Apple harvest day

Shortly after we moved here, I planted a few fruit trees. I remember how far away the the estimated 3-5 years to maturity sounded, but before I knew it, we started getting lots of fruit. Not all the trees I planted made it...some could blame the harsh winters, others might be more precise and blame snowplowing incidents. I'm still waiting to see if the pear trees ever bear fruit, but we get lots of apples - this year we got so many that we couldn't pick all of them. ​

Planting my first apple tree about 12 years ago

It now produces more than we can handle

It was a big job picking all of them, and a big day of processing. Here are the steps we followed.
​1. Early harvest: Ray got a little impatient and harvest a first crop sometime in September, and made it into Hard apple cider. It fermented quickly and we've been having it as bubbly, relatively low alcohol cider. 

Bubbly hard apple cider

When the apples were truly ready, we harvested the rest. It works best to do this as a two person job - one person on the ladder and one person on the ground. We are careful not to bruise the apples during this process.  I then sorted the apples into categories and processed them appropriately

From left to right: Red picture-perfect apples, then yellow and red perfect apples (for storage), yellow and red apples with some blemishes (for slicing and canning), mixed irregular apples (for juice), and rejects (for compost). Cat for scale

​Perfect apples (no blemishes, no bruises) were set aside for storage. I wrapped them individually in newspaper. I filled up the two fridge crisper drawers with apples (one drawer of red apples and one of yellow apples). All the overflow (two crates) went into my parents'  basement fridge so that the rest of the family can have as many as they like, and for future processing possibly.

Apples with some blemishes or bruises were peeled and sliced, with the blemishes removed. The resulting apple slices get canned and I'll use them for cooking and baking. For example for fruit crumble or apple pie.

Very small / irregular shaped apples became apple juice. I used the steam juicer for this, and canned the resulting juice. I process it for 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes, since you don't have to sterilize the jars ahead of time if you process for 10 minutes. It's possible to make the leftover pulp into fruit rollups, too, but I didn't take the time.

Steam juicing

Canned apple juice and apple slices

I also couldn't resist making a special category of the five best looking apples, they are really picture-perfect and they are on my desk so I can admire them for a little while before eating them for snacks as I work! I find that having apples (or other fruits) right on my desk makes it less likely that I'll get up and get a less healthy snack from the kitchen when I get hungry and I don't have much time to get up between meetings. 

The picture perfect apples

I have a couple of tools that are really helpful to process apples. I use a handcrank peeler. It speeds up peeling by a factor of two. I like the kind with the suction cup on the bottom (instead of a clamp) - I suction it to a cookie sheet and the cookie sheet catches most of the debris. I also have a slicing gadget that slices the apple into six pieces plus the core. My steam juicer is very helpful for juicing the apples.  Finally I use my steam canner to put everything into shelf stable jars.