I love this day. I look forward to it every year, and every year it seems to get better and better.
Here are some shots of the grange before people started to come in… you can see Jeannine at the till checking the change.
Apples, apples and a few autumn squash…
And the long row toward the door… and …me with my back to the camera, pulling things out of boxes. A bunch of us who are friends with the owners of Madrona Grove like to make samples for people to taste so they know what the varieties can be used for. Our family’s job is to serve up the lovely things other people make!
We snagged a box of Arkansas Black apples as soon as we entered the doors… They are one of my favorite varieties — so fragrant and tasty! Excellent for eating, baking or drying, we will use these first because they don’t keep so well.
We also got a fair number of York Imperials, Spitzenbergs, Spy, Mai Gold, and the original “red delicious” (I have to go look at the box to remember the name)… and Rhode Island Greenings. And a few seckle pears… tiny, absolutely perfect little pears… I’ll take a picture later if I can remember.
Only a few pictures this year — as predicted, it is a rather gray day, though not so wet nor windy as I had feared. So we had a lot of people show up in the first three hours, and then things started to slack off so I came home to get a bit up on the site!
One of the people who showed up, of course, was stidgmere… here she is with Michael and Jeannine, and stidmatt — one big, happy, apple-loving family!
This year, Michael and Jeannine invited me and another artist to display (and sell if we could) some of our artwork. I bought a lovely watercolor by Amanda Waggoner, and we also managed to sell a couple cards with the apple motif I painted for Michael and Jeannine a couple years ago, Jeannine and Michael will use the rest I printed for thank yous and such. Here is the picture from the card.
For more information about Michael and Jeannine (or Jeannine and Michael, depending on who we see first!), there was a nice article on the Enterprise for Equity website in September.