Apple Harvesting

 

Our two apple trees have been producing small, but tasty fruit for about two weeks now. We’ve been feeding most of the small apples to the chickens, goats and my horse, Baby Doll, and sharing them with all the horses in the neighborhood, too.

My mare is addicted to apples now and whenever she sees anyone step out of the house, she hurries to the fence and nickers loudly for us to feed her an apple.

 

I try to sneak outside sometimes, especially very early in the morning when I’m letting the dogs out to do their business, because I want to crawl back into bed afterwards. But that mare of mine has superb hearing and she can be at the very back of our property and I can be as quiet and as stealthy as I can, and she still arrives quickly at the gate, loudly neighing and nickering the entire time. sigh. She’s a girl that knows what she wants and is spoiled enough to get it.

 

We have two apple trees, a Red Delicious and a Golden Delicious. The Red Delicious tree only produced about 40 large, sweet, bright-red apples, which have already been eaten raw or in apple crisp, or shared with some of our neighbors. While our Golden Delicious apple tree is heavy with fruit, probably at least a couple hundred. Many of them are small, although sweet, juicy and crisp.

(These are from our first harvest and we have at least a hundred more still waiting to be picked on the tree)

 

I recently ordered two new fruit harvesting tools online, from one of my favorite companies, Lee Valley. Harvesting fruit is rather new for my family, especially in these large amounts, so after the huge amount of work and time spent harvesting and processing my generous harvest of peaches I decided to splurge and get a little help this time for the apples. And I’m glad I did. What a huge help this nifty fruit picker is. I had to reluctantly donate (sacrifice) most of the peaches on the top branches of my peach tree because I just couldn’t reach them, but with this fruit picker, that’s not a problem anymore!

It slips over your broom or mop handle and comes with a good sized, sturdy muslin bag. It helps if the fruit you are picking is nice and ripe because the fruit will just pop off, unlike this apple that I picked. (haha!)

And the other tool I bought is an oldie and a goodie, but makes short (and I mean, short!) work of the apples after they’re gathered. I took the following photos, not noticing the clock on my stove, but now it’s rather convenient to showcase just how quickly this apple peeler/corer/slicer can process the fruit. It takes less than 10 seconds from start to finish!

Is that cool, or what?!

 

Best of all, it’s not only safe to use, my kids enjoy using it, so I get lots of help processing the fruit, too. My twinling Jem was the camo model in the photos above. This photo is of my silly twinling, Jax, slurping up the peelings like spagetti noodles.

I like the cool spirals that it creates, too.

 

I have one of those little, round, metal, corer/slicers, too, that I use for making apple slices as snacks for the kids or for apple pie, but I think these spirals are neat because after you break them apart the thin slices could be used to make dehydrated apples.

While my kidlets operated the apple/peeler/corer, I was kept busy preparing crock-pot applesauce. The scent of the warm apples and spice filled the air and was the perfect thing for a chilly Autumn day.

I make mine with brown sugar, pumpkin pie spice, a few extra shakes of cinnamon and enough water to cover the bottom of the crock. After a few hours on high, I spun the applesauce around in the blender until smooth and very thick. And then we ate it while it was still warm. Yummo!

 

The weather was perfect for processing apples yesterday, with heavy rain and cooler temperatures in the low 50’s. We didn’t even process most of the apples in the really large basket, as seen in the 4th photo from the top, but I was still able to prepare 15 quarts of peeled, cored, and sliced apples for the freezer in less than 2 hours.

The goats, sheep, llamas, and chickens are enjoying the bounty of leftover peelings and cores, too.

While Baby Doll seems thrilled with her very own version of Equine Pasta.

And I still have a few more apples left to harvest.