Sunday, September 27, 2015

An apple a day or is it the early bird gets the worm...

For once my husband and I were patient.  We haven't picked our apples until this weekend.  We are down to one out of the two original Harrelson apple trees.  They were planted the first spring in our cabin.  They have made it through several major blizzards, but the mice girdled one two years ago.  She tried hard, but couldn't recover.  It was a sad day when we pulled her up.  The last one standing had a ton of apples this year.  We didn't even come close to picking them all.  We left the ones that were bruised by hail. 


As you can see below, this isn't our first rodeo.  We had apple peeling and cutting central set up.  We were a well oiled machine.  Kelly used the Lehman's apple peeler and I used the apple corer.  Within an hour we had 5 bags of apple pie filling, two bags of apple crisp, another in the oven, and two gallon jars of apple cider.  We still have a few apples left. 

That wasn't the end of the weekend projects.  My Hindu's Rope plant was in dire need of repotting.  She is 20 years old and beautiful.  I washed her off good and then went to work making a good potting mix.  My poor composting worms get neglected in the summer.  I tend to use the outdoor composting bin.    I drug the worm bin out and cleaned out all of the good compost in the bottom two rungs.  I took the top box and added apple peels, bananas, and some leaves from the outdoor bin.  Those little worms will be happy, as will my poor house plants.

Good compost and soon to be good compost.  Let those little worms go to work.
Well, my weekend flew by.  Sorry if this post is a little choppy.  There seems to have been some changes made to blogger and it is fight to get anything where I want it.  Oh well, what would life be without a little challenge. 

Have you picked your apples yet?  What do you do with them?  What type of composting do you do?  Worms? Compost Tumbler?  Ground Bins?  Which do you like best and why?

4 comments:

  1. Oh lots of apples for you. We did not get one apple off of any trees here on our farm tame or wild.. I think our winter or lack of bees did this but not sure. It makes me very sad. We have one Bosc pear tree that gave me about half a dozen beautiful pears. Love your Hindu plant and the plane. Hug B

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  2. That plane is fantastic!!! It is too hot down here in the valley for apples. We will go up to the mountains to get them in a couple of weeks. but even they are saying it isn't a good year because of the drought. Our fruit trees, didn't do well at all. I got some peaches but not enough to can.
    I will make apple pie filling and apple sauce. I gave up my worm bin and just let them move to my flowerbeds. It is so hot here in the summer I felt sorry for them. Now I have nice loamy flowerbeds. I still think I would love to have another one. I do enjoy having them.

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  3. My apple trees are not yet producing -- still young. My daughter's backyard neighbor always shares his apples with her/us but they got knocked out by hail. So no apples this year. usually we make lots of apple sauce and butter. I love Susan Branch's Apple-Cranberry Crisp about this time of year!

    Your Hindu's Rope is beautiful. Not sure I've ever one.

    I'm going to go till up part of my garden and throw some old, moldy alfalfa bales on it for the fall/winter. The worms do good things underneath mulch like that.

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  4. sometimes...summing up life, is a little choppy!!! i have been making baked apples and right now, we are sick of them!!!!

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