Our Crabapple tree is weird.
One year, it will nearly collapse under the weight of the fruit, and then next year it won't have any at all. Is there a crabapple cycle that I don't know about? Or was there some nasty frost last year that killed the buds? Who knows? One thing is clear: we had a bumper crop of crabapples this year.
I strapped the kids' school bags on backwards and we set up some ladders to pick the fruit. It took us two evenings to harvest it all, and we filled several large Amazon shipping boxes with the crop. Scott loved to climb the step ladder, but he laughed his head off when he stayed at ground level and I threw apples into his bag from the top of the ladder. As always, Katie was a good-natured little worker, telling everyone what a good job they were doing and how much fun she was having. She gets a bit sad sometimes when Scott gets first turn at the ladder, but she doesn't let that sour her apples for long.
We got an apple corer this year and we prepped the apples to be steamed in our big stock pot and then stuck the steamed fruit in the blender to make applesauce and kept the juice that dripped down into the bottom to try to make jelly. The jelly seemed more like syrup, so decided to just keep the juice on subsequent batches. Now I have a fridge full of various jars of juice that no one is particularly excited about drinking. The applesauce was really good, but we ate all that for Sunday dinner one night. Now we may have to wait until 2017 to have some more.
No comments:
Post a Comment