Instant Applesauce

Wow time flies by, and suddenly it is September. With the onset of Fall, I am always reminded of the orchard my family owned growing up. The orchard was my grandfather's, but my family only lived about 30 minutes away and thus we were often helping out at the orchard on weekends and even some weeknights in the Fall.

Growing up I wasn't a big fan of the orchard, however, as I've gotten older, I sometimes miss those Fall days spent near the mouth of Payson canyon. It was on the orchard that my siblings and I learned the first stages of driving as we took the old tractor up and down the rows of apple and cherry trees usually with the flat bed trailer following behind. The trailer would often times be loaded down with bushels of newly picked apples that would then have to be taken to the packing shed where they would be polished and sorted.

Dull apples that had been picked from the trees would have leaves hand picked off of them and then they would roll over a series of brushes that would shine them up and take the dust off. They would then run up a conveyor belt roll down a gradually widening track which would thus sort the apples by size. Most of my time spent on the apple sorter would be spent pulling apples from the bins where they had been deposited and putting them into bushel baskets which would then later be sold.

While the orchard often had many chores to be done, we of course found ways to cause mischief. One particular day my sister and I learned to flip apples. We were down, far away from the packing shed at the other end of the orchard. Naturally there would always be apples littering the ground that had fallen off and would usually be left to either rot or some people would come and gather them for juicing later. We found that if we took the apples and put them on a slight flexible stick we could whip the stick and then the apples would bo soaring through the air--what a great discovery! We were near the road, and so we would flip the apples from our orchard to the other orchard across the road, just to see how far we could get them to go. Luckily we were smart enough that whenever we saw a car coming we would wait until the car had passed before resuming our new past time. What we didn't consider as much were the power and telephone lines that ran along the other side of the road. I don't remember which one of us actually hit the line, but as soon as the apple touched it seemed to just explode--what exactly happened I'm not entirely sure, but I am pretty sure there are better ways of making applesauce.