Last October, we were given a box of nice fresh apples, perhaps MacIntosh?
We put them in the cold room and enjoyed fresh apples right up until we left for Vacation in mid-January.
Now that we're back at home and grocery shopping downstairs again, I noticed the apples are
finally starting to dry out noticeably.
Now, if we didn't have a pantry full of applesauce and freezer doors lined with sliced apples for
pies, I'd do either with these apples. But we really don't need more. Really. We. Don't.
I quartered them and then halved them again and added some water to the pan.
Since the woodstove is going all day and night, the apples will become sauce in no time.
Free Heat! Free Apples!
These chickens love applesauce. Funny, they definitely like their apples cooked, they don't like them raw.
The point of this post is twofold.
First, if you can provide free but good food for yourself or your animals, that is a very good thing!
Second, notice how long that box of apples lasted? Put in the cold room in October, held at temperatures between 32 and 40F - these apples could be eaten fresh almost all Winter long.
How much are you paying for apples in the store? Are there wild Apple trees growing near where you live? Do you have a neighbour with fruit trees, but doesn't do anything with the fruit? (You'll want to know if they spray their fruit trees.)
You may already know that fruit hanging on trees and not used, entice bears by the wonderful smell of ripe and rotting fruit. Picking fruit from trees is a necessity around here.
If you can, put a box of apples in your cold room this Fall. Come January, you'll still be eating out of that box of apples....if there are any left.
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5 comments:
I desperately need to get a cold room set up.
I wish I lived around some fruit trees because I'd snatch them up in a heartbeat. I'm stuck in the middle of a concrete jungle. My mother in law will occasionally give me a bag or oranges or lemons from her yard but she is over an hour away so it's not a regular thing. I will be hitting up the local farmer's markets soon. I also plan on canning for the first time this year.
You know what I find morbidly funny? The fact that most people would see the apples drying up and think nothing of tossing them away. The mind reels.
We have hundreds of old apple trees growing in the forest around us. Not to mention all the different varieties of berries and wild grapes too. I have been picking them and treating my horses with them as well as us. This year, I will be picking everything I can get my hands on!
I took a bunch of my apples and made fruit leather from them. I also used some of my left-over applesauce from last year and dehydrated them for fruit leather as well. They are so easy to tuck into a bag when I have to head out the door to work.
Our friends do something similar, they slice the extra apples and dehydrate them too...but they feed them as treats to their horses.
Limette, do you have an area where the temp could be 32-40 fairly constantly? Maybe with venting?
Zany, are you familiar with canning? Let me know and I can send some links if you want.
Katlupe, we too are going to make the extra efforts to glean more this year. We do pretty good in the fruit department, but there is always room to improve.
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