Apples & Pecans Great for Holiday Baking, Salads & Gifts

   Our homegrown apples, pecans, and homemade jams made from our homegrown fruit all make great holiday gifts, and many are buying them to give to others as Christmas presents.  Some like to put them together in gift baskets.  Holly Johnson, County Coordinator for Cherokee County Farm Bureau, made a gift basket for the state Farm Bureau annual meeting in Manhattan, KS, using our apples, pecans, and jams, and it looked great.

Holly Johnson made this gift basket for the state Farm Bureau annual meeting. It contains 'GoldRush' apples (yellow), cracked 'Kanza' pecans in one-pound bags, 3 different kinds of Bill's homemade jams (made from our homegrown fruit), & 'Enterprise' apples (red).

   Each Christmas season I make lots of foods using our homegrown apples and pecans, such as Apple Pecan Pancakes, Apple Pecan Bread, Apple Pecan Cake, and Healthy Apple Pecan Salad.  Recipes for all these and more are posted as Notes on the Brendas Berries Facebook page.  Click on "More", then click on "Notes" to access these recipes.

This Healthy Apple Pecan Salad contains 3 'Scarlet Sun' apples (a selection from my apple breeding program), 2 'GoldRush' apples, pecans, craisins, celery, flaked coconut, and cinnamon-vanilla yogurt dressing. As our son says, "It's delicious."

   From Dec. 1 until May 31, we’re open by appointment.  Phone 620-597-2450 a day ahead and leave a message with your name, day and time you’ll come, and what you want to buy.  Then I'll be in the sales building when you come.  If you want to come that same day, call between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., when I'm still in the house where the phone rings, before I go out to the sales building to sort apples.

For the next few weeks, we still have some selections from my apple breeding program for sale, such as these 'Northern Lights'.  I give taste samples.

   Small amounts of harvested apples and Asian pears cost $1.30 per pound + tax.  I pack them in 20-lb. boxes, which I then weigh to exactly 20.0 lbs., so you save $1.00 if you buy a 20-lb. box of apples and/or Asian pears for $25.00 + tax.  We harvest apples and Asian pears into 2 bags per box, so you can get a 10-lb. bag each of 2 different apple varieties, or a 10-lb. bag of Asian pears and a 10-lb. bag of apples, and still get the 20-lb. discount.
   Our harvested 2nds apples, with rain cracks, limb rubs or other surface damage, sell for just $0.93 per pound + tax.  We now have a good supply of harvested 2nds apples for holiday baking, and for those wanting to make apple pie filling, apple butter or other apple products to give as gifts.
   We have harvested, cracked pecans for sale now until we sell out, probably in Jan.  Our high-efficiency pecan cracking machine blows out most of the shell fragments, so our bags of cracked pecans contain over 75% nutmeats and less than 25% shell fragments.  The remaining shell fragments come off very easily, and many customers say they can pick out a 4-pound bag of our pecans in 15 minutes or less.
    We have mixed selections from Bill's pecan breeding program for sale in 4-pound bags.  Each bag has the equivalent of 6 pounds of in-shell pecans, and when you pick them out, you get at least 3 pounds of nutmeats.  These are all large pecans with thin shells and great taste.  Each 4-pound bag costs $16.67 + tax.
   We also now sell smaller, 1-pound bags of cracked 'Kanza' pecans, which many like to give as gifts.  These bags also contain at least 75% kernels, so you get at least 3/4 pound of nutmeats when you pick out the pecans.  Each 1-pound 'Kanza' bag costs $4.63 + tax.