Fighting Foes: Caterpillars, Bears, and Ourselves

So, crabapples.  We inherited three crabapple trees of unknown heritage when we moved to our property.  Two were tiny, twisted, and poorly placed.  They had to go.  But one was beautiful and fully formed.  For two summers we watched, waited, hoped, and despaired as flowers and leaves formed before forest tent caterpillars attacked. 

The tree was left naked. Two years in a row.  We discussed chopping the last tree down.

But then came spring 2015.  We watched, waited, and hoped again.  The caterpillars came.  They seemed as ferocious, as voracious, but...  did we detect they were fewer in number?  We held our breath as leaf after leaf of the crab was folded around a cocooning caterpillar.  Still, somehow.....

Ahh!  It survived!   And apples grew.  This was a little toughie, this tree.  It produced a bounty of tiny, shiny apples.

And now the bears were on the move.  I'd seen sign of them in the back four and in the neighbourhood, and though our tree was inside the dog's fenced yard, I wasn't going to give the bears even a chance at our first harvest in three years.  So we picked them.

We picked them, and picked them.

And then we picked some more.

We threw the apples that had blemishes to the chickens. Scout helped by picking up every apple that didn't make it over the fence. He didn't want them, he just didn't want the chickens to have them.  He's very helpful that way.

We finished picking the apples.  The tree once again looked a little run down, a little rough around the edges.  But we had actually vanquished our fearsome foes of caterpillar and bear.

After the frenzy of picking we realized we had a bit of a harvest on our hands.  68 pounds of harvest, to be precise.  "Oh, my goodness!" sez I.  "I didn't think of what to do with them!"  And so it goes.

For hours, for days, we chopped, de-stemmed, cooked, and strained apples.

For all our bravado, all our hard work, all our relentless picking, de-stemming, etcetera, we ended up with several jars of crabapple jelly and some bags of frozen crabapple juice concentrate.  We were tired, our fingers were stained brown, and we thought:

"Hmm, maybe we'll get lucky and the caterpillars will be back again next year."