Tag Archives: apple pressing

Community Apple Pressing and a Tale of Accidental Cider

It was the first Community Apple Pressing Day of the season today (a day important enough to justify capital letters even if I wasn’t a Member of the Society for Unnecessary Capitalisation).

The rain came, though it was meant to stay away and the Community stayed away although it was meant to come. (When I say the Community, I mean the people with apples to press).

Sometimes life is like that. However I did give away some free samples, sold a bottle straight from the press, arranged a community visit and was offered free apples. I’ve also arranged for people to come to the next day (26th September if you’re around).

We were all tooled up to produce a hundred gallons but with the apples we had available we only managed five. Looking on the bright side, if we’d pressed 100 gallons I’d be pasteurising through the night.

Not feeling terribly wordy just now, and my shoulders are aching from the press (another reason I’m glad I didn’t do the 100 gallons!).so I’ll leave the photos to do the talking.

Meanwhile the unpasteurised juice we bottled on Wednesday has already started to ferment and has a nice crisp cider taste to it. Knowing my luck the accidental cider from that batch will probably be the best I manage…

A Feast of Lemons

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If life gives you lemons, they say, you should make lemonade (though I actually spent the afternoon making apple juice in our newly delivered 250ml bottles).

They don’t tell you what to do to the person who actually hands you the fruit, but if you’ve read my posts before and have a reasonably active imagination I’m sure you can work out that I won’t be handing them over on a silver salver.

In short, our growing area has been repossessed by the farmer who has decided that he can make a better job of running it than we can. He waited until we went away for a few days then moved in to “clean up” – a process that included felling most of the cape gooseberries (currently selling at around £10/kilo) and some of the tomatoes.

To be fair, he’s not wrong, it wasn’t a traditionally tidy allotment, but you need weeds for wildlife and foraging and you need nettles for nettle soup. We haven’t had the time to work it properly this year and since becoming enthused by vegetables, the farm has been able to put a lot of labour into tidying their half of the plot, making ours look even worse.

He’s a personable sort, prey to sudden enthusiasms and difficult to fall out with, but when you come back to find useable crops dumped on the compost heap it’s hard not to think bad thoughts..

However, I’m not going to waste time, energy or health worrying about it. We still have our own polytunnel and “vertical veg” just became my main interest.

Second lemon – the Forest Schools have stripped all the blackberry bushes between us and them. There are, as I always tell people, very few rules of foraging. One, in order of importance, is only put it in your mouth if you know what it is. Two, almost as important, is never to strip a plant – leave some for other foragers and for the wild creatures who rely on it for food. It’s a question of manners for us – a question of life or death for the animals.

The third is about never picking below three feet high in a dog walking area.

Next year I’m going to go down early in the picking season and pick what we need. I’m then going to film myself applying copious amounts of personal liquid waste (as Bob Flowerdew calls it) to the brambles. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide my own after my current problem is sorted out. If not I have access to gallons of urine each week from the separator toilets.

After they’ve stripped the bushes I’m going to blog on the subject, provide them with a link to the film clip and sit back smiling.

Making Apple Juice

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We bolted the new scratter and apple press together today for a test run. I lost the first batch of apples to the pigs last week (there’s always competition for apples but I console myself with the thought that what goes to the pigs as food comes back to the garden as compost).

As things turned out it was all for the good, as we were able to pick a couple of buckets of Lord Derby . This, according to the notes, is a heavy-cropping Victorian variety, suitable for juicing and with a sharp taste. That all seems accurate – it definitely has a sharp taste. It didn’t yield as much juice as I would have hoped, though I’d have put it back through the press if we’d had more apples to work with. What it did yield was brown and had a lot of sediment in it.

A scratter, in this context, is a device for pulping apples. In the picture it is the hopper and handles that fit on top of the press. There’s a formidable assortment of toothed wheels in the bottom of the hopper, all set to dismember apples and is driven by the handle on the side. You can get electric ones, but they defeat some of the object of community involvement. Having said that, for large numbers, you can’t beat electric. They have no soul but they are quick!

It should not be confused with the current slang for a person of low social status! I ddin’t even know there were two definitions until I looked for a link. You live and learn!

Working the scratter

We’ve definitely pressed better apples over the years – though we often don’t know what variety they are, even the ones growing on the farm. I think we must have had some of these before because the taste and sediment (and time of year) are the same as the first apples I ever pressed. Unfortunately I can’t recall where they came from; they definitely weren’t from the tree we cropped today as it wasn’t planted at that time.

That’s the problem with old varieties – they fell out of favour for a reason. That reason can be that retailers wanted better keeping qualities and didn’t value flavour, but it can also be that they just weren’t very good.

