I'm just starting to compost and we moved to a new home with this beautiful apple tree, but it loses a ton of apples (we've already cleaned up more than what's here). My concern is that if I just throw it onto a pile, the smell won't let us enjoy our town yard. I also need to figure out how to keep our dogs out of it.
I'll be offering apples to friends and family as they get a bit more ripe, but in the meantime so many just keep falling off the tree and our city doesn't have compost pickup like our last place.
by sreimer52
28 Comments
Oh man, if only you could box up all the fallen ones and press some cider. Its so good! Then the crushings go into a compost pile.
I like to make Apple Brawndo this time of the year
Grind them up and add some dirt !!
Cover it in 3-4 inches of leaves. Also your yard may smell of cider but not for too long. I have a pear tree that does this with squirrel chewed pears and it smells slightly fruity and fermented for pear falling month but the bugs and composting process work fairly quickly.
Make cider and then compost the rest
Alternate layers of apples and ample quantities of “browns”. The browns can cardboard, straw, sawdust, coconut coir, dry leaves, in other words, stuff that is high in carbon and low in nitrogen. If you don’t get enough browns into the mix, your compost will get dense, gooey, and stinky.
Juice. So easy
Breaking them up would significantly speed up the decomp process and reduce smell. People who press cider use a dedicated garbage disposal or wood chipper to grind up the apples.
New neighbors moved into a house with an apple tree and just let them fall on the ground and rot. I picked them up, buried them in a raised bed, and covered the bed with leaves. Nothing more. That bed is still nourishing great vegetables.
As with 99.9% of composting, throw them in a pile and do nothing. Eventually they will be dirt.
Gather up all the apples you don’t want, find a spot for a new pile (if you don’t have one already), set up a table or sawhorse, line up the apples on table or sawhorse, spend an afternoon busting apples with clay slingshot rounds.
With some pigs!
Take a shovel and slap them to crack the skins before adding some dirt and letting the bugs do the rest.
Compost them like you would anything else. In my experience the apples and pears don’t take long to disappear.
Next year I would thin the fruit about 4-6 weeks after the trees bloom. The tree will likely not drop any fruit before they’re ripe, fruit will be larger, and the fruit will be better quality. There are plenty of videos on YouTube that explain what to do and I bet your local extension office has some articles on fruit thinning. Also consider pruning late winter.
I hate you. I have three apple trees I’ve planted three years ago. Zero apples.
Chickens
Easy to compost. Just pile them and cover. Cut grass, leaves, and shredded paper will cover the smell if you have a thick enough blanket.
Mix them with a ton of leaves and/or cardboard and flip on the regular. Season with pee to taste.
Toss in a pile and let the bugs and nature take its course.
Get a cider press. Compost the non- juice parts of the apple. Cider is awesome.
Dig a hole, put them in, mash a bit with a spade to break the skins, then back fill.
Piss on ‘em
goats
Can try to cover them in a pile with shredded cardboard and leaves. Hopefully you have plenty of moving boxes to rip up
Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew
Put a sharing shelf and some paper bags out on the footpath – share your abundance. Be brave.
Heyo! This should be easier to deal with than you might think. You have a variety of options:
1. Do you have a compost bin? If so, mixing these with some bulking material should be enough by itself to prevent them from smelling too bad. Fruit generally only starts smelling especially bad if it goes anaerobic, which the bulking material will prevent. If you need to build a compost bin, this is easier to do than you might expect and there are plenty of guides online. You can also purchase them pretty easily, and if you check Craigslist or Facebook marketplace you can get nice used ones very cheaply.
2. Do you have any raised beds, or are you planning on putting any together? If so, you could try burying the apples in the raised beds, either in existing raised beds or as you build the new ones. This basically amounts to trench composting and will build up some great soil health.
3. You could also just straight up dig a hole or a trench and bury them in the ground. If you’re going to dig more than a foot or so I’d call your city and ask them to mark your underground lines so you don’t hit anything with your shovel. This is usually really fast and easy.
Happy to give further advice! Insects generally love eating fruit like this, so whatever you do the apples will probably be compost pretty darn quick 🙂
If you have any kind of chipping or mulching machine, this would be a good time to haul it out. Or for more low tech, just rake them into a corner and let nature do its thing. Or if you’re afraid of odors or rodents, dig a hole about 2 feet deep and bury them. If you are planning on putting a vegetable garden in anywhere, that would be the place to burrow them