From what I have been hearing, this is a very good year for apple harvests. That goes for the old apple trees on my property, that were planted generations ago by someone who used to own quite a bit of land in this area of North Fork.
I have no idea what kind of apples they are, or if the trees reverted back to their original root stock. The apples are pretty good quality, though, so they are probably produced from grafts.
Yesterday I made the recipe for Swedish apple cobbler, and the story behind picking those apples is both hilarious and scary. My husband and I decided to venture down the hill to pick the “wild” apples. It was rough going, however, because the area around the trees was covered with blackberry canes, wild, thorny rose bushes, tarweed plants (full of burrs), poison oak and many large, downed pine trees that were criss-crossed to and fro. Added to that, there were many broken tree branches and old chunks of bark that formed a deep and unstable layer.