At the invitation of Curtis's friend, Doug, we went to an abandoned orchard to pick apples on a perfect fall day. We had no school on this Wednesday, due to parent/teacher conferences, so it was an ideal day to spend the morning gathering some free fruit. It's about a 40 minute drive over into Colorado but it's well worth the drive. This is quite a large orchard with peaches, cherries, pear and loads of apples. We picked yellow delicious, some johnathons?, and fujis. We brought lots of 5 gallon buckets, coolers and tote bins to fill, hoping to get enough to do some canning and preserving.
 |
| getting ready to load up on apples |
 |
| James decided to just eat the apples rather than pick them….just getting started on filling my bucket. |
 |
| The trees were absolutely loaded... |
 |
| Just looking at the trees made my heart happy and seriously brought tears to my eyes. |
 |
| Curtis |
 |
| Charles wanted to climb a ladder to pick. It was scarier up there than he thought it would be |
 |
| Soren's turn |
 |
| James with another apple |
 |
| Our bounty…the large cooler under the three buckets is full also |
Once we got this load home, my life pretty much went on hold because I had to process them before they went bad. The days were filled with washing, cutting, coring, cooking, straining, filling bottles and processing the bottled product. It took almost a month to get through them all, and we ate a lot of them fresh and fed some to the chickens. They got sick of me feeding them the cooked skins and cores that came from the strainer. Picky birds. My kitchen was a sticky mess, but it sure smelled good and it is so satisfying to see all those bottles on the shelf in my food room. We plan to go next year and are hoping for another bumper crop.
 |
| The end product: applesauce, apple butter and apple pie filling. We ended up with almost 100 pints of applesauce, about 20-25 pints of apple butter and 12-15 quarts of apple pie filling. |
No comments:
Post a Comment