Today I finally got around to collecting apples for juicing. The apples haven’t been great this year, as I may have already said. We’ve only really had a decent crop on the ones that flowered late, which is mainly cider apples. However, there was a decent harvest of Ashmead’s Kernel (all on the right hand side in the photo) and a sackful of what was still left of all the other eating/juicing apples (quite a mixture — Blenheim Orange, Ellison’s Orange, Tom Putt, Sunset, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Charles Ross, Braeburn and possibly a few others).
I suspect there’s somewhere between 120kg and 150kg in total. If we get fifteen gallons of juice from that lot I’ll be very happy indeed (ten might be nearer the mark), but that will wait until my daughter is around to help.
I also picked crab apples until I got bored 🙂
They’re now in the freezer until we get some time to make crab apple jelly, and anything else I can think of. There are actually loads more crab apples, but harvesting them is so tedious. And they seem to go rotten within about thirty seconds of being removed from the tree (which is why they’re in the freezer now).