Wednesday, November 03, 2021

Winter Prep

What in the world is going on outside the world of canning? What are they doing? 
 

Winter prep, of course. They are building a platform for what will be this year's sledding hill...IF we get the right amount of snow. Stacia has been dreading the snow, but she was getting excited at the possibilities for winter fun.  I promised hot chocolate from the deck...and Michael plans a warm fire...fun ahead. 


But inside the house there WAS canning...the last day of the apple marathon of 2021. The final case and a half of the produce tower processed and on the shelf.  These little stickers became the bane of my existence. Seriously, a sticker on EVERY apple...who wants little plastic stickers going into their applesauce....and this? Certainly adding insult to injury in my book! A tad bit excessive me thinks. 

The final load coming out of the canner...7 more quarts of apple juice. 

I'm going to add the tally here so I can judge how many cases to order next year. From a case of Granny Smiths and 1/2 a case of Honey Crisp we put away 20 bags of pie filling and 1 1/2 gallons of pear/apple juice. 

From five cases of Fuji apples we processed 65 quarts of various kinds of applesauce and 4 1/2 gallons of apple juice.  I only did 2 loads of dried apples. That is less than last year, but I can order more as the time goes by and dry them.... I checked and last year we had 48 quarts of applesauce. We ran out in October. I wanted a bit more...I'm happy with the outcome. 

Text notifications were going off all day as the youth organized a prank on Pastor Shannon. He had sprayed some silly string in his sermon on Sunday.  You can guess where this went.  LOL I needed to duck out early to take the girls to the store. Michael, Alex and Grandpa settled for YOYO night (you're on your own)....or the meals that goes down and back up? ::snort::  Anyway, the girls and I headed to the store and then planned to go on to church for youth and Bible study.  

Millie began to wildly bark....three moose in the garden area. I decided not to head out to the compost....the chicken's weren't impressed either. 


I clicked a couple of photos and jumped in the car instead. 

The kitchen is a mess - I'll work on that tomorrow. It's a GREAT feeling to know that we have jars of organic, sugar free applesauce for the year. The garden didn't produce enough to really can this year, so I'm happy to be able to order cases of things from co-op.