Apples, apples, apples

 So many apples! We have hundreds and hundreds of apples this year, and unlike previous years, they are beautiful enough that we are not embarrassed to sell them. We never spray pesticides, so we don’t exactly know to what we should attribute their pristine condition. Terry thinks the chicken dropping around the base of the trees discourages apple maggot flies. I wonder if perhaps the hens are just eating a lot of the bugs that lay eggs on apples. Or maybe that masting thing really works. I learned about masting in graduate school. Perennial plants, trees in particular, tend to have small crops of fruits/nuts/seeds in most years to keep fruit/nut/seed predators low. Every now and then they have a big blow out of reproduction, which is the mast year, and that overwhelms the predators’ ability to attack the fruits/nuts/seeds.

Nearly perfect apples

Regardless of the reason, the apples are a joy to work with. I have a cranked apple peeler/corer/slicer that works like a charm if and only if the apples are firm and symmetrical. I easily cranked through a bunch of yellow delicious apples for the dehydrator.

My next project was apple sauce. I use peeled apples for that too. Hilda used to put in the skins because she loved the pink tint it gave the final project. If you do that, though, the sauce has to be run through a food mill at the end to get out the skins. This is not only adds a messy extra step, but also yields a smooth consistency throughout, and I like a few chunks here and there. Once the coring and peeling is done, all that remains is to cook the apples until they fall apart, adding a little water as necessary to keep them from sticking to the pan. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating—once you’ve had homemade applesauce, you find store-bought watering and insipid.

Apple sauce cooking

The best way to reduce a bunch of apples to a small volume is apple butter. I make it in the crockpot. It takes 16 hours to cook but not much time to prep.  I just cut the flesh from around the core and toss it in the crockpot. After a long cook, I put in sugar, brown sugar, and spices and it’s ready for canning. Six pounds of apples makes six cups of butter.

Apple butter, before

Apple butter, after

Bingo and Banjo take over our recliners whenever possible. They are not yet the lap cats we would like them to be, but we keep working on it. At times, they are so adorable I can hardly stand it.

So adorable I can hardly stand it!

Our dear friend Laura M. gifted me with tickets to a football game at U of I Champagne-Urbana. Jane is an alumnus and was stoked about going. She researched the game and found that it was Wear Orange Day. She got right on Amazon and ordered t-shirts and sweatshirts for us. (It was still warm at the time, and we didn’t know what the weather would be like.) As it turned out, it was a night game and rather chilly. I wore wool socks, long underpants, and my winter coat and was not ever cold. The marching band was awesome. The football team, not so much. We left after the halftime show so we could get back to Jane’s house at midnight instead of 2:00 a.m. We are too old for that stuff!

Jane and I in our Illini orange at Memorial Stadium in Champagne, IL

I stayed at Jane’s instead of trying to drive home at that hour. We met Kate for brunch the next morning. I brought her a quart of frozen applesauce, a jar of pickles, and two small pumpkins to replace the two large ones that had been eaten by squirrels. The new pumpkins will be indoor decorations. As we were transferring the goods from my car to hers, she held the pickle jar for a moment, wondering how she was going to get it home without it rolling around. Lo and behold, the door had a spot where it fit perfectly! Life’s little victories.

A perfect pickle pocket in the door of Kate's car

Now that things are quieting down in the garden, I am starting to take walks around the property. The wild cucumbers are just about done for the year. I was able to find one that had not opened yet and a few that were still green. Most of them, however, were already dried with their seeds gone. By spring, there will be nothing left but the skeleton, which bears a resemblance to its fellow cucurbit, the luffa. I pulled the skin off the fruit on the end for educational purposes.

Stages of development of the wild cucumber from the top

And from the front. Each fruit has four seeds.

The seeds have an interestingly mottled coat.

Wild cucumber seeds with mottled seed coat

We have been waiting, waiting, waiting for the pullets to begin laying. Yesterday, I finally found the first small pullet egg. It is from a Wyandotte, who lays brown eggs. We had another brown pullet eggs this morning. No green eggs from Goldie, and Ameraucana, yet. The Wyandottes are laying eggs on the floor. I hope they catch onto the nest boxes soon.

Our first pullet egg of the year, right, with an Ameraucana egg on the left for size comparison