75 days ago
I now have four crab apple trees in my new upper orchard, there mainly to ensure the cross pollination of apple trees old and new around the farm. But they also yield their own fruit. Had I harvested a couple of weeks earlier I would have got around 8 lbs as quite a few apples have dropped to the floor and started to rot. Instead I came away with just over six lbs which were cleaned and then with the stalks removed cut in half and left to stew. The water could not get too hot as that would have destroyed the pectin on the skins which is the binding agent. Eventually the apples were soft enough to mush and that mush was left to drain through a muslin cloth overnight.
1523 days ago
I had not expected to be making any crab apple jelly this year. I planted two trees in the new orchard I have created in the top field closest to the house. Their main purpose was in assisting cross polination of the six edible apple trees, all of different varieties which I also planted, along with six plum trees, six pear trees and two fig trees as well as the eight cherry trees that now border the track down to the hovel at the edge of the vegetable patch. I did not expect them to bear fruit this year but, to my surprise, they did. Not the 1 kg of fruit the recipe demanded but about an eighth of that.
