It’s applesauce and Halloween time

Date: October 2019
Type: Post

October 27, 2019

Emilie Phillips

This year I bought

1 bushel Cortland
1/2 bushel Mutsu
1/2 bushel Northern Spy

It made 31 quarts: 27 canned, 2 refrigerated, 1 given away, and ~1 eaten by my helpers. My notes say I haven’t made this combination before, but it came out tasty.

Isaac and David straining the cooked apples

Isaac had his friend David over to help. They cranked the food mill which strains the cooked apples. Isaac remembered how to run the food mill from last year. He directed David how to operated it. When they weren’t helping with applesauce, they carved jack-o-lanterns. David was the expert there and helped Isaac carve his. They both made “traditional” jack-o-lanterns as David called them.

The other thing I often post about in the fall is cutting and stacking wood for the winter. For once we got that done early, back in September. We had plenty of split wood left from last year when I ordered a cord. The old wood needed to be restacked inside to make room for the hardwood trees felled during hangar construction. My parents helped us cut the trees to three foot lengths. For a while, we had two saws running — our new battery powered saw, and our giant gas saw. Then the battery ran dead, and the chain slipped off the gas saw and bent. While I was procuring a replacement chain, my parents found our crosscut saw and continued cutting the trees almost as fast as they had with the chainsaws.