This is the month of apples here where our little piece of heaven resides.  We love em’ and purchase them by the bushel.  I have a local apple farm not 2 miles away where I am able to buy “seconds” at $15 per bushel.  Seconds basically means that the apple, though perfectly fine to eat, may be just slightly less than beautiful.  It might not be the biggest baseball sized apple, it may have a slight scuff or other imperfection which renders it unable to be sold for the $10 a ½ peck that the orchard can demand from its perfect cousins. 

I will share a secret with you though, if money is super tight, or if you are not fortunate enough to have an orchard down the road, HERE is a post on how to score some free organic produce.

What I get for my $15 is usually around 40lbs of apples, we eat them fresh, store some in the refrigerator, and as time goes on and they may start to get a little old, we start using them up for things like:

Applesauce

Apple dumplings

Apple Pie Filling

Apple Fritters

Frozen Apples

Dried Apples

You get the picture.  I will say that all of this apple love does require a bit of homesteading know how and a few good tools.  Hence, the Homesteader must haves for October.  I have been blessed that my mother has often shared tools with me that she has owned and is no longer using, or ones that she has found a fantastic deal on and given to me. 

My mom loves to encourage my love of canning, food preparation and homesteading nature.  As time goes on I think sometimes she really enjoys seeing me become excited about some of the things she first loved about the country, even though I was once quoted as saying, “I will NEVER live in the country.”  Yes, I have eaten those words many, many times over now.

So what does a farmgirl need for all these apples?  Lets get started

(Note: I am an amazon affiliate, the pictures do link to Amazon's site and if you decide you NEED one of these products as much as I do, well then I get a small commission from Amazon because you saw it here and clicked through, by the way...thank you.  The small commission helps with the cost of running this blog site).

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ITEM #1- THE APPLE PEELER

My favorite tool, and my children’s, is the apple peeler, corer, slicer gadget.  I LOVE this beauty.  I have had mine for about 10 years now and it still works perfectly.  The kids love it for fresh eating because as it peels, slices and cores, it makes what they call “apple spaghetti.”  Never one to have peeled apples for my little ones, they get to eat the peels this way, and they find it super fun because it is different.  This is also the tool I use for making apple pies and chunky applesauce and it works for potatoes too (think curly fries).

ITEM #2- THE FOOD MILL

​The homesteader must have for perfect applesauce is a food mill.  I have tried a number of them, but this is hands down my favorite one.  I use this for applesauce, tomato sauce, tomato juice, salsa, baby food, and really any other need I have to remove seeds, stems, peels, etc.  This tool allows me to make apple sauce by doing nothing more than washing fresh apples, cutting them in half and tossing them into a large stainless steel pot with some added water.  I cook it for 4-6 hours (seeds, stems, peels and all) then when all of the apple mush is…well mushy, I run it all through the food mill and I am rewarded with perfect applesauce that often does not even need much added sugar and is now ready to be canned.

I do find Amazon's stock photo of their applesauce kind of funny, you can't put fresh, uncooked apples through a food mill like the picture shows, trust me, it doesn't work, you have to cook them till they are mushy first.

ITEM #3- THE DEHYDRATOR

Another super healthy snack that my kiddos love is fruit leather or dehydrated apples.  I have to admit that though these are quite loved around here, they never make it long enough to really savor because I have to be careful to keep my children’s hands out of the dehydrator (they sneak the tasty morsels of apples as they are drying).  I just can’t dehydrate them fast enough!  Not just for apples either, I might add, you can dehydrate any veggie or fruit, we use it for all kinds of other things too.

ITEM #4- THE CANNER'S BIBLE

​Lastly, if you don’t already own a copy of the “canning bible” from Ball, this is a must have.  It was my most referred to treasure for the first several years I began preserving food and not much has changed, with the exception that now my copy is tattered and worn from many years of love and use.

There you have it, 4 MUST HAVES for the homesteader during October, if you don't already own these products, they make life simpler while preserving your food and they will hold up for years to come.  I own all of these and have had each one for over 10 years, I would say I got my money's worth so far!

What do you think, is there one I missed for October?  Leave me a comment

Canning Season is winding to a close, save for the bushel or so of apples I still need to put up before winter.  My shelves are lined, my winter prepared for, but if you are like me and have some empty jars lying around, they should be put to good use.  Mason jars work as EXCELLENT storage receptacles.  Everything from lining your counter with your flour, sugar and oats to packing lunches with a plastic alternative container for condiments and dressings. 

I have learned, through much trial and error, that when not sealed with a pressure canner or hot water bath those lovely 2 piece ring and lids don’t secure tightly enough for the rough and tumble some storage requires (think laying a jar of liquid on its side in your refrigerator only to find homemade syrup spilled all over the shelves).  Enter in Mason jar accessories.  I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the plastic white caps for sealing up everything from salad dressing in a jar to chicken salad in a lunchbox.  I always have plenty of mason jars in all manner of sizes so they are a perfect accoutrement to stored food, even if not long term storage.  I use the mason jars to store rice, beans, and all manner of dry goods as well.  The best part about the lids?  They are SUPER cheap and durable too.

