150 pounds of apples

Winchester

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And I have plans for every single one of them. We ended up with five 30-pound bags of apples and we packed them full! (It's probably closer to 160 pounds, considering how full the bags are.) We picked three 30-pound bags of Granny Smith apples. Most of them will be turned into apple sauce today, some smooth and some chunky. I'm going to start making sauce while Rick is at church and when he comes back home, he'll help me finish up. We'll be in the kitchen for a while. I want to keep some of the Grannies, too, just to take an apple to work every day for a while. Love my Grannies. 

The other two 30-pound bags are a mix of different varieties of pie apples: some Grannies, Winesap, Rome, Golden Delicious, Jonagolds, Ida Reds (a very old apple), etc. There were more varieties, but I don't remember what all they were. I picked ten of each pie variety and stuck five into each of the two bags. We'll weigh out each bag before we take any apples; that way, we'll know how much total weight we have. (Although I did munch on one Granny when we got home.)

I will make apple dumplings (I found some really nice apples for dumplings) and a couple pies later on this week, probably on Thursday while he's bowling. And Rick definitely wants a pan of apple crisp. I've been dehydrating grapes to make raisins every time our store has grapes on sale, so I have raisins to mix with my syrup to poke down through the holes of the apples. Yum!

The Mutsus were done, so I wasn't able to get any. That happened last year, too. Darn it. The chart said they would be binned, but there weren't any.

It's $20 for a 30-pound bag and you have to be able to actually tie the bag shut. So we get the bag fairly full, tie it shut, then pile more apples into the bag. Lift it up to get any air out, and stuff more apples in. As many as we can. Once the bags are tied, they don't care how many apples are in the bag. It just has to be tied shut. Ours are always just barely tied. If we don't tie the bags, the clerks will. And they can't do as good a job as Rick can, so they take apples out of the bag in order to tie them. Rick just does it....then we just stuff. 

They have bins and bins, each holding a different apple. There's a sign on each bin, naming the variety and then explaining what each type of apple does best in what, whether it's applesauce or pie or cider or what. Which apples are the best just to eat out of hand.

I didn't know it at the time, but there was a man standing there watching me sort through and count my pie apples. He told his wife to watch me and they stood there for quite a while. Finally he came over to me and asked me what I was planning on doing with the apples. I told him about making applesauce for Rick and that the two bags I was working on would go into pies and dumplings for the freezer. He said he figured that's what I was planning....he said that the best pies are made from a variety of apples and that my pies must be really good.  My brother walked over, put his arm around me and said, "She makes great apple pies!" That made me feel good.

I want to make some apple butter this year, too, and will probably do that in the crock pot. And then I'm going to experiment on making apple butter BBQ sauce.  I bought some last year (at that store, in fact) and it was delicious; we tried it on chicken, pork, and ham. But I think I can make the BBQ sauce, too.
 
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jcat

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:clap::clap::clap: You have your work cut out for you! I spent the morning making applesauce, too, but have no idea just what I'm going to do with the rest of the apples. Apple butter sounds good. I don't even know how much we have this year, but the cellar and garage are pretty full. Hubby was out at the orchard yesterday, gathered up 207 kg. (456 lbs.) from under the trees, and sold them to a juice/cider producer.

We've mainly got Brettacher (bicolor and somewhat tart) and Jonagold (a cross between Jonathan and Golden Delicious). This has been a good year for apples, pears, peaches and walnuts. The apples are a bit small, but very plentiful, and the peaches and pears were/are huge. Last year I got teased at school about the size of our pears, so who knows what people will say when they see this year's giants.
 
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denice

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I love apple crisp.  I think I prefer a crisp to a pie for most fruit.
 
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Winchester

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Well, Rick has 24 quarts of applesauce in the freezer. We did 16 quarts of smooth sauce, which we just ran through the food mills. and 8 quarts of chunky (I peeled a lot of apples to get those 8 quarts of chunky, too). I put a bunch of Grannies in the fridge for me to munch on. I had to throw one apple away as it wasn't a good one, but that's not too bad. (Rick put the peelings up on the compost pile in the back of the yard.....we saw deer munching last night up at the pile, so they're happy campers.

Will do the pies and dumplings on Thursday night. I'd like to try to dehydrate some, too, but want to try that when I'm home all day.

We weighed the bags and it came right out to about 150 pounds, give or take a couple ounces in each bag. One was a little over, the next a little under. So it evened out in the end.

Tricia, I didn't realize that you have quite an orchard! That's incredible! We've often wished we would have planted some fruit trees when we first moved here; they'd be producing by now. 
 

jcat

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We bought it 30 years ago to give our dog an extra place to run around (there are strict leash laws in our town). The dog is long gone, and a lot of the trees have been replaced. There are around 30 of them now on about 1/3 acre. I didn't see the point of having more fruit trees back then, because we had several in our yard, but they're gone now, too.
 

MoochNNoodles

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That all sounds so good!  I've been thinking about planting some apple trees on our property; but I'm not sure how long I'll have to wait to get anything from them.  So I guess it's still orchard picking for us for now.  And not to that scale!  
 
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Winchester

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So, 150 pounds of apples equals:

29 quarts of applesauce (finally finished up all the applesauce on Sunday morning)

18 apple dumplings

2  9 x 13-inch pans of apple crisp

1  8-inch square pan of apple crisp

2 double-crust apple pies

2 apple crumb pies

2  9 x 13-inch apple coffee cakes

3 pints of apple butter BBQ sauce

....and roughly 25 apples for munching. I ended up having to discard 5 apples because of spots and such. I never did get around to drying apples. There's always next year. And that's how long it will be before I ever do anything again with apples!
 
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peaches08

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That's a lot! I loved applesauce as a kid. I was raised to eat it with caraway seeds in it. I may need to hit the store later...
 

MoochNNoodles

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Oh my that is just too much apple goodness for one post Pam!!  It's a good thing I was just finishing off a pink lady and half an empire apple with butterscotch caramel dip.  I thought it would make a good alternative to the glass of wine I wanted; but nope...I think I need both.  I'll be doing a few apple pies later this week for our early Thanksgiving dinner!
 

mani

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Trivia:

The Granny Smith Apple was developed, back in 1968, at Eastwood,(now a part of Sydney). They're rather proud of the fact,even though it was a bit of a fluke, and they still have the Eastwood Granny Smith Festival every year.

According to Wikipedia:

Because the Granny Smith is a chance (and rare) mutation, the seeds of the apple when grown tend to produce a tart green apple with a much less appealing taste. To preserve the exact genetic variation cutting and grafting are required. Thus, like the Naval orange and the Cavendish banana, all the Granny Smith apples grown today are cuttings originating from the original Smith tree in Sydney.

I just wanted to tell you that 
 
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Winchester

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Interesting trivia about one of my favorite apples. Thanks! Rick says he thinks we should plant a couple GS apple trees in the back yard. I said that's fine, but til they'd ever bear fruit at this point, I'd probably be too old to go up and pick them!
 
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