Turn a Whole Tree of Apples Into Winter Food With These

Sauce and pie apples die by the paring knife - three minutes each times a bushel is a lost evening. The suction-base crank machine peels, cores and spiral-slices an apple in six seconds, and it is genuinely the gadget children fight to operate, which converts a chore into free labour.

For sauce through a food mill, skip peeling entirely - the mill removes skins itself.

The applesauce shortcut nobody tells beginners: quarter the apples whole - skins, cores and all - simmer soft, and crank through a mill. Skins and seeds stay behind, silky sauce comes through, and the skins left in the pot have already tinted it pink. The same mill does the tomato sauce in August.

Choose one with interchangeable discs - coarse for salsa, fine for sauce.

The apples you can reach are the ones the deer already sampled; the clean fruit hangs high. A basket picker on a telescoping pole tumbles the top-of-tree fruit into foam padding without a ladder wobble, and picking unbruised matters double for anything headed to the storage rack.

Bruised fruit is sauce fruit - only perfect apples go into storage.

A step ladder on lawn is a dare: four legs guarantee a wobble on uneven ground. The orchard tripod plants its single pole in among the branches and stands rock steady on dirt, slope and mulch - it is why every commercial orchard uses nothing else. For pruning in February the same ladder is the safe one.

Never side-lean off any ladder in a tree; move the ladder. The tripod makes moving easy.

Late-season keepers stay crisp for months somewhere cold - but only if the fruit sits in shallow layers where air moves and one bad apple cannot preach to the whole box. Slatted wooden crates in single layers stack a tree's harvest where a bad apple can be spotted at a glance. Check weekly; eat the biggest first, they soften soonest.

Apples exhale ethylene - store the crates away from the potatoes and the squash.