The Secret Orchard

I happened to have the local news on and found out that the price of potatoes has gone up. I hollered out to husband, "Hey, we just got wealthier!" Because, you know, we've got potatoes.

We also have these apples. Now, these are from a secret place that I hope only we know about. Well, us and the bears anyway. At first we wondered why there were no apples on the ground. Then we saw one way high up bit in two. With teeth marks. And these odd looking piles of poop. The occasional branch ridden down. And stomped down areas. At first we were thinking other people knew about this secret place but then we thought about the bears. It is, after all, in the bear preserve. We live in the bear preserve. So we hope the bears won't mind too much sharing these apples with us.

Now, each bag you see there represents apples from a different tree. There were a couple more trees whose apples were not anywhere near ripe yet. We plan to go back. But right now this is enough to process. And pack out. The trees are not near anything, including the road. That is a good bit more than a hundred pounds of apples.

We will keep the perfect ones and store them in the cool, probably in sawdust although you could use clean dry leaves. Those will be some eating apples and some of them will likely keep until Christmas or after. The less than perfect ones will become what I grew up calling "apples". Or "cooked apples" if you had to specify. It was also known as "fruit". Anyway, it is just cut up apples, usually fairly sour ones, cooked, with a little sweetening added. And usually a dollop of butter. Just enough water in the bottom of the pot to keep them from sticking. Just stewed. Depending on what kind of apple you start with, the end product differs. My grandparents used "horse apples" that were very sour and sweetened retained a rather sweet-tart flavor and cooked to mush. My mother had three trees with some Winesap sort of apple on them (they were 5 in one trees) and those kept their shape and had a full bodied flavor. I love all of them. I remember my grandparents, sitting under their big double birch tree, with wash tubs full of salt water, peeling, quartering, coring, and slicing the apples. When I'd take my hand to dunk the slices into the water, I could see my grandmother's hand doing the same thing, still holding her knife. After the salt water, you just take the slices, shake the water off them, and put them in freezer containers and freeze. To cook, just put in a pot on some low heat. This is a great breakfast side. Great anything side actually.

We'll also dehydrate as many as we can. We're dehydrating onions and tomatoes right now too.

Oh, and we'll be trying this this year to see if it works or not -- taking the peels and the cores and cooking them with water to make apple jelly. No waste that way.


These are Jacob's cattle beans, dried on the vines before they were picked off. The thing sitting on the handle is a giant sunflower head drying. Tons of those this year too. I'm determined to not let the birds have all of them -- there are plenty of other things for the birds to eat!