But an accidental coincidence (or maybe not accidental ... everything comes by itself to the one who waits, the world is formed by the power of our thoughts , etc) - led to this surprising and completely unexpected photo session. Just yesterday -- I told Barbara that we harvested our apples by the end of August, and have not visited our summer house since then - and today I have arrived here, and standing with a camera and taking new photos , especially for this challenge. (Actually it happened on Saturday, not today ... I just put it figuratively). And you may check some photos that I already shared in this Sunday blog. Count that as an extra background to the story.

A fantastic picture greeted me - bare trees without a single leaf, decorated only with lichen - and apples, which can rightfully be called not autumn, but winter!

There was no snow in the city, and 50 kilometers away from it the fields and the forest were already covered with a thin white film of snow... apparently it fell just a couple of hours ago.

There was very little amount of snow, it covered the ground and wilted grass in uneven spots, and was already beginning to melt. But it was enough to make an ordinary picture with grass and apples falling on the ground very unusual, eye-catching, attractive ... really magical.

By this time, you might already have legitimate questions ... that we did not give a damn about our harvest, and threw the apples to lie where they fell from the tree. This is not true! We have two apple trees growing in our garden, and two more apple trees of our neighbors grow nearby (this is actually an abandoned area, which I also take care of a little - I mow the grass, prune the lush willow jungle, and so on ... including collecting a small part apples). During August, I cleared the ground from falling apples from time to time, here is a proof-pic:

But this year turned out to be extraordinary, extremely fruitful for apples. There were so many apples that it was impossible to collect everything. Some were sent directly to the compost pit (see photo below),-- those were impossible to keep for long.

We managed to process a small part - we made a supply of dried apples for the winter, a solid size package. (We do not have our own gadget, we borrowed it from our neighbors for a while). At the end of the village season, we collected and moved to our city flat ten sacks of apples! And the rest ... heh, we were planning to come back and shake our apple trees one more time, but every time something stopped us: a lack of time, urgent matters, the arrival of old friends from another city, sudden illness ... in two months we have never been able to escape the city. And this time, we had to come for a sad business and it was not picking apples at all...

So do not think, looking at these photos, that we are such bad gardeners who do not appreciate the gifts of nature. By the way, exactly the same case was visible behind many fences in the village: there were apple trees standing without leaves, strewn with unpicked apples. We were not alone here.

Many gardeners were forced to throw their apples - sometimes in a compost heap, sometimes in a nearby ditch with water ... some carried bags of apples away from their vegetable garden, into the forest.

The lonely last fruits on the branches looked less picturesque than apples covered with snow, which I wanted to photograph endlessly, without stopping. But something curious was also found on the branches. Look!

Several apples cracked and even more -- turned inside out! I think that not only the frost should be blamed for this, but also the birds that pecked apples, feasting on this sugar treat. We have a lot of magpies and blackbirds on the site, I think first of all that this is the work of blackbirds.

I managed to photograph also chokeberry and several mushrooms... Yes, yes, don't be surprised: mushrooms were found too! And then the third battery ran out (of the three that I took with me), and I stopped taking pictures, just looked with my eyes and made a promise to myself that as soon as I returned to the city I would definitely buy a new fresh battery for my camera. Of course, I didn't buy it ... you can continue to procrastinate with this, but in winter I won't be able to take a lot of photos every day. Perhaps this is for the best: the space on my portable 1TB hard drive is also running out, I need to buy a new one ... I'd rather take fewer photos for a while, but they will be of better quality!