Cider Makers

Next crop - apples. We have one tree that gives a fantastic crop of green slightly tart apples and this year we have harvested them to process into juice or maybe even cider. That is, we harvested the ones that the geese didn't eat. One of the geese, Nibble, just adores apples and would 'jump' up at the branches to make the apples fall, then they'd all chomp the resultant bounty.

Our neighbour brought 3 massive fruit boxes of their red apples and my Uncle invited us to come and raid as many apples as we liked from his orchard (sadly he's moving to Canada so we won't have that perk next year).

Anyway, here you see the boys with the apple chopper and press below. We have made 12 litres of juice so far and still have 10 fruit boxes to process. Plus more set aside for eating apples. It's time-consuming but fun. It also feels great that we can teach the boys through example how things grow, how to look after and improve your crops, how to harvest and how to process and store food supplies.

This was my first ever taste of freshly pressed apple juice and it is very different from the shop-bought apology. We have frozen lots so hopefully there'll still be some for lucky visitors in the spring.