Apples are done

It took me a couple weeks, but we finally got all of the apples that we were planning to preserve taken care of.

We bought 5 bushels of York, Granny Smith, and Ida Red apples from a school fundraiser.  The apples came from a local farm.  Five bushels was a lot more than I originally pictured.  

One bushel

 We couldn't even fit them all on the breakfast table.  We had three on the table and then the bags were on the benches with the other bags we had left over from our previous canning experience the week before.

Peeling by hand wasn't so bad once I set up a system like the week before.  I would peel a large pile into a big platter and then go take care of those apples.

I started with apple pie filling.  I had to order more of the cornstarch-like product that is needed for canning and I was sure to order a lot so that I'd always have some on hand and then I got to work.

The sauce

Blanched apples

A batch of apple pie filling is started.

It wasn't until I had completed a few batches before it dawned on me "when will I ever eat this many pies?!"

I believe we ended up with over 28 jars!

After the apple pie filling I did some jars of apples.

And then decided to do a lot of apple sauce and to dehydrate a few batches of sliced apples.  We don't normally eat apple sauce very often, but now that I've made it, I'm sure we will.  I even made a few flavored batches by using the fruit I had frozen that we picked at farms over the summer.

Blueberry applesauce, strawberry applesauce, peach applesauce, and regular applesauce

Regular applesauce

One batch of dried apples (minus the two bags that the boys already took)

We've clearly run out of space on the shelves in the basement.  It looks like I will be taking on the project of building more sooner than I thought.