There’s not much to recommend a cool, rainy spring day unless you’re planting a fruit tree, which is just what I did.

It’s an heirloom Cox Orange Pippin, highly esteemed in England as a dessert apple, it produces excellent fruit in cooler summer climates. First grown in 1830 England, it’s a medium sized apple, red and yellow, usually striped. The flesh is yellow, crisp, juicy, richly aromatic and some say almost spicy. The flavor is enhanced when fruit ripens off the tree. When Cox Orange Pippin apples are ripe they can be shaken, the seeds make a rattling sound since the seeds are loosely secured in the apple core.

And it’s all mine, from “Trees of Antiquity.” Two years to fruit. The only downside is mud on the kitchen floor, but she’ll never notice.