The Yarkin Pearl

The folks at The Orchard told me to pick out a bag of apples to take with me and after browsing through the various varieties -- Jonathan, Stayman, Delicious -- I chose York.

It's a tasty, crisp eating apple and tart enough to be good for cooking too.  But, to tell the truth, I chose it for reasons of nostalgia.

Our first fall in the mountains, Clifford, our neighbor down the hill, gave me an apple to try, saying that it was an old time variety and a good keeping apple.  

I tasted it and was impressed. We were planning to plant apple trees come spring and I already had a tentative list of varieties.

"What's the name of this apple?" I asked, and was told that it was a Yarkin Pearl. 

Interesting, I thought, Yarkin could be the name of the discoverer or breeder of the apple and Pearl could be because it was so good -- or maybe the name of his daughter. Nice.

This was 1975 - pre-Internet -- and I began to hunt through my nursery catalogues and Rodale gardening books for more information on this pearl of a fruit -- but alas! I could find no Yarkin Pearls.

I intensified my search, checking various orchard-related books out of the library and leafing  through back issues of Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening.

1975 was also before I learned the language of my adopted home.

Finally I came across the name York Imperial.

York Imperial . . . Yarkin Pearl.

Yep.

Temptation

Apples, apples everywhere and not a drop to drink!

I think it's really lame that getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden was blamed on Eve. 

I mean, Adam needs to take some personal responsibility for the fact that he ate the apple too.

Taking personal responsibility is a huge problem with the world right now. 

Everyone wants to blame everyone else for their problems. 

However, this blog is not about lecturing others or stepping on a soapbox. 

It's a place for me to express my creativity, to admit addictions, explore temptation and have fun.

When I enter a grocery store, I'm drawn to the fruits and vegetables. 

I like to surreptitiously whip out my iPhone and snap a photo...like the one above of the apples.

That's weird right?

Do you have a weird habit like that?

and, why, why, why does the new Blogspot photo up-loader turn my iPhone photos SIDEWAYS?!!

I can't figure it out!

Anyone know how to fix this issue?

The Apple Dryer

We had an abundance of apples last year, prompting John to build a solar food dryer so we could have another way of preserving the bounty.

So, according to The Law of Natural Perversity -- what, you never learned this one in school? The L of NP says: If you drop an open-face peanut butter sandwich, it will land face down.

As a corollary to this law, we have this: If a handy man builds a cider press and a solar food dryer one year and purchases a handy-dandy apple peeler/slicer/corer, there will be no apples on his trees that same year.

There weren't. Not on our trees. But there were local apples for sale at a good price and John has been busy drying apples.

The handy-dandy gadget is really pretty nifty -- it makes quick work of turning an apple into nice, thin, dryer-ready slices.

And the solar dryer (which can be aided by a light bulb at night or on cloudy days) produces lovely leathery dried apples -- full of concentrated sweetness and perfect for snacking or fried pies or maybe Clytie's Apple Stack Cake.

What I find amazing is that five pounds of apples, once cut and dried, can fit into two of these quart size bags. One needs to remember that as one keeps dipping into that bag for one more sweet slice.

Rose of Sharon

Its botanical name is Althea, which is a pretty name from Greek mythology, but I always knew it as Rose of Sharon. When we moved to the mountains, we brought with us three small Rose of Sharons from my grandparents' yard, descendants of others that had made the trip from Troy, Alabama to Florida. We planted our three by the barn where we were living and today, they tower above us and their descendants are all over the place. It's a hardy plant that produces lots of seeds -- too many, some would say.

I'm partial to our shrubs, just because of the sentimental tie, but they're common in yards around here. And when I heard a neighbor describe them as "Rosasharn," I remembered the young girl from Grapes of Wrath who bore that name.

Local pronunciation had me baffled for quite a while. Once a neighbor gave me an apple, bragging on how good it tasted and what a long keeper it was. After a bite, I asked for the name, thinking we would plant a tree of this fine apple. He told me the name and I carefully wrote it down -- Yarkin Pearl. I wondered where or who Yarkin was but didn't find out till I began to peruse a catalogue of antique apple varieties.

Try I never so hard, I couldn't find the Yarkin Pearl. I did, however, find what I was looking for -- the York Imperial.