My folks had one little bitty tree but it put on like crazy every year. Mom never used them, but we had relatives that would come and get them. Makes great bread and other stuff. I never cared for them off the tree. I don't like eating stuff that's almost rotten by the time it's ripe.
When we were kids, the brown ones were good to blow up with fire crackers. Just make sure you get behind something, though, cause rotten fruit would blast everywhere.
When I was a kid, there were two mean little boys that used to walk home down our road. They stopped one day and one of them said that he was going to take the apples off that tree...
I tried to tell him they weren't apples.
Yep, him and his brother got a couple and chomped into them.
They never tried that again...