Unfortunately, I found that there are not only mason jar screw top lids but so many other accessories you can purchase to repurpose your mason jars, oh boy.  There are screen type lids for straining, there are wire lids for flower arranging, there are hole top lids for drinking, you name it and someone has thought of it!

I bet our grandmothers would have loved some of these handy gadgets to use.  I also find that when I break the seal on a much love labored jar of my home-canned goods and the entire jar is not used (applesauce for example) using the plastic lids seals the air out better which means longer storage life in the refrigerator.  I write directly on the plastic lid with a black sharpie so that I can have the date handy that the item was opened and subsequently stored in the refrigerator, this is so much easier than dealing with peel and stick labels and the best part?  The sharpie washes off when you are ready and the lids are all dishwasher safe!
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Alrighty, get to storin’ (just don’t forget to get yourself both wide mouth and regular sized lids so that you can use all your jars for storage!)

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​The verb “homesteading” leads us to conjure up images of roosters crowing, the smell of freshly cut hay, jewel toned mason jars lining shelves stocked for winter, fresh juicy fruits dangling from a front yard orchard tree, and of course the quintessential porch adorned with rocking chairs to sit back and enjoy the country life.

Though this may be the ideal that we have in our minds, possibly crafted from one too many country lifestyle periodicals, homesteading can actually look quite different indeed. According to Wikipedia, Homesteading is defined as:

“A lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of foodstuffs, and it may or may not also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale.”

Far too many of us have a desire to homestead. However, lacking the rolling hundred acres that we have ideally tucked into our minds, we observe others and discount our own self-sustaining efforts. Let me suggest that anyone can homestead, or at least begin that journey. If you live on a smallish plot, in a more suburban area, on a few acres or as first generation farmers jumping in head first to the lifestyle of our ancestors, you can be a homesteader.

I actually began this journey about 15 years ago when I planted my first garden, in my first home. The string of years that followed caught me learning the skills of bread making, home canning, sewing, seed saving, dehydrating, and from scratch cooking. I still didn't consider myself a homesteader. We had expanded from a 900 square foot home on a tiny little lot, to a larger home on exactly 0.64 of an acre. I still didn't consider that I was on the road to homesteading; after all, we had no livestock, no rolling acres and no front porch rocker.

Fast forward a few more years and we were able to move out a little ways. Our small farm is just shy of 6 acres. Though I was aching for those rolling pastures, we purchased what was in our budget. That homesteading ideal was still eluding me, I wasn't feeling self-sufficient. Though cooking most everything from scratch by this point, I had shelves of those jewel toned morsels in mason jars waiting for winter. I had learned the art of saving heirloom seeds and growing a garden from seeds instead of nursery plants. I could identify and use a number of easily procured medicinal herbs and weeds. I could make most anything I needed, including laundry soap. I finally got some livestock in the way of chickens and turkeys, but I still felt vastly inadequate when I looked around at what others were doing.

We began harvesting and butchering our own poultry, purchasing our pork from friends, and drinking raw milk whenever we could get our hands on some. We made butter, yogurt, and sauerkraut. We learned more about food sources, cleaned our diets and introduced fermented foods and drinks. I also began blogging to teach others some of the skills I had learned. I still didn't feel like a homesteader, though I desperately wanted to join that ever intangible, seemingly exclusive club.
It was only recently that I realized that it was my ideal, or definition, that was holding me back from recognizing all that we had accomplished in the way of becoming more self sufficient, more sustainable. I was looking at others and comparing what our family did not have mastered and sustained, instead of accepting that we had come a very long way from the days when I fed my children macaroni & cheese with hot dogs for lunch and had no idea how to even cut up a chicken, let alone butcher one.

I stand amazed at the journey we have had to get to our homesteading nirvana. I may not have all that my neighbor homesteading on 30 acres down the road has, but I am learning daily and each season we get just a little closer to being less dependent on others and more dependent on ourselves and God's provisions.

If you are one of the voyeurs just lurking and wishing you could live the homesteading life, get started where you are. Plant some herbs in a window sill instead of buying them, teach yourself a new skill, and research some aspect of homesteading that fascinates you. Learn from another's mistakes and don't compare yourself to someone else, there will always be someone further along the road to total self sufficiency than you are. That someone will have a more well equipped greenhouse, more renewable resources, a larger scale livestock operation, and more country know how than you.

Don't let other homesteaders hamper your curiosity driven desire to get back to your roots, take off learning new skills so that you too can look back and see just how serendipitous your journey has become, and how you too are actually homesteading. You’ll be able to do just that, all while sipping a sweet tea from that quintessential rocking chair on the front porch.