apples and more apples!

I just finished canning 32 quarts of applesauce - I always look forward to a great variety of apples every Fall. If I come across any apple recipes that look easy and tasty, I'll pass them along to you. Bonnie

Hi all!
I just finished my applesauce as well; it's a comforting feeling to see the shelves fill up. I have one more canning job yet, and it's the grape juice concentrate. We really like that. It is supposed to be here any day now. Everyone keeps asking me when I'm getting it. Impatient bunch!

We are having more rain today. We had some heavy winds Saturday night which brought down lots of leaves. Our road was a beautiful carpet of gold Sunday morning! The deer are out and about; the bucks are snorting (kind of unnerving when you are out in the dark!) and the geese have that wild, far-away sound these days.

Happy autumn to everyone!
Ruth

Good Morning Ruth, I agree with you about the good comforting feeling we get from looking at filled canning shelves each Fall.
Here's a picture of my harvest for 2009. The top shelves are filled with my three kinds of squash and my pie pumpkins. I have boxes and baskets of my homegrown potatoes, onions and garlic that turned out great this summer.
The next two shelves are filled with my 240 quarts and pints of canned fruits and vegetable.... and of course pickles. The green and clear bins are filled with my grains of wheat berries, bulgar wheat, wheat flour, brown rice, cornmeal, variety of dried beans, rolled oats, and other various grains. It's such a good feeling to walk into the cellar each day and help yourself to what ever you need for the day. Bonnie

Now that's what I call a rainbow!  It's nice to know that if the power goes out during those inevitable winter ice storms, you can pop open a jar and have plenty to eat.  Right now I have two canners boiling away with grape juice concentrate.  I bought 7 gallons of the stuff which gives 24 quarts of concentrate which will work out to 18 gallons of reconstituted concord grape juice. 

If I had a pressure canner, I'd do our meats as well, but my stove doesn't have a burner big enough.  We have an outdoor gas 2-burner canner, but that thing is either off or blasting off to the moon; it scares me.  Hubby will operate it if I am canning on a Saturday, but that rarely happens except for when we do corn.  Maybe if he asks what I'd like for Christmas, I'll suggest a pressure canner?!  ;)

Ruth

Loved the harvest picture...it reminds me of our cellar when years ago it looked very much like that. Now that the kids are all grown and on their own I don't can anymore, do freeze some garden surplus and give away what we are snowed under with..this year Swiss Chard and Kale. Our apple trees were bare this year..a late frost killed all the blossoms so I had to buy them to store.
  We did have a few tomatoes and cucumbers to share. but the blight was so bad in this area that we were lucky to have any tomatoes at all. The strange thing is, we had loads of the little yellow pear and some type of bright orange cherry tomatoes, they seemed to be somewhat resistant to the blight.
Unfortunately, it really difficult to make a good BLT with 1 inch tomatoes!!!
Paula

We had only a few cherry tomatoes; the beefsteaks all got the blight and produced nothing. The cucumbers got the blight as well.  That's the first time my cukes did not make it; they bloomed wonderfully, then shriveled up and died.  Living in the woods with limited sunshine does not help the situation.  I may just give up on the tomatoes; most everything else does fairly well.

Ruth

Glad you liked the "harvest" picture. We had a very wet summer and it did affect the garden. We also had the tomato blight - it did in some of the tomatoes and I only canned about half of what I expected to. Bonnie