How do you like them work apples?

It’s September, so I grab an apple from one of the apple trees outside my office on the way into work – my elevenses snack.

My family is eating local this month, as we have for seven of the past eight Septembers. We’ve been doing it for my youngest’s entire life. (The year he was born – in October 2018 – was the year we took a break).

In recent Septembers, these four apple trees growing alongside our office driveway have been clutch in keeping me fed during the day, when I’m away from home. They also serve as a snack bar for the kids whenever they stop in. Way before the apples are ripe, the kids will pluck one off the tree and start munching the minute they get out of the car. (We used to have a vending machine at work, back when our company had the run of both floors of our office building. Times may be lean, but this particular swap is a major upgrade from my point of view.)

My company planted these apple trees when we repaved our driveway pre-Covid. It was a big job that involved ripping up the asphalt, installing area lights, and saying goodbye to some decorative pines that had gotten scraggly.

What kind of trees should we plant in place of those pines?

Ooh, ooh, call on me!

Apple trees, obviously. Liberty, to be particular; I’d read about their disease resistance right around that time, which was probably the zenith of my enthusiasm for growing food all over the place.

Many of my projects in the grow-food-everywhere department have failed over the years, but boy have these four trees delivered. Such is the magic of trees. While weeds overtook our office grounds that Covid season we all worked from home, the apples trees thrived under total neglect, and have produced increasingly robust crops each year since – even this year.

This was a tough year for local orchards. A late frost decimated stone fruit crops, triggering a natural disaster designation across New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But our apple trees are loaded. Maybe it’s the heat island effect of the driveway?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still all about the digging-in-the-dirt variety of gardening. My lunch every day this month includes whatever I picked that morning from my garden at home; today it’s cucumbers and beans from my hoophouse and a turkey leg from one of our own turkeys. But I’ve calmed down about trying to grow food everywhere I go.

Here’s why. The year I was pregnant with my youngest, I got permission to start a little vegetable garden in the yard outside the office. I figured it would be a communal effort, team bonding. I forgot that most people don’t like manual labor. One young guy in the production department did pop out to help me break ground, but after that, I was on my own.

As my belly grew, so did the poison ivy that had looked manageable at first, wrapping its creepers through the AC units, unfurling its glossy leaves toward the sun, sending runners up the handicap parking sign, my tomato cages. I knew I should get in there, but I could barely fit, and I really didn’t want to get poison ivy at this stage of the game, and it was so hot, and... then one brutally hot summer day, the AC died. The office became a greenhouse, turning sweltering in a matter of minutes. We had to send everybody home in the middle of the day – a minor catastrophe for a small, busy outfit like ours. The compressor units had been suffocated by their pelt of poison ivy. I gave my blessing for the landscapers to weedwhack. That was that for the office garden.

But I wasn’t done yet. In subsequent years, I planted seedlings – squash, cherry tomato, sweet potato slips – in the planters outside the office. I watered them each morning, until the day I arrived to discover the landscapers had ripped them out to plant flowers. I nearly cried. How did they not know what a tomato plant looked like?

This was obviously the universe telling me to give it up. Message received. I was done trying to grow food outside my own garden.

But the apple trees never got my resignation memo. They have continued, without fail, to flower lavishly each spring and swell with fruit over the summer. Come fall, these four hardy trees turn our parking lot into an oasis that summons a menagerie of hungry animals. We’ve seen groundhogs, squirrels, deer, even – one early morning – a bear.

And of course, me.