Saturday, October 22, 2011

Visiting the Apple Orchard

The beautiful scenery along the road.


A couple weeks ago, we made a visit to the apple orchard. This wasn't an ordinary, run-of-the-mill orchard though, it was an actual orchard owned by family. My mother-in-law's cousin has this amazingly, beautiful land in Michigan and every year, they invite the entire family for a day of picking.




They have Red Delicious and Golden Delicious apples and they are so sweet and juicy. They taste even better knowing that your efforts are the ones that brought them to your table - or in my case, brown paper bags scattered in the kitchen.


The amazing orchard.



Now, I'm all for nice weather come fall, but we happened to go on one of the hottest days in October. If you ask me, apple picking weather means a sweatshirt and jean with a light chill in the air...not shorts and a t-shirt while you're sweating from the hot sun. I, on the other hand, still wore jeans to protect my legs from the brush. Boy did I regret that! I'm also glad I put jeans on the little guy because some of the grass was almost as tall as him!




We still had fun though and we came home with an insane amount of apples just waiting to be sliced and diced and cooked and eaten and everything else you can possibly do with an apple. My son had such a great time that we're actually planning a trip to the local public orchard tomorrow. He was an excellent apple picker, too. I've never seen a kid so involved and so precise in something that seems like a chore to most people. He was very careful to pick big apples that were blemish free. Now if only he could have remembered to place them in the bag instead of throwing them!




I almost walked face-first right into this little guy. I was amazed at how quickly
he got up his web so I just had to take his picture.


He climbed right in there!


I have many plans for these apples and I'm just waiting for the perfect day to get started. I've already peeled, cored and stuck a bunch in the freezer, but I still have bags to go. I'll probably be canning for the first time with the remainder. A friend lent me her food mill so I'll have to give that a whirl. I'm planning on apple butter (I've already done a test run so check back for that post), apple pie filling and some apple chutney. I can't wait to get started!


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