 Apple. Apple. Apple. Yeah, apple. So it's February and we are still moving along with food we're getting here. Got stitching together the last three videos. Where are you going? Stitching together the last three videos. Apple Harvest and then making applesauce and dehydrated apples as well as making apple juice and apple cider. So we're gonna stitch all those three videos together here. Slip a snack. Come here. Come. Have a nice snack. Apple. We're still doing well with all of our apple stores here. We've got applesauce that's still doing well. We've got a lot of apple rings. Yeah, yeah. Got a lot of apple rings. It's one of the favorite snacks. You have to hide these from him or he just stands there asking for apples all day. And we even have fresh apples still stored in the basement. These are forest winters and they don't look that great on the outside with all these spots but they're actually perfectly fine inside. We have some that we have to make into pies and other things but some that still perfectly good. So in February I picked these four or five months ago. So real happy with their storage. Anyway, enjoy the videos this week. Next week I have one big video about butcher and chickens. We raise chickens and we only eat meat that we've raised in butcher ourselves. So next week's videos will be on that. And I'm really excited to tell you about our new project that we have coming out, low-tech R&D which is where we're going to test some non-industrial and pre-industrial technologies against industrial technologies and also in their own right just to kind of come up with ideas and strategies that we can use as fossil fuels become less abundant, ways that we can be more self-sufficient in a scientifically oriented way, right? So we can run these trials and figure out the pros and cons of different things. So you don't have to. So make sure you subscribe to our channel to make sure you're hearing about the low-tech R&D as that comes about. One other thing that's really neat that's kind of happened since the loss of fossil fuels is people are revitalizing previously important parts of the landscape that are now important again. So this behind me is about a hundred apple trees. This is an abandoned apple orchard. It hasn't been used really for production in years. As you can see, weeds have grown up. These trees, great vines that are choking them out. Really, this is what used to be a vitally important part of the farmstead and this is on one of the older farms in the area. But it's fallen out of favor. Why would you pick all your own apples when they're so cheap at the grocery store? Well, they're not anymore. So now we're coming back to using these things. And because this has been abandoned, they haven't been sprayed, they haven't used any petrochemicals on them in a long time. So I'm really excited to have access to this space. But it's gonna take a little TLC to get it usable again. So that's what I'm starting to do now. May very well be dead. But if I give them some breathing room by killing the grapevines, who knows, maybe something will sprout next year. Fingers crossed. All right, well, I'm a little pooped from sithing down all this grass, cleaning up from under these trees to give them a fighting chance for next year. Once these grapevines die, I've cut them off. I'll be pulling them all down, probably next spring when I prune. These all need to be pruned and brought down to their old form. So there's a lot of work here in the spring. But for now, some of them are ripe. I'm gonna be picking apples and these are gonna be made into apples. So a few weeks ago, I picked about three bushels of apples to store for the winter. And these are spartan apples, which were designed to be stored for the winter, as well as winter forest apples, or forest winter, I can never remember, which are supposed to store quite a long time. And so what I'm doing now is I'm taking them out of the baskets that I brought them in, and putting them into bags in smaller containers. And I'm gonna have half-bushel baskets here shortly once I make them. But for right now, I'm taking them in plastic bags because there's a reason that you buy apples in plastic bags in the grocery store. It helps keep the moisture in. If I weren't to do this, these would become wrinkled and they'd be okay to eat, but they'd be better to eat in pies or something like that. But if I put them in this plastic with not tied to tight at the top so that they can breathe a little bit, they'll increase the humidity within their bags. They should be stored at 80 to 90% humidity anyway. And this will help keep the humidity up. And then I'll put them in the coldest part of the basement that isn't where the potatoes are. I have two cold spots in my basement. One over here where the well is, and then one over there where the stairs coming into the basement are. And I have the potatoes and one up with the apples and another. And the reason is apples let off ethylene gas. The ethylene gas is used to ripen fruit. Basically, the apple trees let off ethylene gas to say, hey, everybody, ripen right now. So they ripen together. Tomatoes do it, bananas do it. It's that ripe fruit smell that you have. That's