Week 23: Apple Butter, Apple Sauce? What is the difference?

This week we decided to try our hand at making apple butter. What makes apple sauce different then apple butter? No skins or cores for sauce, does not matter for butter. You can add all sorts of things to apple sauce and butter for unique flavors. We just did straight apples but cinnamon, sugar, nutmeg, etc. all work as well. You cut the apples, cook them down, process them, and cook them down some more. It smelled so good. The hot water bath is used to disinfect the cans to make sure that no diseases can fester inside while you keep it sealed. We will have these at our farm stand on Thursdays for a donation of 2 or 3 dollars.

We uprooter our stakes and untied our strings that kept the tomatoes upright at 38th st. Most of these tomato plants are almost done but we will still be able to get some tomatoes until the frost. The tomatoes are producing better at 46th so we are leaving those up for now.

Our two lettuce varieties (Grand Rapids and Butter crunch) have come up this week. The butter crunch is new and a very tasty variety with more round, dark leaves. The broccoli is taller as well but I don't believe we will be getting any this year.

While it has been cold it has also been rainy. This is great for the plants as they have not had rain in awhile but harder for us to get things done. In other news: Buy an Alliance Garden T-shirt they are great and only 5$. Our farm stand is open just two more weeks so please come by! Our chickens are not laying right now because they are molting. When the days get shorter they realize they need to keep up their strength and they stop producing eggs. They are also re growing their tail feathers which they will need. We have been feeding them some extra cheese danishes recently. They love it so much. I love it because they get cheese all over their beaks. (Think child's birthday party). Zach Arington