Are the apples ready?

Have I mentioned that Farmer Bill is a stickler for waiting until his apples are perfectly ripe before he picks them?

Here's what we use to help us make that decision -- along with taste tests of course!

What is that bottle...?  It looks like...?!?  Yes, it's iodine, the kind you might use on cuts or scrapes, or take along camping to purify water.  Now think back to your chemistry classes in school & reaction experiments.  Iodine reacts with starch and turns black.  It reacts with sugar and loses its color.  The apples in the center of the picture show white in the center and black outside that.  The bottom apple is a Zestar!, the middle apple is a Chestnut Crab, and the top apple (almost all black) is a Ginger Gold.  As apples ripen the white center grows.  At just slightly more white than is pictured, the apples are perfect for picking.  Apples in normal storage will ripen and sweeten.  Apples picked too ripe & put into storage will not keep as long.  Apples picked too green will ripen & sweeten some, but may not gain the full flavor the grower and consumer would like.  Just a few more days now & we'll be in the apple business for this season.

The apparatus in the top left corner is a refractometer.  It measures the Brix.  Brix is a measurement of the sucrose in a liquid solution (look it up in Wikipedia if you want a more thorough explanation).  Because the apples also have fructose and other stuff in the liquid we squeeze from them, the refractometer only gives us an approximate sugar level & really doesn't tell us when the apples are ready.  But it's pretty fun to use -- and we got to spend a bunch of money on it -- and it has a cool name.

Of course, the best way to tell when the apples are ready is to taste them.  We have been tasting for a couple of weeks now -- and the 'green' taste is almost gone from the 3 earliest varieties.  Coming soon to a farmers' market near you: Straight River Farm apples.