Our first apple harvest
On September 29, 2018 by Vlad2 min readThe last few weeks have been crazy busy. We spent our weekends working in the kitchen and juggled with shopping and doctor appointments throughout the rest of the week. Autumn came in full force here at Vechea and hit us with a few nights of 1°C temperatures, light rain and winds. That was also our queue for gathering our apples from the orchard. Can’t wait to convert this orchard into a food forest!
We never got around to spraying our trees so most apples were eaten, rotten or fell before they were ripe. Initially, we weren’t sure if we’ll be left with anything to harvest by the end of the Summer. But last Friday, Greti got to work and started gathering them.
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Today’s apple harvest #homestead #countrylife #orchard #garden #harvest #apples #fall
It wasn’t a big harvest by any standards, we managed to gather about three crates of apples in total. The best thing is that although we were working in freezing temperatures, we had a lot of fun while picking ‘them apples’.
Here’s a short video with us gathering apples:
Preserving apples over winter
Now that we had three crates of apples it was time to consider our options for preserving them. We decided to try a few ways to preserve our apples over the winter. This includes making applesauce, which is not so popular here in Romania, so we’re not used to it. Sure enough, making and canning a few jars of applesauce was easy enough.
Greti got it done in no time just by following some YouTube videos. This year we’ll settle for just four jars and based on how quickly we eat that, we’ll adjust for next year. Like I said earlier, our kitchen is not done, but now it’s at least functional. All our appliances are in place which is awesome since we’re finally able to cook properly. We don’t want to give you any other spoilers with our kitchen renovation progress, so we didn’t record the applesauce canning process.
Another batch of apples is going to end up as apple pie filling. Greti plans to clean and cut the apples then coat them in flour, sugar and cinnamon and freeze them in ziplock bags. As for the rest of the apples, we will stew them and can them in jars to eat later in the winter.
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Hello and welcome!
We (Vlad & Greti) are building a home on a homestead in a rural area of Romania in Western Europe and sharing our story as two passionate gardeners who ditched the city for a simpler, better life.
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