Happy October!

I love October. Love, love, loooooove it! Mornings are cool, leaves are changing, nature is at it's finest. This morning we took advantage of the weather and headed out to pick APPLES.

Yummy.

Immediately, thoughts of homemade apple sauce, apple pies, apple cakes and apple butter filled my head. The reality that I've never made any of those things--ever--nor have the desire do so, is just now starting to take effect.

Anyhoo, we arrived at the orchard all bright eyed and bushy tailed. After three cups of strong coffee, who wouldn't be? Then we picked out our buckets, loaded them in the wagons and headed for the rows of trees...

Now if I were a brighter bulb in the box, I would have taken note of the SIZE of the buckets they gave us to use and the fact that we were pulling these ginormous buckets in wagons... but my head was just too full of apple dreams and cool October morning air to notice.

Everyone had a great time picking.....

Aaand eating....

to their heart's content.

We headed back to weigh our apple treasure and, well let's just say that even the Duggar family couldn't polish off in a week the amount of apples we picked in mere minutes. Here's the evidence:

If you look reeeeaal close, you'll notice that scale reads right at 25lbs. The sad thing is.... that was just under HALF of what we picked this morning. So yes, we picked over 50lbs of apples!! And just incase inquiring minds wanna know, that comes up to roughly $70 worth of apples. So I suppose I'll have to get over my resistance to only eating yummy apple creations. sigh...

Anyone got any good recipes??

Have a great weekend.

"Now's the time when children's noses
All become as red as roses
And the colour of their faces
Makes me think of orchard places
Where the juicy apples grow,
And tomatoes in a row."
- Katherine Mansfield, Autumn Song