My suggestion to anyone who has a piece of land is; plant an apple tree. Today.
Apple trees give us so much, from the beautiful blooms in the spring, shade in the summer and oh, all those apples in the fall. Twenty years ago as fledgling gardeners we put a few apples trees in the ground, never anticipating all the uses we would have for the apples once our trees had matured.
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Our apples trees do not bear fruit every year. In 2012 we have a very early spring and when the apples trees were in full bloom there was a killing frost. All the developing apples froze and we had an "apple free" summer. Some years we get a hail storm which bruises the fruit and rots the apples before they reach maturity. There are no guarantees, but when the conditions are right you get a bumper crop.
The summer of 2013 was one of those bumper crop years and we really revved up the apple processing and for the first time thoroughly utilized our apple crop. We ate the apples fresh off the tree, stored the fruit in our root cellar for winter use, dehydrated apple slices, froze apples slices and pressed apples to make cider. Since a family can only drink so much fresh cider, the rest needs to be preserved into hard cider and vinegar.
All these things take time, but the sheer volume of food products (and nutrition) you can get from one apple tree is pretty astounding. And if you don't use chemicals on your trees all your products will be organic. And if you have priced organic apples, cider and vinegar you can see that the work you put into these products is well worth the effort.
We experimented with hard cider using the juice from three different trees and had three very unique tasting beverages for the effort. The most unusual was the cider from a crab apple tree. This tree was planted for it's beautiful spring blooms, but it also produced small apples that were red inside and out. The fresh cider had a very tart almost cranberry taste and the red hard cider was described by one of our friends as tasting like champagne. Unlike beer, hard cider actually gets better with time. The flavors mellow and become more complex.
I was truly surprised at how much apple cider vinegar our family used this winter. One of my favorite cold remedies is Fire Cider. Onions, garlic, horseradish, ginger and cayenne pepper are infused in raw apple cider vinegar producing a very effective elixir for preventing colds or whatever ails you. Whenever our throats felt sore or we just didn't feel 100%, we would drink a shot glass full of Fire Cider and feel better almost immediately.
Even if you are new to gardening planting an apple tree can be your first step toward a more self reliant life style.
Apple trees give us so much, from the beautiful blooms in the spring, shade in the summer and oh, all those apples in the fall. Twenty years ago as fledgling gardeners we put a few apples trees in the ground, never anticipating all the uses we would have for the apples once our trees had matured.
Click Read More to see the complete post.
Our apples trees do not bear fruit every year. In 2012 we have a very early spring and when the apples trees were in full bloom there was a killing frost. All the developing apples froze and we had an "apple free" summer. Some years we get a hail storm which bruises the fruit and rots the apples before they reach maturity. There are no guarantees, but when the conditions are right you get a bumper crop.
The summer of 2013 was one of those bumper crop years and we really revved up the apple processing and for the first time thoroughly utilized our apple crop. We ate the apples fresh off the tree, stored the fruit in our root cellar for winter use, dehydrated apple slices, froze apples slices and pressed apples to make cider. Since a family can only drink so much fresh cider, the rest needs to be preserved into hard cider and vinegar.
All these things take time, but the sheer volume of food products (and nutrition) you can get from one apple tree is pretty astounding. And if you don't use chemicals on your trees all your products will be organic. And if you have priced organic apples, cider and vinegar you can see that the work you put into these products is well worth the effort.
We experimented with hard cider using the juice from three different trees and had three very unique tasting beverages for the effort. The most unusual was the cider from a crab apple tree. This tree was planted for it's beautiful spring blooms, but it also produced small apples that were red inside and out. The fresh cider had a very tart almost cranberry taste and the red hard cider was described by one of our friends as tasting like champagne. Unlike beer, hard cider actually gets better with time. The flavors mellow and become more complex.
I was truly surprised at how much apple cider vinegar our family used this winter. One of my favorite cold remedies is Fire Cider. Onions, garlic, horseradish, ginger and cayenne pepper are infused in raw apple cider vinegar producing a very effective elixir for preventing colds or whatever ails you. Whenever our throats felt sore or we just didn't feel 100%, we would drink a shot glass full of Fire Cider and feel better almost immediately.
Even if you are new to gardening planting an apple tree can be your first step toward a more self reliant life style.
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