Harvest Season is Busy

I have more or less stopped blogging.  Mostly because I’ve been so busy, but also I’ve had a shortage of ideas lately.  Anyways, this is simply an update on what I’m up to lately around here at the Local Kitchener.

Apples.  This has been an incredible apple season, so good that many are free (if you know where to look!).  My friend Jake and I got a ton of apples from his friend’s tree and I took several bushels of them out to a Mennonite farm called Rolling Acres that presses apples into juice.  You can have it bagged in 1 liter “milk bags” or just put it in a bucket, so we got a bit of both.   We actually ended up going twice, using pears that another friend had bought as seconds from a farm for really cheap to make one of the batches half pears.

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On the left are canned jars of cider, the right is 23 liters of cider fermenting contentedly…

All in all we ended up after two trips with close to 150 liters of juice.  Jake and I canned about 40 liters of it, another 46 liters are fermenting in two large 23 liter carboys, another 30 or so are frozen, and the rest was consumed fresh.  Yes, it’s a lot of juice.  It’s also going to be a lot of hard cider for enjoying in the winter months.  And yet there are more apples.  So we’ve made applesauce.  In our basement there are now about 30 liters of applesauce.  It’s been fun, but it definitely gets exhausting.

Making applesauce.  Top the apples cook until softened, below my young assistant strains out the skins and cores using a food mill.

I’ve also done a lot of canning of tomatoes and salsa and think I’m done with that now, with around 30 liters of salsa, and about 40 half-liters of salsa.  You never know how long supplies will last but just see how far it goes and then plan accordingly the next year.  Jake has been even more prolific than I have, putting up probably about 200 jars (maybe he’ll comment with exact numbers, hopefully I’m not too far off the number…).

We definitely need more shelf space.

Thus, no recipe post this time, just saying I’ve been busy getting ready for winter.  I will return with some recipes in the next few weeks, but in the meantime I’ve still got a bit more preparing to do….

This post is linked at The Homeacre Hop .