It’s Apple Harvest Time

Woohoo? When you have sixteen apple trees you really do question whether it is a good thing.

The first thing I did was take one of each type of apple that we have and cut it up to sample.

We don’t know the name for each type of apple. I know that we have Granny Smith (3 trees), Red Delicious (3+ trees), Yellow Delicious (2 trees), Gravenstein (1 tree), Early Transparent (1 tree), and Johnathan (2 trees). Some trees didn’t produce any fruit this year. All of the trees need serious care. Pruning and pest control. It will take years to get this orchard producing at maximum capacity. Hmmm. Do I even want it to produce at maximum capacity? I’ll have to ponder that question in my free time. Oh yeah, I don’t really have free time!

Michael and the boys left for errands on Friday and I picked almost all of the apples. Some junky ones I gave to the geese. Some I couldn’t reach (and I had strict orders not to be climbing on ladders…..one tree I was able to climb without a ladder!). Here is what I was able to collect.

I actually forgot about the two trees in the front of our house so Joshua picked those and added a sixth basket to the haul.

What to do with so many apples? Personally, I’m not a fan of apple pie. Don’t get me wrong. If I have a sweet tooth and apple pie is the only sweet thing available I’ll eat it. But as the chief cook and food preserver for the family I’m not going to go to the effort of canning apple pie filling when I don’t like it. Let’s just call it the one and only perk of being chief cook and food preserver for the family.

My mind has been pondering what to do with all these apples long before I picked them. My dear, talented husband planned on building us an apple cider press. I, knowing how busy he is right now, called some rental companies and finally found Reid Rentals in Newberg. For $40/day we could be done with all the apples. We both agreed it was a reasonable price and so we rented it. Michael will make us a cider press this winter, when there is less stuff to do outside.

Here it is.

It has a motor for the chopper which kept the mess outside of my already dirty kitchen. You just turn it on and drop the whole apples in.

It has two of the containers so that once you get one full of chopped apples

you can slide it forward to under the pressing mechanism and still be chopping apples. It makes things go much faster.

You put the wooden lid on top of the chopped apples

and then twist until you can’t twist anymore,

and then you bring in the muscle.

The juice just drains out the end.

Here is about half way through the process.

Those are half gallon jars. We ended up with 7 gallons of cider. In about two hours.

I was not helping with the making of the cider. I had another test project that I was working on.

I picked the nicest Johnathan and Granny Smith apples and cut them up for apple crisp. Now that I LOVE. I could eat any fruit crisp EVERY day. The test project came into play in that I froze the apples. I have been told that you can freeze uncooked apple crisp and then bake it whenever the need arises (that would be every day in my book). I don’t have enough baking dishes that I can put an actual apple crisp in the freezer so I decided to just freeze bags of sliced apples. I ended up with three gallon size bags.

When the cider making was finished I began the process of canning it. I put some fresh in the refrigerator and canned the rest. Have you every heard the saying “A watched pot never boils”? Well, let me tell you. A not watched pot boils VERY QUICKLY! The instructions on canning the apple cider was to bring the cider up to 190 degrees and hold there for five minutes. Nope, never happened. I would check the temperature and think “Oh, it has a ways to go” and then go do something else (remember, my canning kitchen is in the garage) and I would come back and the thing is boiling away. And apparently on the temperature scale 190 degrees is just a quick jaunt to the next room away from 212 degrees.

So, if you want to know the taste difference between “properly canned” apple cider and fresh apple cider I’m afraid we won’t be able to tell you. I will, however, be able to tell you that the difference between fresh apple cider and boiled apple cider is minimal.

Enjoy your day,

Karen