Just desserts…Beauty of Bath apples gathered from the trees in my back garden last weekend (and now transformed into stewed apple).
An article from the November 7th, 1891 edition of the Westmeath Examiner notes that “Any variety of apple that fruits early and presents a striking appearance in the shop window sells rapidly, and enables the best possible price to be paid for it.” The same article described the anticipated demand for Beauty of Bath once it became more widely available. Given that Beauty of Bath was only introduced in 1864¹ [in Bath], that was a fairly rapid rise in popularity.
On our family farm in Rahugh, there was an old orchard in a field near our house when I was a boy, during the Seventies. The trees were old and gnarled, which made them ideal for clambering in, and we had a swing attached to a large branch of one of the taller trees. Despite the age of the trees – the orchard was there when my Dad was a boy during the Forties – it still produced plenty of apples. In fact, the orchard (it was just five or six trees) produced a huge glut of apples in early August, carpeting the ground with red apples, and (ahem) forcing us to eat home-cooked apple pie pretty much every night in late summer. Given that we also had an endless supply of fresh cream (we had a dairy farm), my memories of the orchard are all good ones.
The orchard is long gone now, but I decided to remember it by planting a couple of Beauty of Bath trees in my back garden in Galway. I planted them in early 2016 and despite a fine crop of blossoms on both trees when I planted them, not a single flower developed into an apple. Beauty of Bath requires another type of apple tree for pollination, so last year, I planted a dwarf apple tree nearby, as well as plenty of early flowering heather to encourage bees to pollinate them. My efforts were a little more successful – some of the blossoms began to form into apples, but none of them lasted long enough to grow into a full apple.
This year was different, and given the extremes of weather, it’s hard to know how it impacted the trees. The blossoms appeared at the end of April and the apples began to grow in June. I think the drought might have hindered the size of the apples but it probably helped ripen them too. By the tail-end of July, the apples had fully ripen and began to fall off to the ground. It was then that I got a flashback to my childhood – going out first thing in the morning to collect the apples that had fallen overnight. When I was a kid, there were buckets of apples to collect, whereas my two trees in Galway only dropped 3 or 4 each night. There was also a memory from my childhood that I didn’t get to relive – checking the apples for wasps. AS a kid, I soon learned to check for wasps on the fallen apples – it was no fun to accidentally grasp a wasp along with an apple, since they didn’t react well to it. But in my Galway back garden, I’ve hardly seen any wasps this year, and very few large ones. I have quite a few bee visitors to the garden (more of that anon), but almost no wasps. Is it just my garden, or is it a general thing ?