It’s Labour Day. Also would have been Mom and Dad’s 52nd anniversary today. I go back to work tomorrow and the kids are starting grades 6 and 9. It’s the start of the long run into winter. I am hoping for a pleasant and long autumn like (mostly) last year, but this summer has ended with rains and chilly weather.
If I had to sum up the last few days of vacation in one word, that word would be
Crabapples.
It started with Tammy getting the kids to pick the lower branches of the tree mid-week: they were bent under the weight of lots of apples. In previous years, I had used the peeler/corer to make the apples usable for baking, but these this year were plentiful but smaller. The peeler would be useless. So that got me searching for other uses, and together, Tammy and I made
- Jelly,
- Freezer jam
- Applesauce (three ways: with orange & spice, apple and cinnamon, and cranberries).
Today, we harvested the rest and there are about 20 gallons of apples waiting for our attention. Not sure what we are going to do with these. Tammy also cleared out the spent cornflowers and when she did so, she discovered that we have three hops vines, not one.
We’d previously mis-identified the vine as a grape, but now we’re wiser. Looks like a bumper crop of yet another fruit that we don’t know what to do with. Going to need to talk to a local U-brew place to get some ideas. Hate to see them just rot like last year’s much smaller crop did.
Maybe you need to start”The Biickert Brewery”