeds inside have turned brown, the skin colour in the stem dimple has gone from green to yellow, and the apple lifts off with a twist instead of a tug. A few sound apples dropping on their own is the tree telling you the rest are close. Early varieties ripen in August and do not keep; the storage apples come in late September and October, and in most of southern Canada the whole crop is in before the end of October.

Cold and damp: 0–4 °C with high humidity, which in a house means a cold room, a second fridge or a crisper drawer, with the apples in bags with a few holes punched in them. Keep them away from the vegetables — apples give off ethylene that ages everything near them and they pick up the smell of onions and potatoes. Late varieties keep 3–6 months this way; an early apple keeps a few weeks whatever you do. Check every week and pull anything soft.

Yes, as slices for pies and sauce, not for eating out of hand. Peel and slice, hold the slices in water with a half-teaspoon of ascorbic acid per litre (or steam-blanch them 2 minutes) so they do not brown, then freeze on a tray and bag them. Applesauce freezes perfectly as it is and is the fastest way through a glut on a weeknight.

You can grow a tree; you cannot grow that apple. Apple seeds are crosses with whichever tree pollinated the flower, so the seedling is a new variety and almost always a sour one. It is still a good experiment for a child — plant a few seeds in a pot outside in autumn, since they need a cold winter to sprout, and watch for them in May. Named apples are made by grafting a bud onto a rootstock, which is a skill worth learning in late winter.

A light frost, no — apples do not start to freeze until about −2 °C (28 °F), and a brief dip to there only shortens how long they keep. Several nights below that soften the flesh, and at around −5 °C (22 °F) the fruit freezes hard and is ruined. If a hard freeze is forecast, pick what is ripe that afternoon. If the apples do freeze, wait until they have thawed at midday before touching them, and use the firm ones soon.

For the kitchen this week, a windfall that fell today, is firm and unbroken, cut open and cooked, is a judgement call most gardeners make in favour of pie. For jars and juice, no: extension food-safety services say not to can or juice from dropped fruit, because drops have touched soil and animal droppings, are usually bruised enough for moulds to start in the core where you cannot see them, are less acidic than picked fruit, and the mould toxin patulin is not destroyed by heat. The useful children’s job is picking up drops every day into a bucket for the compost, which also keeps the wasps down. Teach them to look before they lift: a wasp feeding inside the hollow of a dropped apple is the commonest sting in an orchard, and no one bites into a windfall.

No. Apples are a high-acid fruit, well below the pH 4.6 line, so applesauce, apple butter and sliced apples are safely water-bath canned by their tested recipes without extra acid. The ascorbic acid or lemon juice you see in sliced-apple recipes is there to stop browning, not for safety. Where it does matter is anything mixed with low-acid ingredients — apple pie filling is only safe by a tested recipe with Clear Jel, and apple-and-vegetable chutneys need their vinegar measured, not tasted.