Sporatic Blog Update

With getting a new teaching contract and a baby on the way, I've been a bit neglectful of the gardening blog. I took some of my tomatoes and made ketchup and salsa with it. The ketchup wasn't that hot but the salsa with added Ghost Pepper was great. I also made pesto from homegrown ingredients...the taste is the good times. This looks like the last canning of the season before I winterize.

110 Pounds of Apples Into 56 Pints of Apple Sauce

I used to have many fruit trees, but over the past few years, I have been slowly taking them down. Last year, Craig and I decided on sort of a whim (and questionable circumstances) to take down an apple tree leaving one remaining. Usually the apples on the tree start to drop off before they can get to a decent size for eating leaving my lawn looking horrible and inviting critters to come into the yard.

This year, my mom drove up to help pick, process, and can the apples into apple sauce. I don't think she knew what she was getting herself into. We were thinking there might be about 40 pounds of apples we could pick but we ended up with 109 pounds. To round it off, my mom threw in another pound to make it 110 pounds of picked apples.

I didn't realize how labor intense making decent apple sauce was in addition to the sheer time to can that much fruit. We started canning the picked apples around noon and did not finish until after 8pm. All apples had to be washed, cored, boiled down with some sugar, mashed up, strained, packed into jars, and then given a boiling bath for 20 minutes. We had quite a system going on in my fairly small kitchen.

So from 110 pounds of raw apples we ended up with 24 pints and 16 quarts or another way to think of that is 56 pints total or 7 gallons of pure apple sauce.

This was the most canning I've done in one session. It was an endurance test to can for 8 hours but we sure got a lot of product out of it.

Click the images to enlarge: