"Applesauce is good for ya," says Joyce Drews. She and her husband eat apples from his orchard throughout the year, freshly plucked off the tree and cooked in a crisp, sauce or butter.
Her applesauce recipe is simple and doesn't require canning because she makes it in small batches. She cooks down 10 peeled and sliced apples with about a half cup of water in a pot, not adding sugar. The sweet juice of the apples is flavor enough.
For a sweeter treat to eat on toast, Joyce makes apple butter in a crockpot.
Crockpot Apple Butter
You will need:
• 2 1/3 c. sugar and 4 tsp. cinnamon.
• 3 lbs. unpeeled apples
Mix sugar and cinnamon and set aside. Core and quarter apples. Do not peel. Layer apples and sugar mixture in the crockpot. Turn on at medium to high and cook four hours. Stir only once or twice.
Put cooked mixture through a colander or liquefy in a blender. Pour into pint jars and seal or refrigerate and eat fresh. The mixture will naturally thicken as it cools, so there is no need to use artificial thickeners.
In about 1980, he planted most of the trees at Pond View Orchard on land near the home he shares with his wife Joyce just west of Monroe. He's down to about 20 trees but they're still producing well and he expects them to continue bearing apples another 30 years.
Now retired from John Deere, the 70-year-old recently started selling the fruits of his labor at the Monroe Farmers' Market. He'll be at the market through the end of October on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The orchard is mostly his project. His wife Joyce, who retired from Monroe Clinic in 2000, helps him sell at the market.
"These trees are my kids," Drews said. Plus, he's a "farm boy at heart," having grown up on a farm just south of South Wayne. "I like being outside and dealing with nature."
He also regularly goes over to a neighbor's to indulge his farm-loving tendencies: "They allow me the run of it, let me scratch the steer's ears, flop the dog's ears."
Another neighbor is a hobby beekeeper whose bees help with pollinating Drews' apple trees. The neighbors swap their honey and apples in appreciation.
Apples keep for months when stored at cold temperatures ("That's how you see apples from Washington State - they could be a year old," Drews said) but they're tastier and better smelling when they're fresh and in season.
Over the years, Drews says he's gotten tips on growing apples from Rob Ten Eyck of the Ten Eyck Orchard west of Brodhead, a major operation that sells commercially.
"When you're a hobbyist, you might talk apples with people instead of the Packer game," Drews said.
Drews grows more than a half-dozen varieties, including Empire, Yellow Delicious, Red Duchess, Macintosh, Wealthy and Empire. Each has its own personality of flavor and juiciness. Many of the varieties are heirloom, meaning they're the same as apples eaten more than 100 years ago and haven't been genetically tampered for mass production.
"You can't just put them on auto pilot and just walk away," he said. The trees require daily attention for much of the year. He prunes in the winter and, after the trees blossom, sprays them weekly to discourage pests.
He switched over two years ago from a commercial pesticide to a homemade spray that's safe enough to eat. He concocts it with a "teaspoon of this, teaspoon of that" diluted in water, including baking soda, Murphy's Oil Soap, canola oil, white vinegar and lemon dish soap.
"The spray I use is not a killer, it's a preventative," Drews said. The trees are a lot less stressed since he quit using pesticide, but the natural spray isn't a guarantee fix and requires daily vigilance against bugs, he added. "If you haven't gotten them under control by the end of July, you're sunk. And it shows. Your apples are buggy, wormy.
"If you see ants going up your tree, they're not going up there for the exercise," he said.
Switching off pesticides has resulted is a healthier orchard, he said. On a recent morning, he picked an apple and held it up in admiration.
"I'm pretty proud of it."