ethylene gas. And so by keeping the potatoes and the apples apart, the apples won't cause the potatoes to sprout. Because otherwise, they like the same conditions. Apples and potatoes both like to be stored just above freezing to 30, 35 degrees or so. And then they like to be humid 90 plus percent, which is a difficult combination. And that's why I'm having to put these in plastic bag is to keep that humidity up. It also gives me a chance to go through and find some of spots. So I found these as I've been going here. I should go through these every month at a minimum, every two weeks, that would be ideal. Just to find apples with spots because one bad apple can spoil a bunch, as they say. We'll see how long these keep. I've seen instances online where these spartan apples last into the spring. I don't know if I'll be that lucky. Now I have three bags, I'll just lightly close the top. I don't want them to breathe, but not that much. And now this goes into cold storage. Well, that's how we harvested our apple. Now let's have a look at what we do with all those apples we harvested. Even Sally, who loved everything about Linus, had something to say about his blanket. It's time to process apples into applesauce. This is one of the first things we're doing with apples. I like to have a mix of apples, so I've got some yellow, I've got some red, some tart, some sweet. And so what I'm gonna do now is move them through from picked state into applesauce. And the way I do that is I weigh out. I'm gonna weigh out about 23, 24 pounds. And I'm gonna quarter them. I'm not gonna peel them or core them. I'm just gonna toss them right in the pot with a little water. Then I'm gonna cook them down. And as they cook down, they break down. And once they're broken down, then I'm gonna run them through a food mill. And the food mill just takes out the cores and the peels, spits them out. I feed all that to the chickens, they love it. And then all the applesauce gets put back in the pot. I might add a little honey. We'll see how sweet it is if it's palatable alone. I won't add any honey. And then I'll put it into seven quart jars. Okay, now comes the real test. Come here. Our local taste tester will give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Let's see. What's the verdict? More? More? Okay. It's good. Hoop. More? Yeah, okay, good. Okay, this is the last one. One more, are you done? Okay, kind man, nope, no more, that's it. Thank you, thank you for your services. And then a little teaspoon of lemon on top. And then we can them and it's good to go. It's real easy, real quick. We'll get to save a lot of these apples for the winter. It's hot out. It's about 90 degrees out. In here, at the top it's only 100, but down here it's gotta be 130, 140 degrees. So what's happening is the black mesh in there heats up and pushes air upwards as it heats, right, through convection. So it pulls colder air in there underneath, heats it up and then it gets to the top and it runs all the way up into this box. And then it runs through all these racks holding about a, well it was a pound of apples each. Most of that's water weight, probably three quarters of it. So what I'm doing now is I'm just going through and having a check. I find a thicker piece, still got a bit of juice in it. So I'm gonna let it go a little longer. I just rotate through every hour or so. Make sure I rotate these screens, check on them, maybe turn them over. Not really necessary for apples. They dry pretty uniformly. Whether or not I turn them over tomatoes, it's more important. And this is probably how I put up half of our apples, maybe not half, but quite a lot of them. Not half counting cider. So later in the afternoon, the sun has gone behind the trees so we're not gonna get any more power out of this. Almost done. I'm gonna have to pop them out again tomorrow but they're pretty close. Maybe another hour would have done it, but we ran out of time. I have 10 pounds of apples in here. It does five in a day for sure yesterday but just couldn't do 10. That was too much for the sun we had today. They're pretty good. I should mention, you shouldn't eat too many apples, dehydrated apples on an empty stomach and without a lot of water. Last year I was actually hospitalized because I ate about a quart of dried apples which is about, I don't know, four or five pounds of raw apples. So they rehydrated in my stomach and blocked up my intestinal tract and I had to be hospitalized. So don't eat too many of them on an empty stomach when you're dehydrated, which is exactly what I did was exactly wrong. Make sure you only treat them as a snack and make sure you're drinking a lot of water. So there's that. I still love these. Linus would not give up his blanket but somebody had other plans. Snoopy. Snoopy. Screen Linus. And now for my favorite part, making cider. Linus chased Snoopy everywhere but Snoopy made a daring escape. It's time to make apple cider. So I am running apples through my grinder which is a oak drum with little teeth on it that run apples through a smaller and smaller gap and I have to push them through because this isn't perfectly designed. This is something I'm gonna be rebuilding next year but for this