This year our little town has been blessed with a bumper apple
crop! Everyone in town has apple trees that are loaded with
apples! Our trees had to be propped up with boards to prevent
the branches from breaking from the weight of the apples! We have been eating, cooking and making lots of fresh pressed
apple juice with LaVerl's apple press!
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| I call this my "giving tree". It has the BEST tasting apples ! We had enough apples on this tree to share with all my friends! |
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| So lots of apples require lots of work, so I invited a few of my friends over to make applesauce. Lenna & Marcella came first, then Tami and others helped. We set up outside because of the mess making applesauce makes! The weather was nice and cool, however it did start raining later that afternoon, so we had to bring all the tables into the garage. |
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| "Many hands make light work" they say, plus it was a lot more fun! |
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| Marcella helped make apple pie filling by using the handy- dandy 'apple, peeler, corer, slicer' tool. The applesauce tool also made our work so much faster and easier! All we had to do is wash and quarter the apples, cook until soft, then run them through this amazing little gadget. |
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| We set up two propane cookers, plus the cooktop in my garage and had these huge pots cooking the apples. Then once the apple- sauce was in the jars, we had two steamers and two water bath canners going. |
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| My friend and visiting teacher came over to 'watch and learn'. |
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| Tami did about 14 quarts, Blake loves applesauce! |
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| He also loves just apples. Every time he comes over, he likes to go get an apple off the tree to eat! |
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| Dad was excited to use his snazzy apple picking bag. He straps it over his shoulders and back and he doesn't have to climb up and down the ladder, he just puts them into his bag. Then when its about full, he lets down the ropes and dumps the apples out! |
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| Andrew and Blake eating a little lunch! |
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| The finished product! We did 167 quarts! Not bad for a days work! |
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| Lenna & I decided we wanted a little more, so we did 78 more quarts the the next day! |
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| These look like cherries, but they are crab apples. Tami & I went and picked about 3 gallons of these little guys. She had to back her truck up under the neighbors tree so we could reach them. |
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| They made some really good, beautiful jelly! |
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| Oops, blurry! I made some cute labels for them. |
I haven't got any pictures of LaVerl pressing apples, so
there will be more pictures to come of that. I bet you
can't wait to see those!
