A cautonary tale for storing apples

I have just come home after a one week Xmas holiday. For several years i have been storing my annual apple crop in my detached garage and the fruit has kept perfectly for several months. I had a bumper crop this year and checked the individual fruits for defects before going away. I checked yesterday morning and it looked like a hand grenade had detonated amongst the fruit which was totallydecimated .In a nutshell , rats have gnawed their way in through in the corner where the roof meets the walls and have had a whale of a time i spent yesterday tidying and at the tip.
I shall no longer store fruit here.
My purpose in posting this is to highlight this for the benefit of anyone else in a similar position , i feel it likely that the mild weather and bumper harvest has meant the smell of fruit has been picked up outside by rats who have the intelligence to burgle the garage and messily enjoy a banquet which i have unwittingly provided.
Hopefully nobody else will have a similar experience.

 

What a shame. That happened to me once, except it was mice and dahlia tubers.

 

Oh what a shame, especially after taking such care.
I had hardly any usable Apples this year. Mostly due to bacterial and fungal rots. I'm finding this an increasingly difficult situation I wonder how commercial organic growers manage to keep their crops so clean.

 

We store our apples in our porch which is unheated. Every few weeks I go through them and remove any damaged ones which go out into the orchard for the birds to feed on.

 

@On the Levels . Our unheated porch is south west facing so temperature fluctauations are great all year but thanks for the suggestion.

 

Been there, had that. The rats gnawed through 4 inches of concrete floor to get into our apple store. Now we don't have apple trees and the ones our neighbour brings are non-keepers so the spare ones are microwaved as pulp and frozen. No rats in the freezer.......yet!

 

@Palustris Thank you for that input , thankfully my visitors came and left and now there is no payload for them they have not returned. At least i havent needed to repair the floor. Like you it will be frozen down now with the luxury of a few fresh from the trees.

 

I don't bother with storing too many apples, after losing so many. I don't even pulp and freeze.
I stew and bottle - which saves electricity, and freezer space for the soft fruit I can neither store fresh, nor bottle long-term.
Bottling seems to keep the apple edible for longer, plus there is not the need to defrost, or rely upon a constant supply of electricity.

 

Ours are rarely blemish free so I haven’t tied to store them “properly”. I did freeze a lot the first year but now we just pick a large shopping basket full (large beach type basket style bag) and keep it in the kitchen. I rummage though occasionally to get rid of any which are turning. It usually lasts about three months, so picked mid September and finished mid to end December. To be honest that suits us just fine. It’s a cooking apple although I can eat it as a dessert apple from end November (I like tart apples) and we’ll have had enough of crumbles, cakes and pies by then.
The last ones usually go into a final fruit cake or batch of mincemeat for Christmas. It also means we are really looking forward to the next crop when it arrives.

 

@Butterfly6
@Fourmerkland
Thank you both , you make some good suggestions there and i like both ideas and will aim to try out both ideas.

 

@shiney .Hello. Thats an enormous yield of fruit , just how big is your orchard? I love the idea of an orchard of old fashioned apples . Our supermarkets are obsessed with homogenised sales where you have a choice of the same 4/5 apples wherever you live. I am fortunate to live close to a fruit tree grower who i visited and bought 6 x 2 year old maiden whips with a view to growing cordons about 5 years ago . I wanted dual purpose long keepers and have had mixed success. The only one i knew was a James Grieve but i have had a mixed bag of success as 3 have been prolific and the other 3 have proved reluctant. I have had great success with Christmas Pippin and Red Falstaff and a Canadian apple called Eden , large reddish purple fruit with snow white flesh that does not brown. The flavour of these fruits are so much better than what you can buy in the shops

 

@shiney . Sounds like a great mixture of apples there. I read up about Rivers Nursery online which was very interesting. You have given me some ideas too.
My cordon apples were enclosed completely within our tortoise pen. Tortoises eat or trample anything they can clamber onto , like mini bulldozers. The tortoises will now live with our daughter so the pen has been de- constructed and i have been weighing up what to underplant the bare soil with under the cordons. Primroses grow well here and would be great to naturalise in that bare soil. Thanks for the tip !

 

Hi @Robert Bowen! May I ask which fruit tree grower you went to? We are/will be also in Herefordshire. We bought some trees from Tom the Apple Man, but boy! was it a long drive from here!