It was reassuring yesterday to see a young buck confirm our own reaction to the state of many apples that are now falling from our “wild” (long-abandoned) apple trees.
As you see above, he picked up a just-fallen apple and bit into it with watering mouth. Within a second, he spit it out explosively and shuddered all over – a reaction identical to ours of a few days ago when we tried a wild apple that looked ripe:
Some of the wild apples are so bitterly tart that they never will sweeten up sufficiently to be eaten. We knew that oldtimers around here call them “spitters,” but we thought that referred only to human reactions and that the White-Tailed Deer could stomach them.
Nonetheless, you can press a fairly decent cider from even the tartest of apples, we hear. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on September 28, 2021.)