Saturday, November 2, 2013

The Apple Plague of 2013

A few weeks ago you saw pictures of Grace and Company processing apples. We're still trying to figure out what to do with them all.  Last month, Grace canned
- 17 quarts of apple pie filling
- 13 quarts of apple cobbler
- 73 quarts of applesauce
- 48 pints of apple jam and jelly

And that was from apples within reasonable reach. Last week I set up six-feet of scaffolding and harvested these buckets plus one more that made its way through the juicer:



Today, with David's help, we added another layer of scaffolding.


And in two-hour's time, this was the bounty from 1 (one) tree:


We're about appled out. We're running out of ideas, jars, freezer space, sugar... and the trees still look like this:

Tree One (yellow delicious?)

Tree Two (red, crisp apples)
Seriously. That's what's still left after all this time. The ground below doesn't look much better.


We've lost count of bucket after buckets we've fed the sheep and chickens and cow, oh my. There's a tote of apples in the back of the vehicle to take to church tomorrow, but many of our neighbors suffer the same fate.

As someone said, if you don't have apples this year you don't have enough friends. Need apples? Find a friend. Need a friend? Ask for apples. You never know how many fruity folks you'll find. Could lead to a doctor shortage? Hmmm....