We are on TV!

If anyone watched tonight's Inside the factory : Cider, on BBC 2, the orchards they harvested the cider apples from are either side of our house and grounds, and in one shot you could see our wood.

Interesting to see how Bulmers do it, bears no relation to our craft cider making, though! 

Cider making!

Bumper harvest this year. We picked hundreds and hundreds of pounds of apples.

This is just a selection!

I washed out loads of bottles

and apples ...

and then started to chop

Then we got busy with the scratter

 and the press

End result - 70 l of cider

and some pasteurized juice.

Hard work, but well worth it :)

Mounds of produce from the garden, bottling, preserving - it's that time of year!

September here at Compost Mansions means picking produce, blanching, freezing, dehydrating and preserving by various means.
 
The kitchen is full of steam from blanching and the bench is full of beans, pears, plums, tomatoes and peppers from the garden

 I need these fermentation vessels to make this years cider

So finally I got round to bottling the cider we made last year.

 45 l of the stuff!

The tomatoes from the polytunnel are nearly finished but the pepper plants are still producing loads of peppers - these were washed, cut up and roasted before being frozen.

 

And we have so many beans this year! Runner and French beans - I have never had such a crop in our entire 16 years here.


Compostman is using the fine weather to paint the exterior woodwork all round the house - a huge job which takes up his time.

The last few days

 Have involved a lot of these ...

And a lot of this ...

 More of these - this time cooking  and baking ...

 Lots of these now filled with lovely apple juice and pasteurised, safely stored away to drink over the next year.

Even more apple stuff !

Having scratted and pressed over 100Kg of apples so far this week we now have 25 bottles of pasteurised juice and 30 l of  cider on the go.

so as it was fine today, we went and picked some more apples,


 

 It was glorious outside, sunny and crisp and with just a hint of wind and a fabulous blue sky.

Compostman picking apples

And, just to prove I do actually do, do some of the work around here (!) I graciously allowed myself to be photographed in action..

 We weighed each bucket

 

 and then I graded them into "juice" or "cider" quality.

 This is some of the pommace from the scratting and pressing we did earlier in the week. All added to the compost bins now, to make some beautiful compost next year :)

After a morning of apple picking another 150 Kg now await my attention to be turned into something else.



 I think tomorrow, I will be mostly pressing apples again!

Yet more apple stuff

So today started with yet more apple washing

While Compostman scratted some I had washed earlier

 I bottled up yesterdays juice and pasteurised them, 13 bottles as a time.

 
Here they are, cooling down. I did 26 bottles today, as well as washing, juicing and pressing many, many more apples.

Compostgirl was roped in to help :)

Here is a 30 l fermentation vessel, full of juice-to-be-turned-into-cider-by- magic ( well, or biochemistry!)

Washing up takes a very long time!

Tomorrow we are having a day off apples and will be doing Other Things - we need a rest!

Gosh our house smells of apples!

 Today has been a day of much sloshing water of around, to wash apples.
















 And as you can see a lot of water went on me!

Lots of apples.

 We did our stuff today inside the kitchen annexe as it was too cold ( but lovely and sunny) outside - I have more cleaning up to do because we worked inside but at least I could operate the scratter and press - if outside my hands would have stopped working asap due to Raynaulds
 

 

 
Much juice collected - some to be pasteurised for juice tomorrow ( that will be my mornings work!) , most to be converted into Cider 

BUT I feel guilty  ( Gods above, what IS it with me and guilt?)  as there must be 100's of pounds more of apples on the trees more, not picked - but we have more than we can deal with AND no one wants them - I have offered but we live in Herefordshire apple county so no one wants as they ALL have loads surplus

 

Am now drinking 2011 Cider and about to eat some (much needed) food - then will watch Only Connect on catch up TV , and a bit of patchwork also beckons. And probably more Cider

Love this time of year - gathering in all the good stuff I have grown to feed the family and our friends


More of the same, tomorrow :)

Apple picking - a bumper harvest!

In common with many who have apple trees, we have a bumper harvest of apples this year

We have been picking them over several days, this week. The platform I got from Argos is really helpful!

Compostman does most of the picking  - he goes up the ladder; I pick from the ground. I also grade the apples and pass him the newly emptied buckets to pick into

The air is scented with appley-ness   as we are surrounded by cider and juicing orchards here. All our neighbours are doing the same as us, although they do it on a much larger scale.

Still, we enjoy how we do it here on our small scale and love to drink the fruits ( ha ha ) of our labours -cider for us and juice for Compostgirl and friends ( we drink the juice as well and it is lovely to be able to give a bottle as a gift, but we prefer cider!)

We are still drinking cider we made from the 2011 harvest and very nice it is as well - 6.5% abv, so a tasty alcoholic tipple, and free!

 So far this week we have picked more than 300 lb of assorted apples - with loads more to come. This should make around 40 bottles of pasteurised juice and more than 30 l of cider, if yields are good. I will also be dehydrating a load and we will be cooking and freezing some as well as making chutney and jelly with the windfalls.

We have also done a swap with a friend - a large quantity of his assorted cider apples for a similar quantity of our eaters and cookers  so our cider this year will be a rather more balanced mixture rather than our usual "whatever we have to hand to juice". We only have one cider apple tree so this arrangement is a great one and I hope we can continue it in future years :)

I have ordered some more bottles from Vigo for juice and washed all our saved wine and juice bottles again, ready to sterilise. Compostman has got down the scratter and press from the loft and I have washed them and the garage is FULL of boxes and buckets and tub trugs of apples.

Just need to make some time in the very busy next week, to do some pressing :)

Cider, harvesting and patio news.

 We finally got round to bottling the 2011 cider last night.

Am slightly surprised I could find my Hydrometer straight away ( actually, am astonished!) , but pleasantly surprised by the strength the cider came out at - 6.5%, Tastes good as well :)

And I took 4 Kg of Damsons out of the freezer and set them off on the road to Damson wine ( in the white fermentation bucket)

When they have thawed I will add lots of boiling water to them, leave it to cool, add pectolase then leave them for four days, stirring now and then.

This freed up space to open freeze another 6 kg of Damsons, for use later in the year in another batch of wine or to make Jelly or Cordial. I have no time to make any more at the moment!

I have 80lb of Beth pears to process - will be using the steamer which fits on my pasteuriser to make pear and tayberry juice - and then some of the juice will be turned into pear jelly while the rest will be bottled immediately.

It is a bit of a drawn out process using the steamer/pasteuriser but it has the advantage that the juice comes out pasteurised, and just needs to go into hot bottles.

I will also cold press some of the pears and pasteurise the juice from cold - but that will be a job for the weekend, along with the first of the cider and apple juice making :)

Cheers!

Patio update :)

It's now finished, apart from the pointing, which needs a dry day and dry slabs to do. Which we did not have, yesterday or today.

I have not taken a photo of it as it has been too blooming wet!