Apple Festival 2011

This weekend our town hosted their yearly Apple Festival. I love apple season and I love to get out and support our small town events. I normally like to attend these events with my whole family, however this year, both my teens were busy elsewhere, and my husband was busy driving them about, and chaperoning a school event.

So I spent the day getting out more of my fall decorations, I have a lot, and it takes awhile to put away my year round decor and put out my fall and Halloween decor. The sun came out, and the day was beautiful, so I decided to drive over to the festival by myself.

Now, I drive quite a large van, we call her Penny, short for Penelope, one day I will need to do a blog post just about our Penny. Anyway, she is wonderful for long drives, and great for big grocery trips, but I have quite a time parking her. Usually I am with hubby, so my parallel parking is way out of practice, and nearly all parking for the apple festival was parallel- Yikes! I drove around a few times before I found a spot that I could actually park in, and I was grateful that it was nice and close.

I really enjoyed getting to look through all of the old buildings- the festival takes place at The Dibble House Museum Complex. There are a few really interesting old houses and out buildings, as well as part of the towns old high school. You can read here for more info on The Dibble House, it is one of the few Salt-box style houses in Oregon built around 1854 by Oregon Trail settlers. The house is very well preserved, and is filled with lots of antique furniture and household items. I really enjoyed looking through the rooms, and at all of the antiques.

I loved this fireplace in the Dibble House!

This house is the Von Der Ahe House, which used to be a popular stage coach stop between Oregon City and Molalla- around 1869. The house was moved to the Molalla Museum complex for restoration and preservation. The story of Von Der Ahe is very interesting and can be read at the link above.

My favorite building on the complex is the Von Der Ahe House Summer Kitchen. This building is about the size of a tool shed, and was originally about forty feet from the Main House just in case there was a kitchen fire. I think this would be a wonderful kitchen to cook in during the summer, I love cooking and baking throughout the year, but don't like how it makes the house too hot during the summer- this little kitchen would be perfect!

The Summer Kitchen.

There was an interesting demonstration in making wood shingles.

This is a picture of an old machine that figures the percentage of butterfat in milk- I had never seen anything like it.

There are quilts on display- here's part of a crazy quilt.

The were cider press demonstrations, corn grinding, butter making, and various needle crafts- like bobbin lace making- and of course you can't have an apple festival without Apples.

A local grower had some interesting varieties for sale, so I bought a nice big bag full. I will be making a big batch of apple butter today, and apple bars later in the week, I also hope to make Eve' s Pudding- come back Wednesday for my Apple recipe post!

There was also a wonderful old Apple Tree next to the Dibble House.



The whole inside of this apple tree was hollow, very wonderful old tree, I loved it!

Here was an old school bell I thought looked neat.

Thanks to all of the volunteers who worked to put this event together!

I really enjoyed visiting the apple festival and look forward to attending next year!

And for a quick fall garden update- The Kale and Swiss Chard are coming along nicely, and so is my lettuce planting. The tomatoes and peppers are still hanging on, and hubby picks a tomato for his sandwich every day- I imagine a frost will get them within a week or so, then it will be time to put most of the garden to bed for the winter.

Looking forward to a wonderful October Week!