Kitchen Garden Forum

I harvested all my Russet apples of which there were an abundance. All inspected & put in the rack & I was feeling pretty chuffed with the bounty. In just 1 week they all went soft & I had throw them in the compost. OK I will know for next year to cook them down & freeze them, but what a waste!

Now that's annoying, Westi....I wonder what caused that.

Disappointing to lose a whole drop like that. Was there anything on the outer skins that suggested all might not be well within? Probably not as you wouldn,t then have risked storing them.

To be honest I don't think russets are the best apples to freeze but maybe your experience is broader than mine. I suppose it depends on whether you want a apple to cook down completely almost like a purée, as Bramley do, or to stay relatively intact.

Hi Primrose, they are brilliant cookers as they soften but keep their shape so it is a joy to cut open a pie. I do not know what they didn't like, maybe it got a bit too warm. Anyway, lesson learnt.

Disappointing to say the least westi ,I had a similar experience last year with around ten melons I picked them one day put them in the fridge next day the lot had turned mushy

Were they properly ripe? I thought most russets were fairly late probably only due to pick at the end of the month.

I went apple picking a week ago, I'm cooking apples as fast as I can (I was up at 6am today making apple samosas) but some are rotting almost in front of my eyes. I've always lost some, but in a week out of 3 crates of apples, I would thing half a crate are in the compost bin.

It may well be that even tiny insect holes or blemishes on the skin have allowed water to intrude into the flesh with all the recent heavy rainfalls and that is why the rot has set in. There is probabky so much pollution in rain these days sadly.

I picked up one of a number of bags of lightly damaged windfalls donated by somebody at a social event last week but by the time i got round to dealing with them two days later, even though I'd atored them in the fridge, there was very little undamaged flesh left.

How very frustrating. I sympathise enormously.