Blue Faerie Farm

The last few days we have been immersed in apples, just how we like it! Our orchard is very young, but we have a small amount of fruit developing on a few trees this year. Yesterday evening we finally got the chance to have our first apple out of our very own orchard. What a fabulous moment! Our Yellow Transparents had a tough year. We were hit with two weeks of rain just at petal fall completely wiping out any chance of spray so all but one of the YT apples had curculio damage. That one apple made it all the way through though. It sized up nicely, didn’t have any blemishes and tasted fantastic. We were so excited to finally try one of our own apples that we didn’t even think about taking a picture until all that was left was the core. Oh well.

This was just the highlight of a week full of apples though. Friday we headed down to Virginia for a family get together and on the way back stopped to see the wonderful folks at Vintage Virginia apples. We picked up a mixed bushel of Transparents, Carolina Red June and some winter keeper Albemarle Pippins. These are the start of our apple sauce season for this fall’s apple butter. We got the Transparents, along with some others from our trees that had minimal damage sauced. Tart does not begin to describe the sauce. It will add quite a bit to the overall flavor this year.

The Vintage Virginia folks were in the middle of preparing for the grand opening of their cidery next Monday, Albemarle CiderWorks. They have a flair for the big events and they were pulling out all the stops for this. We did manage to secure a bottle of their Jupiter’s Legacy, and are happy to report that it was delicious. Not being a pedigreed wine connoisseur I probably am missing many very important things to say about it, but to me it tasted like a very good dry sparkling wine with a hint of apple. We can’t wait until we are at a point to give this craft a try ourselves.

Happy Growing!