How do they grow

My father planted what his father called "The Orchard" next to their house just beyond the outskirts of Town in the early 1930s. They got a few apples and pears but, Dad told me, by the time I was born "the rabbits had eaten all the trees." I wasn't sure whether to believe him that the trees had produced. But there were a few stalks of pear and apple trees taller than me there when I was young and every year they produced a few weak leaves. No fruit.

In my imagination, based on what I could see, only tiny sour crab-apples grew around here. I was an adult before I saw full-sized apples grown hereabouts. I was surprised. But of course they grow all over the place. Even in downtown St John's.

Here, on the right, is a Gala from the supermarket, ultimately from Chile. On the left are two downtown Townie apples growing on our ca-sixty-year-old tree, flourishing by our fence line, in the shade of much bigger trees.

Same size apples. With a bit more rain, warm weather, and sunshine beating through the upper trees, they may get to be just as ripe as and perhaps even bigger than their Chilean cousin.

By the way, I don't know what variety ours are. I used to think they were Yellow Transparent. And some of our apples do look like Transparents when they are ripe. But others are redder with a few line-markings (like on the Gala but less so). Last year, I ate a bunch of them and they were crisp like a good Gala, almost as sweet too, and they seemed to keep much better than Transparents do. I don't know what the historical antecedents of the Gala were, perhaps Honeycrisp and others like it, and maybe that is what got thrown as a seedy core into the fence sixty years ago.