We drove to Shipley Farm, half an hour north of Seattle. It’s an organic apple farm where you can pick as many apples as you can carry. Beforehand, the farmer told us of how he had bicycled to Washington from Pennsylvania, and then stopped. (Meanwhile his dog trotted around, pleading to play catch with me.) We also learned today about apple scab, an unattractive growth on the surface of apples that is apparently quite nutritious, and how you can prevent pests by spraying the apples with clay and using snakes to hunt the mice, and then we went off to forage for apples.
I was amazed to see how different these apples are to the ones we usually have. Supermarket apples are usually sprayed with wax to make them look nice and shiny (as Destroyer and I found out from her school work the other week) and even the apples from our local orchard are much more regular than the misshapen, scabbed apples we were picking up. And yet, the extra flavour, the range of colours from these apples was incredible, especially for somebody who ate exclusively Granny Smiths for at least three decades of his life.
We ended up with twenty pounds of apples, and then took the advice of the farmer and drove to King Charley’s, a drive in burger joint in Snohomish, where I had my meat of the month, a bacon cheeseburger, and then we drove home again.
This weekend’s car, a Nissan Rogue SL, is huge, and I struggle, even with reversing and 360° camera, to park it properly. It also lacks Android Auto integration and is the first car in eternity that I can’t find cruise control for. On the other hand, it is very big and has a powered tailgate that can open and close without human interaction. I still think I’d prefer a car, to an enormous monstrosity like this. Perhaps we will go fully electric after all – decisions, decisions…
One response to “How do you like them apples?”
Sounds an interesting farm