autumn harvest

Our garden has been bountiful this season.  Harvest has continued late into the autumn and is just now ending.  We've had plenty of kale, arugula, tomatillos, hot peppers, broccoli and a few slow tomatoes.

Erik made a boatload of hot sauce!

We had our annual applesaucing over a few days in October.  

Apples from our farm up north of Philly - beautiful red cortlands!  

Both girls were sweet helpers - washing apples and helping turn the hand crank on the processor.  

I canned a few dozen quarts, froze some and we are enjoying a lot of it right now.

Erik's made two delicious 2 gallon batches of saurekraut in our new-to-us crock.  We are becoming addicted - so yummy!  Recently Eliza Wren and I had a hankering for a late afternoon snack, so we settled down on the kitchen floor to enjoy some together.  It hit the spot. :)

October Visit #1

We just finished a full 10 days of guests visiting and staying with us.  It's been busy, but oh-so-good!  First to come were Granna and Grandaddy for 4 days.  Lots of fun times together with beautiful autumn weather!

Late-night applesauce making extravaganza!

 Soooo yummy and soooo pink!

 picked our own home-grown pumpkin :)

 evenings around the firepit

a jaunt to the beautiful Morris Arboretum on Granna/Mom's birthday

"Let's run, Granddad!"

 a baby woolly caterpillar :)

 homemade apple pie for Granna/Mom's birthday

 and, a beautiful stroll on Forbidden Drive and duck feeding 

Fun times!  No wonder Mer said, "I want Granna and Granddad to stay at my house for a long, long time!"

Applesauce and the First Day of Autumn

This week I made a special farm run to Ray's (our bi-weekly raw milk and egg pick up place) to get 5 bushels of beautiful red courtland apples.  :)  So today, on the first day of autumn, my friend Rhonda and I made the first batch of the season. 

We made it through 3 bushels of apples and canned all but a tiny bit!  YUMMY!!

A wonderful way to celebrate the beginning of autumn, don't you think? 

Apples to applesauce!

This weekend we made and canned applesauce with dear friends. It was a Saturday afternoon event with two canners boiling away on the stove for 4 hours while we chopped, cooked and pressed the applesauce.

We used cortland apples from our favorite farm a bit north of us - Ray's. His 20 lb bags of organic cortland apples are $9! We went through close to 60 lbs of apples between us, and used nearly all the jars we owned!

Adam and Jenny have an AMAZING new gadget that sped up the process and lightened the work load incredibly!

I love how pink it is!!

The stove worked hard that afternoon too!

Cooling and sealing jars - we were so pleased that all of our jars sealed - hooray!!