Apple Picking

Living in the South can make growing apples quite the ordeal. Apples just don't like the high heat and humidity. Despite this, we do have several apple trees on our property, but they rarely produce enough to do anything other than eat a few. We are blessed with a neighbor who has 'horse apples' that he lets us pick, but they don't produce yearly. And those horse apples are way too tart for applesauce ~ we make diced apples for baking with those apples. 

So, then we have a distant relative who lets us pick her apples, which are suitable for making applesauce. Unfortunately, they don't produce yearly either and you never know until you get there if it's going to be a producing year. Most years my father-in-law takes the children to go pick apples, but since he had his knee replaced recently he wasn't able to take them this year. 

Since my father-in-law couldn't take the children to pick apples, we decided to make it a family event. We all loaded up this past Saturday to go pick apples ~ even our oldest son. Little did we know it was going to be a major adventure with a hilarious story that we will tell for years to come!

My husband and I had never been to this distant relatives house, and all we had to go by was the crazy directions written by my father-in-law. Somehow we didn't even get an address, not that we could have used a GPS phone app since there was zero cellphone service where we were traveling. I wish I had taken a picture of the directions, because y'al,l they were absolutely hilarious! They went a little something like this:

Go past Able gas station 

go thru two 4-ways (there wasn't the first 4-way during our drive!!)

make right at crossroads (what constitutes as a crossroad???)

Look for a large mailbox on right

If you get to the church turn around and look for large mailbox on the left

I'm NOT EVEN KIDDING!!! 

No road names, no mile markers, nothing! The only definitive direction was the Able gas station. We ended up making two major wrong turns which led to a supposedly 20 minute drive turning into over an hour long adventure. But, we did finally get there ~ YEAH!!

Once we finally arrived and unloaded a giant dog was running wild and wanted to 'play' with our younger crew. Much to my littles disappointment they had to hang out in the back of big brothers truck until we could get the dog put into his pen. (which took a good while)

Despite the wild ride to get to our apple picking destination ~ this was not a year for apples in the Deep South. We ended up with barely 10 gallons of applesauce making apples. Regardless, we still had fun, and now we know how to get there, so the next time we go to pick apples we'll know exactly where we're going, lol. I think we'll still try to make a small batch of applesauce because my little people love to make it, and fresh applesauce is so yummy!

There aren't too many apple orchards in Alabama and the few that are located in our grand state do not allow for folks to go pick the apples themselves. Which to me defeats the whole purpose of visiting an apple orchard. So those of y'all that have the luxury of visiting and picking apples at a local apple orchard ~ don't take it for granted; not all of us have that wonderful privilege. {{sigh}}

We have visited the amazing Apple Festival in Ellijay, Georgia which is about three hours away. It was well worth the drive, but it still isn't a place to 'pick apples'.  Even still, it is a fun place to visit and find all sorts of farm fresh apples, baked apple treats, as well as a plethora of other fair goodies! We're hoping to visit the apple festival again this year, Lord willing.

Thankfully our food budget doesn't depend upon us finding free apples to can, but it is so nice the years that we are able to put up fresh apples. My family loves fresh canned applesauce and fresh canned tart apples. Hopefully next year we'll be able to get some apples to can. Until then I will continue to ration the few jars of applesauce that we have leftover from last year. 😊

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer