Waste Not....Want Not

Today we decided that all the fruit falling to the ground from all those trees was simply unacceptable.
At my mom and dad's house, there are four grape bushes.....two peach trees, a plum tree, and two apple trees. AND one plum-peach hybrid tree. (No joke....they cross-pollinated with eachother to creat these little peaches that are the size of plums. And they're yellow. The fruit is sweet, but there's not much that can be done with them.

With all the fruit falling to the ground, we decided we'd better do some canning. And mom took this opportunity to teach us (Anna and I) how.

The apples we dried. We're also gonna make some apple sauce....however the apples weren't our priority cuz they'll be good till the end of the month.

Now....the GRAPES! We picked two buckets full of grapes, and we juiced them and made grape juice. Which is gonna be SO great because Caleb LOVES juice! It's literally like his favorite thing in the world. He lives and breathes for juice. And now we've got all this free juice that he's just gonna love. The rest of us will like it too, but I'm excited that we don't have to go through so much juice just for Caleb's sake. Now we don't have to buy it at all.

There weren't too many plums left on the tree. Lots of them got eaten by the birds, or they'd already fallen to the ground. But I picked all that was left, and along with eating them fresh (which is so yummy) we're gonna dry them into prunes. I am also gonna experiment with the dryer and see if I can make some fruit-rolls. (or some call it fruit leather). But I haven't quite figured out how to do it yet. I read the recipe, but I need to make sure we've got the right equipment.

So we got to use my mom's super-cool apple peeler/slicer/de-coreer thing. It was TOTALLY GENIUS! And not to mention FAST! I did three apples before I realized I might not have room for all these in the dryer. They fit, but combined with the plums, bananas, and tomatoes that we also are drying it was JUST enough.


So I laid all the fruit out on the trays, and now we just have to wait. Drying fruit can take anywhere from four to ten hours (depending on what you're making). But it's all gonna be yummy! I'm glae we could help save the fruit. I think I'm gonna do some more grape juice tomorrow. We haven't even picked HALF of those grapes.

OH! One thing I DIDN'T get a picture of was the peaches! We also made peach freezer jam! YUMMY! That's really easy too. And it tastes real good.





Here's a picture of us pouring the grape juice into the mason jars. Juicing is by far the easiest thing EVER! And I'm excited to get some concords done tomorrow.

Here's a picture of some prunes! YUMMY!

So the last thing we did today (that I also didn't get a picture of) was the pumpkins! We picked some pumpkins outa the garden and cut them up and boiled them till they were soft so we can make pumpkin pies and cookies when the holidays come. Hopefully preserving all this food will help us be prepared for our unknown future.