My Chicago Garden

Our family started a tradition of sorts last year of visiting a U-Pick Apple orchard at least once a year.  This year we visited Royal Oak Farm up on the border of IL and WI.  Holy Cow! That’s an orchard.  They have over 10,000 apple trees of over 24 varieties.  We spent the night up at a water park/hotel nearby and headed over in the morning to get a jump on the crowd.  Good thing we did.  By lunch time the place was packed and a steady flow of cars coming in to find parking.  We picked 1/2 bushel of Cortland apples and 1 peck of Jonagored for a total of $36.  I haven’t done much of the grocery shopping these days but my wife says that’s comparable to the local grocers.  I’m happy with that.  These apples are better, fresher, local so I’m willing to take a couple penny loss if at all.

 The Cortland’s are enormous and a very nice eating apple (I couldn’t help myself) but mainly used for cooking.  And the Jonagored is a horrible apple for eating (again..I couldn’t help myself), but it’s main quality is the sweetness that you combine with the Cortland for cooking.

We plan on doing some pie making and canning in the next few days that I’ll try and post about.

 We also picked up two pumpkins for carving later.