 One of the things 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 100 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 are 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 going to 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, some of them will be picking apples and these are going to be made into applesauce. 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 going to have half bushel baskets here shortly once I make them. But for right now I'm putting 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 want to put the apples in another and the reason is apples let off ethylene gas. 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 tomatoes 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 bags is to keep that humidity up. It also gives me a chance to go through and find some of spots but I found found these as I've been going here I should go through these every month at a minimum every two weeks would be ideal just to find apples with spots because one that 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 just lightly close the top I wanted to breathe but not that much and now this goes into cold storage