The Cunningham's apples

This has just NOT been a year for the garden. As I looked out from the second story window at the completely fallow garden, seeing the one lone red tomato that I had seen, but hadn't even had the time to get out and pick, even though it would have meant a 30% increase in our yearly tomato crop, it made me think of the Sabbath years that God commanded the Israelites to give to their own fields - a year of no planting, but only harvesting what came up on its own.

We got a hint of that with our ten baby pumpkins. Ten pumpkins for our ten children growing up in this motley garden. Coincidence? I think not.

But, getting just one jar of pear sauce out of all of the fruit trees in the backyard made getting a gift of a bag of apples from our friends' trees that much more special. (The Cunninghams got 3000 pounds of apples this year, and sent a bag via the Engessers last week.) Even more fun was having Mr. Cunningham bring three more boxes of apples - roughly 100 pounds! - and tucking them behind the dumpster at his office in St. Paul.

Evania and I went out after lunch (with Eben in tow), to pick them up. She was my helper in case the boxes were too heavy or awkward for me, and they really were, so she helped me lighten the load by piling some into bags.

 And here's the haul all loaded up in Big Blue. Yum!!!