We started picking apples the last week of July.  Since then we’ve been picking and preserving apples every week.  We love apples.  There comes  a point when we love being finished with them too.

Besides the innumerable apples eaten out of hand, this year we managed to dehydrate over 700 pounds of them.  Cores and bad spots get trimmed, so about a quarter of that weight ended up in the pigs’ bellies.  If we had used pristine grocery store apples we wouldn’t need to do so much trimming.  But the price for perfection in apples runs between $2 and $3 per pound, so we don’t mind working with speckled and dented fruit.