My parents have an apple tree that is so full of apples that one of the large branches has broken from the weight of the apples! So, what do we do with all these apples? Well, for one thing, chickens LOVE them!!! You don't have to do anything fancy with them, just throw them to the chickens and watch them go at the apples. Every part of the apple is OK for chickens to eat and since we have so many chickens, I plan on filling up the back of my car with apples from their tree! Hey...it's free food for the chickens! Free food sure beats paying $10 - $15 for a bag of feed! Now, I just need to come up with a way to store them so they don't get "bad." We don't have a root cellar, however, it is possible to put them in the ground and store them that way. I will be doing some more research on this and choosing an option that is economically viable for us.
I found a great recipe in a recent "Grit" email by Lisa, author of "Fresh Eggs Daily" Blog, about using the apple scraps to make homemade apple cider vinegar. The recipe consists of apple peels, cores, sugar, water...and time and patience on our part! Feel free to read the article here. With all the extra apples we will have, this is TOTALLY worth trying. Not to mention, it's a SUPURB use for scraps that would otherwise have been thrown on the compost pile.
I'm not one that particularly likes apple pie (how un-American is that?), but if you've got a ton of apples, why not make and can some apple pie filling?! That way, you can have apple pie all year long and know that it's fresh from your own trees! My mother does the same kind of thing with tomatoes...making salsa and seasoned tomato juice by the quart! It's great! In fact, the seasoned tomato juice is far better than any V-8 you can buy in the store! (Love you, mom!)
I found a great recipe in a recent "Grit" email by Lisa, author of "Fresh Eggs Daily" Blog, about using the apple scraps to make homemade apple cider vinegar. The recipe consists of apple peels, cores, sugar, water...and time and patience on our part! Feel free to read the article here. With all the extra apples we will have, this is TOTALLY worth trying. Not to mention, it's a SUPURB use for scraps that would otherwise have been thrown on the compost pile.
I'm not one that particularly likes apple pie (how un-American is that?), but if you've got a ton of apples, why not make and can some apple pie filling?! That way, you can have apple pie all year long and know that it's fresh from your own trees! My mother does the same kind of thing with tomatoes...making salsa and seasoned tomato juice by the quart! It's great! In fact, the seasoned tomato juice is far better than any V-8 you can buy in the store! (Love you, mom!)