Tree Fruit

 On the topic of peaches, pears and apples...  Peaches and apples ripen on the tree; pears ripen off tree.  Ideally, pears will be picked green and put into cold storage where they are sorted daily and processed as they ripen.  Peaches and apples will be picked at their peak of perfection.  When you gently, gently, gently squeeze a peach, its flesh should give under your pressure.  This is a telling sign that it is ripe.  However, that "pitting edema" will become a bruise, so extreme care is necessary with peaches.  They are tender and fragile.  Apples  are ripe if they come off when you give them a lift at the stem.  This is not a complete and thorough tutorial on how to tell when these fruits are ripe; that topic is worth a conversation, a work party, and greater deliberation.  However, it will suffice as a rough and dirty introduction.  

During fruit season, on your daily walkabout, groundfall is something to observe.  Fruit which falls either needs processed, removed or fed to the chickens.  

With all these fruits, as well as others, when an insect penetrates its skin, it leaves an injury which quickly turns to rot.  Groundfall needs to be picked up from the people and chicken yards and hi-graded.  

      

fruits are either gathered and sorted, or you can sort as you go.  In this case, the orange bowl is what I picked everything into, from the front yard.  In this picture, I am "mid-sort", and have started a "good" pile, 

 

which turned out like this. 

The hen-pecked chicken food pile on the lawn, 

 

Some of these are really mangled and others could benefit from a sound "stomping".  If it is suitable food for chickens (not rotten and diseased), we will put fruit in the chicken yard and stomp on it to help them get at it more easily.  It's actually surprising how much fruit they can really eat! 

 and the rotten "bad" pile:

  

Rot is easily recognizable with practice.  It's circular and has a characteristic look...

 

Good fruit is put ultimately where it will be processed.  Up around back in the canning kitchen, there are also food dehydrators and a fruit "marshaling" area:

Pears and apples in various stages of ripening...
 

 

As food ripens, it is processed for either drying, canning, lacto-preserving, or?