We’ll have to see with Lord Derby – it isn’t really fair to condemn a cooking apple without cooking it, but on the other hand we come from the county that gave us the Bramley so the chances of me telling you that a superior coking apples exists are practically nil.

It doesn’t really matter in the end anyway because the fun is in the pressing and drinking something that you’ve made, not in producing a clone of the juice you can buy from a shop.

Enjoying the results!

For any of you who are local, we will be holding community apple pressing days on Saturday 12th and 26th September and 10th and 24th October from 10.00 – 3.00, though we can be flexible on that. There will be a charge, but I’m still working it out.

Bottles and the art of Business management

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The damsons are nearly ready and the plums won’t be far behind. Indeed we have had some plums on the anonymous tree that produces yellow plums, though only two. One is still in the tree and one was on the floor been eaten by wasps until I shifted them. The remaining parts were very juicy, though if the best it can do is two plums it will be having an appointment with a wood-burning stove in the next few years. I’m sure that I can encourage it to fruit in the next couple of years as it’s been neglected recently.

I’m doing the pruning this year, and with the old orchard, the new orchard, the agroforestry trees and the odds and ends it’s over 500 trees, so I’m going to have plenty to do.

We need 250 ml drinks bottles because we’re going to try selling more of the apple juice through the cafe this year, and we need 1 lb jam jars for the jam because people haven’t been bringing old jars in fast enough this year. We are still allowed to reuse jars, despite various scare stories in the press, but we just can’t get enough. It won’t be a surprise to anyone in the UK that the situation is so ambiguous, because we’re used to it. After all, if you read the last paragraph you will see I am buying bottles and jars in two different measuring systems.

Now, each seller has their own idea of what numbers to sell in, whether to include lids, what to charge for shipping and what to stock. The jars from one, for instance, were far cheaper than anyone else but they don’t sell 1 lb jars. Their shipping is so high that if you aren’t buying the jars that we ended up buying slightly more costly bottles from a company with lower shipping costs. One of the companies sells in dozens, one in 25s, 50s, and 100s. The calculator on my phone is a bit fiddly in the area of the small button/big finger interface but fortunately I had long division beaten into me as a kid so I was equal to the challenge.

As an aside, did you realise that long division is In “a standard division algorithm suitable for dividing multidigit numbers”.Strange stuff this long division, I’ve been doing it all my life but I hardly recognise it when I have to read the definition!

I suppose this is the definition of management – when you spend more time buying the bottles than making the juice.

142 days until Christmas

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Have we really had 223 days of 2015 already?

Time really does fly as you get older, though whether that’s anything to do with the theories in the article, or just because you spend longer asleep in front of the TV is a moot point. In my case anyway, you may be a lot more active than I am.

I had an email this morning telling me that we have to have news of Christmas out by 3rd September. Not sure why this should be, as most people already know it will be at the end of the year even if they are hazy on the exact date.

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It’s going to be an interesting end to the year. We start apple-pressing in early September with Doga on 19th September, World Porridge Day on 10th October, Apple Day on 24th, Turkey Tasting on 28th November and our Christmas Event (with wreath-making and Dickensian cliches) on 5th December. Add seven shoot days and a couple of events waiting for confirmation and it’s quite busy.

Then there’s Project Molish. It’s something to do with children and tools, so there’s not much to go wrong there is there?

Doga? Yes Doga. You bring your dog, do some yoga, have breakfast and then take the dogs for a walk. We’re at the forefront of novelty Yoga here, or the cutting edge of chaos if you consider the likely result of introducing a random collection of dogs to each other while the owners go “om”.

Apart from that we’ve held a discussion on the existence of Santa and whether Rudolph is a proper member of the reindeer team or a later addition, so it looks like I’m not the only one who is thinking ahead to Christmas.

We’ve also done a butterfly count that saw us able to record two Commas for the first time. We’ve had record numbers of Peacocks this year, far outnumbering the Small Tortoiseshells that were last year’s commonest sighting.

Comma

Overall we’re up on last year in terms of variety, though it’s the moths that have made numbers up. It’s time to start planning new plants for next year’s Butterfly Garden and I’ve been pricing up alder buckthorn. It’s a good plant for Brimstones – a butterfly which we had last year but haven’t seen this year.

I’ve just spent twenty minutes outside looking at the Butterfly Garden. For most of the time the loudest noise I could hear was the buzzing of bumble bees. That’s unusual on a crowded island. It’s also a good argument for planting to attract pollinators. I even managed to spot a Mint Moth. They haven’t been as common this year as they were last, probably due to weather conditions, and it was good to see one, though slightly annoying I wasn’t doing a count at the time. They are very small and difficult to photograph – you could fit two or three on my thumb nail.

Mint MOth

Strange really, I start by asking if it’s too soon to plan for4 Christmas and end up with plans for next summer already.

No wonder time goes quickly!

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Life after the Care Farm