autumn

Well, this week the husband and I decided to get some canning done for winter months. What with wedding craziness and me just getting settled into my new town, we missed most summer crops, but we still have apples, pumpkins, etc to work with. His family has lived here off and on over the last 17 years, so they know where to get everything and how to barter for whatever they can't get for free. We made the drive to an old orchard that is about an hour from us today to try for a few buckets of apples, but ended up only getting about 4 gallons worth. It was so sad because the orchard is over 100 years old and hasn't been maintained at all for the last few years. Anyway, the lady that owns it was super nice and told us to get whatever we could out of it :).

On our way home, I noticed a stand of trees on a hillside next to the highway, so we pulled off, found the owner's house, and were once again told to take as much as we wanted. JACKPOT! We filled our big bucket and ended up with around 30 pounds of apples for free.

We also stopped off at the farm stand today and picked up four little pie pumpkins to cook up and freeze...apparently pumpkin is rather fickle and not to be trusted when it comes to canning. This is why I love my mother in law...she was the Colorado state fair "Queen of the Kitchen" when she lived here, and is still the official canning expert that the state ag extension agency refers everyone to. A phone call to her put a quick halt to the pumpkin canning plans that I had.

Back to the apples, we put up 12 quarts of apple butter tonight! There are still a ton of apples left in the bucket, so once we get more jars (keeping the fingers crossed for finding some at the thrift store tomorrow), we'll be cooking up a big batch of applesauce. I'm really excited for next month to get here, because the bigger apples will be ready (hello pie/cobbler/crisp filling!)