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Другие записи: Just watching the paint peel | Типа праздник | Пилять | День 2010.11.01, Точное время 22:33:00
For couple of recent years I have observed apples rotting on trees in private gardens by the roads, even during supposedly bad apple harvest years. When there is so little time and cheap Polish or more expensive French or Chinese table apples available in shops, too many people have no time to bother with the apples growing in their own yards.
During my childhood we usually dealt with the apples by making preserves or juice. By now my parents have stopped making the preserves - as with fresh produce available in shops, the craving for preserves is gone. They usually do make juice - though they have not managed, even with giving as much juice as possible away as gifts, to get thorough the apple juice canned in 2005.
For a couple of recent years nobody has bought apples in bulk from the small producers. But this year a business, whose main area of work is importing table apples from Poland, also buys apples for juice making from Estonia and sells them ... to Poland!
The reason why Polish juice factories buy Estonian apples is that, for one, the spring time night frosts caused this year apple harvest to be smaller in Poland and, second, apparently the Estonian apples have stronger sour taste, that makes them more suitable for juice making.
Of course, the price the people get from a kg of apples is miserable - 60 cents. But it is better than nothing and, even if it DOES just cover the price of gas used to transport the apples to the buyers (the buyers DO move around, but for farms further away the gas money is still a problem), the emotional relief of not having to watch perfectly good apples to rot is considerable for older people, who cannot stand waste of potential food.
So, my parents proudly informed me that they had sold 1400 kg of apples (3080 lbs). And they do not even have mentionable apple garden (and they left enough for their own use AND considerable amount of apples HAVE already been carted to the compost heap to rot).