Apple Tree

The Meade County Messenger, June 1957

We Have An Apple Tree
by Walter Scott

We have a Red June apple tree just six years old that furnished us apples to fry for breakfast, stew for dinner and of course, eat raw between meals for quite a while during the summer of 1956. We had to start thinning the apples pretty early to keep the limbs from breaking and of course we always fried these.

This tree is there to fill the place of the old Striped apple that stood behind the house when I was a boy. That old tree was the one I first learned to climb. It was the one Ma had in mind when she threatened to get an apple tree limb to us. As I remember it, the old tree was loaded with apples from May to August with bushel after bushel lying on the ground. Fried apples with hot biscuits, sausage and gravy and cold milk from the old spring was the breakfast I remember best. Now to furnish my family this kind of eating we just had to have an apple tree.

The first year we moved to the farm we bought our tree for 30 cents and set it near the house where it has received its share of the fertilizer and cultivation. We have never sprayed the tree. This year there were enough apples for us and the bugs, too, but we usually got there first. We were not expecting apples in quantity nearly so soon, so we are sure proud of our apple tree.

Every one with a back yard big enough for an apple tree could be proud apple tree owners. Just buy a good tree, spade up a 3 or 4 ft. square area and set the tree out. If the soil is very poor you probably should dig a hole and get 200 to 300 lbs. of good dirt to start the tree off right. Every fall about Labor Day the tree should get a pound or so of fertilizer. You can make several holes about 6" or 8" deep and about 18" from the tree and fill these full of complete fertilizer, as the tree experts do, or dig up the ground for 3 or 4 feet around the tree and mix in the fertilizer, as the farmers do. You see, Labor Day is the time you put your order in for apples next year.