Posted on 10/03/2021 1:03:07 PM PDT by thecodont
One afternoon a few Octobers ago, I sat with a friend from Spain at a picnic table in an idyllic orchard 50 miles northwest of New York City.
As our significant others scoured the farm’s various other goods (jams, butters, donuts), the two of us admired the vast green-and-red foliage blanketing the hills in the distance. Beside us were net bags filled with the dozens of apples we had collected by hand from the property’s dozens of rows of trees — a ritual and scene familiar to many Americans. My friend looked at the bags and gestured toward the sprawl of plants behind him. As enjoyable as the day had been, he found the activity a little weird. “In Spain, we have a lot of fruit,” he said of Europe’s top produce exporter. “But we don’t have anything like this.”
Through fresh eyes, the whole thing indeed seemed strange. Quality apples are generally easily available at grocery stores, and it’s not as though such heavily romanticized traditions are built around gathering other foods. (To wit, a 2015 New Yorker cartoon depicted a family picking apples with the caption: “Maybe next time we can go mine our own salt.”)
Yet apple picking has become an essential, Instagram-friendly element of America’s ever-expanding autumn industrial complex, alongside cable-knit sweaters and pumpkin-spice-everything. It’s a central seasonal activity among many American farms’ so-called “agritourism” or “agritainment” offerings, including hayrides, corn mazes, and petting zoos; between 2012 and 2017, the total US agritourism industry grew 35 percent to nearly $950 million a year.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
Sounds like my neighbor, "Small Engine Bob"...
‘…ever-expanding autumn industrial complex’
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I’m putting this way behind the military industrial complex in my list of things to worry about.
Interesting list of apples. Never heard of several of them...
BTW how does on post an image in the reply?
“autumn industrial complex”
That is a perfect analogy to the Fall assault of pumpkin spice everything.
A local micro beef producer has joined the Autumn Industrial Complex this year by taking a couple of acres of roadside pasture and putting in gravel parking and building shops out of storage containers. Pumpkins and corn stalks everywhere with a farmer’s market of fall produce along with baked goods, hot cider and pumpkin spice everything.
Open on weekends only for the next month he’ll be making more than he does selling a cow a week.
Great logo!
“I used to pick apples on weekends when I was in high school (1980s) and I got 50 cents a crate with usually 40-60 crates per tree for a big tree if I got one. Usually 20-30 boxes was the norm. “
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While active duty at Loring AFB, Maine, we got to see every year the kids get out of school for the potato picking.
Adults thought it was great, as well as the kids. Farming communities are tight on funds and the money the kids made would go a long way in that part of the state.
I’m sure lefties/liberals would cry and moan about using the kids as labor....
Why, thank you!
Looks to me like an article written about ‘everything’, and all.
Over-thought, and still without a central point.
That was the impression I was getting. The more I read, the less I knew that I knew. Then I realized I didn’t even care.
Time we won’t get back :-)
Testing....
https://ibb.co/7zqh6ZX
Thanks for posting this bit of history. Grimes Golden? Nice old varieties.
Near me, adjacent to a deli that we frequent, there’s a huge lot that has always been empty of anything but grass. Whenever I saw it, or any space like it, I thought it was a horrible waste.
We happened to go to that deli a few weeks ago after being away a long time; and we saw that somebody had planted a big part of that lot with flowers and vegetables :-)
“Someone has commented on the presence of the suburban lawn as a yearning for past agricultural practices: fields to be maintained and tilled.”
I saw a show on the lawns and gardens of old English manor houses. The line of thought on this show was having a large grass lawn and ornamental plants, hedges, follies, etc., was a demonstration of wealth by not needing to have cash crops or pasture occupying every square foot of available land.
Thanks, that was it.
Might explain why some HOAs don’t like residents growing vegetables in the front yard.
Some of the cider apples are also good eating apples.
Wish I had some! I hate spraying.
That looks too easy!
So ifI see black folks out picking apples can I remind them this is a white women loves fall activity?
The Israelis have bred four or five types of apples that will prosper in the southwestern desert heat, as long as they get water and nitrogen fertilizer, a single backyard tree can produce a LOT of apples. They do not need a freeze to blossom.
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