Saturday, 20 October 2012
I think it’s time to pronounce the Apple Orchards of my childhood dead.
Once upon a time, there were a dozen apple orchards within a halfhour of my house, and I went to those orchards and actually picked apples. There were signs saying “feel free to eat an apple while you stroll through our orchard.” After I got my bag of apples, I went in to the little store, and they weighed the bag and charge me accordingly.
There are still some like that…but they’re not nearby.
Today we visited McDougall’s Apple Junction. Unlike several other orchards, there’s no admission fee. That, plus their online promise that we could pick our own apples, got us to pay them a visit.
When we got there, I couldn’t find any indication of where to pick apples, so I went into the store and has this conversation with a woman sitting behind a sampling table…
ME: Hi, we’d like to pick some apples, so…
SHE: Oh, there’s plenty of bags of apples for sale right there.
ME: Yeah, well we wanted to PICK our own apples. That’s why we came.
SHE: Oh, I think there’s only one variety of apple left to pick.
ME: Okay, how do we do that?
SHE: Just go outside, and there’ll be bags for you.
So, we went outside, and let the kids play with the free stuff (there was a playground and haystack maze that cost extra). I couldn’t find any bags. So I walked up to this guy at a counter where they were selling brats, and I noticed a wood shelf that said “bags.” It was empty. So I waited about 5 minutes until it was my turn, and then I asked him if he had any bags available for apple picking. He had to rummage around a bit, but then he pulled out a plastic bag, wrote today’s date on it, then said, “Okay, that’s 20 bucks.”
ME: Twenty dollars? Don’t you have a smaller bag, or charge by the pound [like they do with pumpkins].
HE: No.
ME (looking at Jennifer): I don’t know, I think $20 is a lot.
JENNIFER: Yeah, that’s ridiculous. We’ll never eat that many apples.
ME: Yeah, that would be a waste of food and money.
HE: Oh, okay then.
So…thanks for nothing, McDougall.
Then we drove over to Ziertman’s, a place we partonized last year, upon which I decreed we’d return. They sell rock-bottom priced pumpkins (like, 25 cents) and homemade honey. The kids enjoyed feeding the goats, and we had a good time. Alas, there’s no apple-picking there, either. So we’ll keep looking…
Sunday, 21 October 2012
Today I made two trips to the compost heaps in Ramsey County.
The first trip was all the way up to White Bear, where they accept dirt. We got a lot of unneeded dirt. Earlier in the summer, Jennifer suggested we pile it all in the driveway and advertize “free dirt,” but I never did that. I guess my primary resistance to her idea was that, if no one took the dirt, I’d be forced to shovel it a second time (this time into bags) and then take it to the copost heap anyway.
Since our driveway has a slight incline, my idea was to evenly spread the dirt over the driveway right before a heavy downpour, and just let it all wash away. Jennifer thought that was stupid.
My second trip was to the local compost heap, where Owen and I transported 9 bags of leaves. Owen loves going to the compost heap, and he insists on dumping out all of the bags. I think next time we go, I’m gonna bring a lawn chair, an umbrella, and a lemonade, and just set up camp next to the car while my son goes to work. Then all the other men will look at me and be so jealous that my kid does all my work for me. And maybe some women, too – one time, I saw a woman at the compost heap. So that’s good that they’re making inroads into dumping leaves. Glad they’re breaking through that gender barrier.
In other news: Is this an IKEA product, or a Lord of the Rings character? Great idea for a quiz; I scored surprisingly well (85%), but that’s probably because I’ve read all the IKEA novels and I’ve been to Lord of the Rings, like, 50 times.
Dirt is what you sweep off the floor or empty from the vac . Soil is what you grow things in. A favorite quote “Don’t treat soil like dirt”!!
You’re not gonna believe this, but I actually thought of that when writing this post.
The thing is, I have a tough time calling the stuff that I dumped off at the compost heap “soil.” It was gray, dusty, and dry. There was mulch mixed in with it. It just didn’t seem like the rich, moist, black stuff from which my grass, trees, tomatoes, and weeds grow. I didn’t “vacuum” it from the yard, but we did rake it into piles and shovel it away. In conclusion, I thought it would be demeaning to *real* soil to call that stuff by the same name. I hope you can understand.
Maybe I’ll refer to it as regolith from now on.