Tag Archives: apples

Apple Harvest 2025

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In non fibery news, my summer apple tree did very well this year. I harvested close to four plastic grocery bags of decent apples. I probably composted 50 times as much due to bird and animal loss. Or just failing to pick and they got rotten. And that is okay, I am not a commercial apple producer.

I cleaned up the apples and cut out all the bad or buggy bits and dropped into a pressure cooker. My preferred method is jelly from juice so I like to harvest that from the fruit. I cook as much of the apple including core an seed to develop as much natural pectin as possible

The juice is coming out very deep rose colored this year with the peel influencing the color. I use cheese close to harvest the juice. The kids didn’t really appreciate the apple sauce pulp flavor so I chose not to try to salvage any of that. I gave some to my friends with chickens and composted the rest.

It is crazy back to school time again so I don’t have capacity to make jelly right now so I sterilized several jars and I’m freezing the juice until I have time to work it. I am hoping that I can also get my hands on more wine grapes to re-stash my grape jelly stash as well this year.

And then I would just do a large cook day for jelly processing. Hopefully with extra hands to help!

Happy Canning!!

Apple Season

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Late August around here means APPLE SEASON! Our crop was small but might this year but I think I have enough to do two batches of apply jelly.

It literally dangerously hot here in Kansas with 100-110 degree temperatures without the heat index. But apples ripen when they want. I took my time to wash and cut out the bad parts and pressure cook out the goodness.

After the juice is complete I made the basic cooked apply jelly recipe from the SureJell boxed instructions. This batch set but a very soft set. Not enough that I want to recook but I think I will make some tweaks for the second batch. It’s too hot for that!

OOOH! And I did something very environmentally friendly with the canning and sterilizing water. Stay tuned later this week!

Happy Canning!!

Improvising With Apples

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My backyard gifted me just enough apples in the latest harvest for roughly two pies worth. I needed a mom break so I dropped my kiddos with the grandparents and went to MY Grandma’s house and made pie while we chatted. (I wore a mask the whole time even though we are both vaccinated, better safe than sorry!)

I hit a roadblock. We were having so much fun chatting that I didn’t realize we had run out of flour after making two bottom crusts. So I had two half constructed pies that were missing tops! And where my GG lives, the nearest store is 30 minutes away in a different county. So we got creative and made do. We combined quick cooking oats, brown sugar, butter and cinnamon to make a crumble topping.

All reports were that it worked out well, but the pie was a little dry as the oats sucked up all the excess liquid from the cooked apples. But all in all still an edible dessert. But the best part was spending a few hours alone with my GG. I wish I could do it more often so I’ll cherish the time I do get.

Happy Baking!!

All The Apples

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Our apple tree is giving us a bountiful harvest this year! I have a daily ritual of picking the ripe apples every evening (and raking/scooping the fallen ones into the trash). I finally had a refrigerator bin full so the kiddos and I made jelly!

After A TON of cutting and de-bugging I ended up with two instant pots full of beautiful red apples. The tree was here when we moved in so we have no clue what kind they are. We just call them red apples, lol.

We painstakingly drained and filtered the apples for most of the morning. That left us with enough juice for three full batches of jelly.

And the apply flesh/pulp the kids and I ran through the food mill to make apple sauce. I’m not a fan of applesauce but PB and Jellybean gobbled it up!

Safe to say our winter stores are good to go for jelly. No doubt some of this will end up in Christmas gifts!

Happy Canning!!

Apples: Take Two!

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Behold jars of green apple goodness…20140706-153312-55992321.jpgI’ve been cleaning out the deep freeze to both use up old supplies and make room for frozen casseroles for my post-baby haze. I found about 10 lbs of peeled, cored, and frozen green apples from my tree last summer. I cooked half of them down into apple juice and made apple jelly (front jars). The other half I put into jars and added this pie filling recipe (rear jars). 

I’ve tried the jelly and it’s a very light delicate jelly. I think the flavor would have been enhanced by leaving the skin on the apples but alas I did not have that foresight last summer. I shall remedy that this summer with the new crop. The pie filling remains to be tested. I have some summer BBQs on my schedule so now I can take fresh pie!

What is your favorite summer treat?