Hectic again, so this is the Monday morning catch-up post from Saturday.

It was a long day on Saturday. We set up early and pressed the Lord Derby for our single variety juice – twelve hours later we locked the gates and went home. So much for my work/life balance.

Between those two events we managed to eat several cobs containing pig products and pressed a lot of apples for the community, plus a couple of lots of pears.

In contrast to previous Saturdays people arrived with boxes, builder’s bags, assorted carrier bags and even a hand cart. Bearing in mind the educational aspects of the day, I was happy to allow everyone a chance to experience the hands-on aspects of the job, though nobody showed any interest in the cleaning up. I must think up a killer sales pitch for next year – the Full Farm Experience to go with the Full English Breakfast.

Everybody seemed to go away happy, despite the incident with tea urn. That occurred when someone brought some 10 litre bags to fill. In order to get through the pasteurising quicker I was using two tea urns plus the pasteuriser (which is just a big urn). Unfortunately I overlooked the possibility for damage to the bag from the absence of a trivet. Or, to put it another way, I welded a bag to the bottom of the urn.

So, a fused urn, a punctured bag, stickiness, apologies…

You get the picture.

Despite that, a local orchard owner has just (Monday morning) asked if I can pasteurise 150 bottles for him.

Today’s learning: Remember to put a tea towel in the bottom of the urn next time.

Today’s tasting notes: The Lord Derby juice is a lot sweeter than I was expecting from a cooking apple, also a bit thicker, more orange and more prone to producing sediment. I’m hoping it’s going to be popular because we have twenty trees and once they grow they are likely to be heavy croppers.

You can’t see it so much in the photo but the Lord Derby juice is a different colour (see small bottles and large bottles on right of picture