Apple butter

 My, what a pleasant week it was! We finally got the garlic planted. The first step is getting the landscape cloth down between the rows. We worked on that over a few days. By Tuesday morning, all was ready. We tried to start early before the wind kicked up. We used a dibble, shown below, to make a hole in the ground. The garlic clove goes in root end down.

Dibble next to a hole with a garlic clove in it

After that, we cover the rows with straw. By the time the garlic was planted, the wind had, in fact, started, so spreading straw was challenging.

Spreading the straw

The final step is covering the straw with row cover. Needless to say, this is even more challenging in the wind than the straw. We weighed the row cover down with boards, which Terry kindly fetched from his stash.

Goodnight, little garlics! Sleep well.

The plants in the high tunnel did well in the warm spell. I’m planning to harvest some of the large lettuce soon.

The oldest lettuce, left, is nearly ready for harvest

I finally pulled the broccoli rabe, which was getting out of control, and we ate the last of it. For reasons that are not clear to me, the lettuce in the earth boxes (planters with reservoirs at the bottom to provide a constant supply of water) were growing poorly. I took courage from Eliot Coleman (Four-Season Harvest), who claims that it is possible to transplant lettuce, and moved some plants from the earth boxes to the raised beds in the space where the broccoli rabe had been. I’m pretty excited that they all survived so far.

Lettuce transplants

Meanwhile, the apples are getting older every day. I got a recipe for apple butter from Nancy. That’s a process, let me tell you. I started with 6 pounds of apples, diced. I filled my largest slow cooker and turned it on.

A slow cooker full of apples

It was supposed to go for 8 hours on high, but I didn’t get to that point until 4:00 pm. By the time I went to bed, it had cooked down pretty far, and I was sore afraid that it would be ruined by midnight. I turned it to low and stirred it every couple of hours when I was up anyway. By morning, it had reduced considerably. I ran it through a food mill to remove the skins (although the recipe said one could blitz them with a stick blender). After that, it looked like this.

Apple butter

I stirred in sugar and spices and continued to cook off the water. One of the other recipes I found in my brief research said to cook it until no fluid came out of it when it was put on a plate. This was a handy tip.  

When it seemed sufficiently dry, I put it in half-pint jars and processed it as usual. This is the result.

Apple butter ready for storage

Yesterday was exciting. We had two brown pullet eggs on the same day! This is clear evidence that at least two of the Wyandottes are laying.

Two pullet eggs on the same day!

Today we had the first blue Americauna egg! Hilda thoughtfully gave it to me. I carefully wiped it clean (not to go into too much detail, but it looked like it was painful), but while I was hanging up the Egg Towel, it rolled off the counter and landed on the floor. Damn it! So no picture of the first blue pullet egg.

I also have some videos of the girls dust bathing in the nice weather, but due to technical difficulties, those will be posted at a later time.

Rain and cold weather are coming. It’s seasonally appropriate.