Finally the time came to harvest our apples. We hat just finished our last apple juice from for 2 years, so it came just right. Unfortunately the birds ate most of my elderberries, so there are too little left to squeeze for the juice.
We did manage to harvest a crate of elderberries which where combined with apples to reach the volume needed to squeeze for the juice and this juice tastes amazing. It has a nice colour to.
We have so many apples this year that we divided the harvest over 3 times of picking, bringing away and picking up our juice, but finally we have finished this year’s harvest of apples. We have 231 litres of apple juice, which is a lot and will last us longer than the 2 years we need to store for. (These 3 older trees on our property only have a useful amount of apples every 2 years. The other year there are hardly any apples on these trees)
The apple elderberry juice we have 39 litres and I am very happy for that, since it is very good for your health. Next year we have to try to harvest the elderberries before the birds eat all of them.
The juice we get in these 3 Litre bags with a little tap for which we have a box to put them in. I usually do not like to put food or drinks in plastic, but the advantage of these bags is that the juice, after opening a bag, does not turn bad. While using the bag falls together and no air gets in. This way the juice lasts a very long time without fermenting. The apple juice has a bit lighter colour as it did last year and the apple elderberry juice has a very beautiful colour.
The heat has been unbearable for days. We can hardly keep up with the watering we need to do. Lightning struck at our Tiny House.
Many people write about the heat and the lack of rain and how terrible it is, but sometimes also has its benefits. We are lucky to be in a place where we have no restrictions on watering the garden, but the watering takes to much time, so I do keep the watering to a minimum. The soil in our new raised beds is not ideal yet and we have planted many fruit trees we do not want to loose. I hope once the fruit trees have settled in and grown and give shade on the raised beds and the soil improves in time the watering will not be necessary so much. Other than that we also have the hundreds of trees we planted in the fall. These obviously have not settled in enough yet, so we also have to water these once a week. Despite the watering many trees are struggling because of the heat and extreme burning of the sun. Even some older fruit trees let there leaves hang, like this Cherry.
The leaves on the buckeye show some browning, heat damage.
The leaves of the hazelnut also are beginning to turn yellow, but to its feet the blackberry is looking shining and freshly green.
Many Chest nuts we planted last fall have lost there leaves. Some chest nuts looked as if they had already died this spring, but became new growth out of the roots. That still is green and looking good. The big difference on how plants are doing in a relatively small area is amazing.
The grass is brown, partially the lettuce is burned and the red beets are struggling.
On the other side there are also many flowers to be found.
On a small, ratter sandy, patch we sowed some flowers a little late in the season. We rarely watered this patch, but beside weeds some flowers did germinate. What I find interesting is that the sunflowers just stayed very small and have beautiful small flowers at the moment. I wonder if next year the sunflowers from these seeds will also stay small and if those sunflowers will thrive despite drought.
After days of intense heat we finally got a big thunder storm. We had 28 Liter/square meter of water and more to come in the coming days, so that is nice.
What was not so nice is that the lightning struck our Tiny House and turned off our power. We had damage in our fuse box and our washing machine and the air-conditioning in our caravan broke due to that. Loosing the air-conditioning is very unpleasant since the caravan still heats up terrible during the day. But that is just the way life is. As long as no one comes to harm that is fine and we just enjoy the rain and a little relief from the extreme heat.
The elderflowers got rained up on last spring, so I did not harvest any of them. By the looks of it we will have a splendid elderberry harvest (that is when the bird leave some for us). We will have these squeezed for there juice. I love to have elderberry juice for health reasons. Especially in winter.
Last year we did not have any apples, but now we will have so, so many apples. I am already looking forward to the new juice we will get from all of these apples. Currently we are almost out of our apple juice from 2 year ago. These apple trees where already on the property when we bought it. The apples do not taste very well for eating fresh, so we have all of the apples turned into juice. Another 6-7 weeks and it is harvest time.
Beautiful Chaos 