First Frost

I am amazed at how I view fall and the first frost now that I am the proud owner of a garden. Fall is still my favorite time of year, but I have found that since I have this great garden and lots of tomatoes that I have been waiting for them to ripen, I have been hoping that the first frost not come until October. Well, I'm not so lucky. While I was away in Ashland this weekend with my kids on our grape picking adventure, things froze down here. Fortunately I have a wonderful husband (I already knew this) who pulled all the tomatoes that I had sitting on the railing of our deck into the kitchen before he went to bed last night. Yeah Scott. When I got home to check out the garden this afternoon, it looked pretty sad. I was hoping to prolong my growing season, but no. Clean up will start tomorrow - Yeah for 4 day weekends.

Now on to happier things. Grapes, Juice, Jelly and Apple Sauce!
Friday night when the kids and I got to Greta and Nico's we jumped in and picked all of the grapes that my sister had that the boys hadn't snacked on. We picked a full average size diaper box. With 5 kids between our two families 4 and under, we have a lot of empty diaper boxes. We also picked a bunch of the remaining few apples that we could reach in hopes of adding a little apple juice to our grape juice in the morning. The kids had a blast picking grapes and eating them. I have to admit, I enjoyed eating them also.

On Saturday morning we cleaned, squashed, boiled and squeezed all of the grapes. We started with using cheese cloth but the flesh of the grapes kept squishing out so we used an old white cotton towel that Greta had. It worked much better and is now lovely shades of purple. Unfortunately our hands were also the same lovely shades of purple. In the end we had almost 2 gallons of juice once it had been diluted.

After we all had some fresh juice as a snack and the kids were off to a nap, Greta and I started in with the jelly. Neither of us had ever made jelly (helping Grandmas and Mom doesn't count at this point) before and we had intended to make just freezer jelly, but discovered that the canned version had a lot less sugar in it. We opted for that version to start. After 2 batches of jelly and trying to keep track of 5 children all day, we were pooped. Oh, I didn't forget about the apples we picked... after trying to extract the juice from the apple pieces in many different ways and not having an apple press, we opted for apple sauce. We made 2 pints of plain sauce for the kids and then we make 2 pints of jazzed up sauce for Greta and I. We didn't really go by any recipe, we just added our favorite spiced cider ingredients and away we went. After the Cinnamon sticks, all spice and clove pouch had simmered in the sauce for a bit we blended the sauce in the blender until smooth. It was a smooth, warm divine treat. I now love warm apple sauce. Yum! This morning we did make one batch of grape freezer jelly just to see how that turns out.

This coming weekend we are planning on heading back to Ashland for the Bayfield Apple fest and we're going to make and can some more of our divine apple sauce.

When we got home Lizzy, Elle and I harvested 2 of our 4 foot rows of carrots and got tons. Two full ice cream buckets, I think I have 5 or 6 rows left. It is a nice carrot crop. I blanched and froze this batch and will probably do the same to more of them, but I do want to try and store some in my root cellar over winter. I just need to make a nice wood box and find some nice saw dust. The only problem with having the girls help me with the carrot harvest is that they turn into little bunnies. At least they like eating fresh raw veggies.