year it's functioning so I'm not gonna stop it. This is run, it could be run by bicycle but it's actually being run by electric motor right now just for easing quickness of getting it done. And so I'm putting through about a bushel of apples at a time, a little under a bushel of apples to fill up a five gallon bucket of pumice. Pumice is ground apples. And then I'm gonna take that inside. What I have to do is get this five gallons of pumice or shredded apple into this empty bottom, it's kind of like a bucket but it's got open sides. So at the bottom I've got this piece of wood with cutout so any trapped sap on the top side of this can drain out so that's kind of like a drainage board and different pieces of fabric that kind of hold all the pumice in from squishing out of the slats. Each separated by a couple of different pieces of wood to help distribute the pressure a little better. If you didn't have those, just the top would get pressed and the bottom would still say pretty soggy. This allows the pressure to be distributed better. And that will all run out into a collection bucket and then I will pasteurize it and make apple juice and I will also kick in some yeast to a large carboy to make some hard cider for later. So here we go. A friend of mine in Madison who had built this in the 19, was it 30 years ago in a shop class and just never used it. So I mounted it to this and put a handle on it and now through the wonder of physics, et cetera, et cetera, I can exert quite a lot of pressure down on here. Gallon out now, I'd expect another gallon and a half if not two gallons out of this five gallon of pumice. So about half of this volume is liquid. I get my two and a half gallons. So I got a gallon here, a gallon here and a half gallon here and I put them in pots with water. And then this water will be brought up to 75 degrees Celsius, about 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the internal temperature of this liquid reaches 170 or 75, I start a timer for 20 minutes. It pasteurizes for that time. At the end of the 20 minutes I clean the lid, put it back on and they're sealed. And then they sit and cool down and they should be shelf stable for a half year to a year. Today we're continuing the cider making and here I've got my press. I've got a press full of apples, three different cheeses. They're called cheeses when you make a bundle of apples and press them. And then in here I've already pressed one bucket full. I've got about three gallons out of that. And so this is a six gallon carboy. So I'm about to pitch my yeast and this is just an active dry wine yeast. And luckily I had some still on hand but next year I don't know quite what I'm gonna do because I'm not gonna be able to order more yeast, right? So I might have to wash and save some of this yeast. Might also try and save some of it as brewer's yeast. We'll see how that goes. But so, there's different ways to pitch this. I'm just pitching it directly and right before I do a press and then all that yeast will get incorporated as everything drips through. I'm also gonna add, I mean, while I've got it, yeast nutrient because cider doesn't have quite everything that yeast needs to be happy. So I add a teaspoon of yeast nutrient per gallon. One, two, three. I have a little helper here for five. And this is food grade urea. And if you know anything about urine, urea comes from urine. So I could, in theory, make my own next year. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. So now I'm going to run the press and get some more juice in here, yeah. And he is worse than a wasp because he's got hand and he can move these things around. So I have to keep him at bay while I press this. Uh-uh. He is very interested in all the apple juice. Yesterday we pressed gallons and gallons of cider or of unfiltered apple juice that I pasteurized and saved in bottles. And now I'm working on the hard cider. And he's still very interested what kid doesn't love gallons and gallons of apple juice. Oh, this is a bunch of chickens. Give our chickens diabetes with all this sugar. Diabetic chickens. So one problem I was talking about is that I don't have access to more yeast. And so if I needed to, I could harvest yeast. And this is washed yeast. And so essentially what I'm able to do is at the bottom of my fermentation tank, a lot of the pectin and the yeast will settle out to the bottom and create what are called leaves. It's sediment, it just sits there. And in the bottom, above it, there will be an active zone of yeast. And so what happens is when I have one of these carboids full and I'm ready to decant it and let it settle out, I can pull off all the top stuff and leave that bottom inch. And then when I draw that bottom inch out, leaving as much sediment behind as I can, then I can pour some distilled water in there, shake it around. In this case, I'm using reverse osmosis water because I don't have distilled water. And then this could be pour, you know, a third of this could have been poured into each of the carboids. And that would have brought active yeast into the new cider to promote fermentation. But because I still have some good purchase yeast, I'm using that. But once I run out, I'll