725 Pounds

We are nuts, yes, I am aware of it. My neighbors told me they were glad we are normal, because the last owners of this house sure weren't. Well.... I kinda laughed a little and said we try to be normal. This week has proved otherwise. On my birthday - Wednesday - we bundled up nice and warm because it was 39 degrees and headed out to meet Kurt, Jennie and the girls at the orchard. We were there for a total of 3 hours.

The girls ran around eating apples and tossing them around and getting dirty while we picked 20 bushels for the church, which is roughly 900 pounds in less than an hour! They were nice and large. Then we picked windfalls for ourselves for an hour and a half and loaded up in the truck and came home. We weighed them to fill my curiosity. 725 pounds was the result. I told my grandma, who has canned all her life, and she rolled with laughter and wondered what we would do with them all. Yesterday and today we canned apples. Our kitchen is a great canning kitchen with the island. We had up to 5 people at once and it wasn't really crowded. It helped that we used a camp stove on the back porch to can 2 water baths at once - as you can kinda see in the picture of our final product.

We ended up splitting 161 quarts of sauce, 22 pints of apple butter and of juice left over from steaming the apples - probably about 8 gallons. I still have about 100 pounds of apples to dry, make pies and put in the freezer - if I keep at it, I will be done before I know it!