A Week in Our Life at Heart's Ease Cottage, Part One

My intention in writing this post was to give a kind of "Week in the Life" glimpse of what goes on here at Heart's Ease Cottage during a normal week. But as I was writing I realized it was going to be too long, so I have broken it up into a few posts and I will post them individually.

We are long time preppers, so much of our focus has shifted from what we need to be prepared, to what we need to do in order to be self-sufficient. For us, being prepared is a lifestyle. Much of our "prepping" life revolves around the seasons. We have a year round garden, so in every season there is something being harvested and preserved, or just eaten outright. Right now the summer garden is winding down. We still have tomatoes, and some chard, kale, artichokes, pumpkins and lots of herbs, but everything else has kind of petered out. I will begin to clear the summer beds and lay down a layer of compost this coming week. I will put in the fall garden once we are back from Prepper Camp next weekend. It is a little later than I normally like to get things in, but I was late getting the summer garden in so that puts me behind for fall too. No worries though, we still have lots of time. I usually have an early fall garden and then a late fall garden, so I will blend to two and be caught up when it is time to put in the early winter garden.

This is apple time of year, so Monday we drove up to Hendersonville and picked up 5 bushels of apples. The Honey Crisp apples are in season right now and they are one of our favorite apples to eat fresh, so we got 2 bushels for us to eat, plus a bushel to give away to friends and family and one for someone who needed them but couldn't go themselves. We also bought a bushel of Golden Supreme "seconds", (small, mishapen or slightly bruised apples sold cheap), to make dehydrated apple rings. The Golden Supreme apples make the best dried apples as far as I am concerned. They are sweet with a little tang and hold very well as dried fruit. Then with 5 bushels of apples piled in the car we made our way back down the mountain for home. With all those apples in the trunk and back seat it was a fragrant ride home!
Ah! The aromas of fall...

Tuesday we washed dried and refrigerated as many apples as our two fridges would hold, (about a bushel), and then stored the bulk of the apples in our climate controlled 3 month pantry. Sometime this week I will individually wrap them in newspaper to slow the ripening process and turn the temp in the pantry down a little. They will hold until mid October, if they last that long... we eat a lot of apples. In late September we will make another trip to Hendersonville to pick up our fall and winter supply of Pink Lady apples, they hold better than Honey Crisp, and the weather will be cooler so they will last us fresh through January.

We started to process the Golden Supreme seconds that we got for drying. We have an Excaliber 9 tray dehydrator, it is in constant use year round. It was a little expensive but worth every penny to us!

So Da ran the apple gizmo, pared, cored and peeled the apples it would take to fill the dehydrator, (25 average sized apples).

Here is a look at what the apple gizmo does, it peels off the skin, cores and slices all at once. Beats the bageezes out of peeling coring and slicing by hand!

Then I soaked them in a citric acid solution, (1 Tblsp. citric acid to 1 gallon tap water), for a minute.

I cut through one side of the apple, which seperates the whole apple into rings, and placed them on the dryer trays.

When the dehydrator was full, I set the temp. for 115 degrees, (at this setting the temps. are low enough to maintain all the enzymes and the food is still considered raw), and set the timer for 12 hours.

The next morning I had a nicely dried, sweet and chewy apples rings to seal up with our food saver and store for later. We use most of these for eating as snacks, for backpacking and to fill in after the fresh apples are gone in late January. These dried apples when stored in a dry, dark, cool place, will last several years. They may darken some with age but it doesn't affect the nutritive value or the taste.

Tomorrow, is day two of a week in our life at Heart's Ease Cottage. I will post about making pumpkin leather in the dehydrator. Please feel free to stop by for a visit!