be switching to washed yeast. Yes, yes, you're very chatty. All right, now I'm down in the basement and it's January and I've got a whole bunch of different casks here with my different ciders. So here's a cider from that you just saw being pressed and here's another cider. Over here is grape wine that I made in a previous video. And here are some other ciders. So these are all ciders. They're just kind of sitting here, waiting to be moved into secondary fermentation. So basically they fermented in these containers and now I'm gonna take them out and put just the cider and leave all these leaves or the remaining yeast and leave that out. And then up here, you can see a variety of bottles. We have mead and cider and other things from previous years. So after they've sat for a while, then we'll be putting them into these empty bottles and then they'll just age. Generally my mead has to age for at least nine months. My cider depends on the cider. Some ciders drinkable in six months and some needs a year and a half. So it really depends. But yeah, looking pretty good going into the winter with lots of cider for drinking, which is kind of nice. I thought it was time to do a little bit of an update because it is midwinter now. And this was completely full of jars going into the summer or going into the winter. We're still doing pretty well. We have plenty of pickles. We have quite a bit of honey. We're starting to get down on our maple syrup. Our jams are doing okay and we're about halfway through our tomatoes and it's January. So we're going to do okay going into the spring. Eventually, once we start running out of tomatoes, our soups will be less exciting. But we do have lots of potatoes. So let's go look at those. So over here in the hurricane door that comes down to our basement, we have lots of potatoes in boxes. We are in milk crates. We have one, two, three, four milk crates left of potatoes, not to mention all of our carrots that you saw me putting in sand, kohlrabi turnips. We're doing real well on the root vegetable crops. And that's not to mention that we have lots of squash still remaining. We probably have a dozen or so of these Long Island cheese squash. These are my favorite. They store really long. This will be good well into March, April. And then here in these crates, we've got apples. And I picked this apple in September. And yeah, it's got some spots on it but it's totally edible. Great for pies and all those sorts of things. And then down here we have sweet potatoes and more apples. So we're doing pretty well. Not to mention I have a dozen quarts of apple sauce still. I barely even touched that. So that's, and then grain wise, I see one, we probably have about four bushels of grain left. I originally made nine bushels of grain. So we're, you know, we're a little, about halfway through our grain supply. And that will be replenished in July. So we're doing okay. And finally over here, we have our store bought stuff. This is the things that we can't replenish. We've still got, let's see each of those is three pounds of salt. We've still got 18 pounds of salt. We've got a couple of quarts of olive oil. We've got a couple of gallons of cooking oil. Olives, peas, quite a lot of legumes. So like lentils and peas and beans and other kind of snacky things. We do a little bit of store bought pasta, bouillon, peppercorns, you know, we got a little odds and ends. We're doing pretty well coming into February and the spring is generally the hungry time. And so that's when we would start to imagine that we are gonna be having trouble. But really we're sailing through. We will have problems though in terms of cooking oil. That's gonna be our Achilles' Heal. We don't have a way to make cooking oil. We don't have animals to make dairy to make butter or other types of oil or fat. So really oil is going to be our Achilles' Heal. Another thing that we're missing is onions. We ran out of onions. My onions just didn't grow enough. I didn't grow enough of them. So we've been having to cut up Kohlrabi and cook that with onion powder before we do a soup instead of onions and that works okay. Gives us some onion flavor but it's not the same. So I'm looking forward to having onions and it's one of the first things I've started in the garden already at the end of January. I already have onions growing. Luckily for Lidah, someone would always want to just blanket the end. And we are approaching the end of Food McGuiden. Once we get the rest of our videos out we're going to be summarizing a lot of what we found out. The calories we created, the calories we burned, the work we put into this and our assessment of how we would actually fare for you, yeah, without fossil fuels. Stay tuned for that but we will have a few more videos coming out. So never fear, we have a couple more of Food McGuiden's coming out. But in the meantime, you can watch our low-tech R&D videos which will start coming out shortly as well as some other videos on plaster and our greenhouse and things like that. Next week, like I said, we have a video on chicken butchery and we've got a couple more coming down the pike here. So stay tuned for that. Thanks for watching and take care of yourselves.