Category Archives: Orchard

Memory Lane, 26th November 2022

Posted on April 8, 2024 by james

Oh dear! No more apple peeling for you! After several years of sterling service, the crank on our apple peeler/corer has snapped off. Don’t think there’s much I can do to repair this one. It might be time to invest … Continue reading →

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Memory Lane, 13th November 2022: Juice, juice baby

Posted on April 6, 2024 by james

It’s that time again. Always seems to come around so soon even though it’s mid-November already. The apple press is on its annual outing… Looks very appealing (I tried to make that more like appleing, but it just didn’t work … Continue reading →

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Last of the 2023 apple juice

Posted on March 24, 2024 by james

It’s not done too badly. Pressing was late November, and whilst I did press quite a bit of juice not all of it was frozen for drinking straight. But today I opened the very last bottled. No more until the … Continue reading →

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Memory Lane, 11th October 2022: Pears going bananas

Posted on March 20, 2024 by james

To prevent losses to the chickens (there have already been a few), today I picked all the remaining pears from the tree in their run (Concorde is the variety as far as I recall). Now I just have to work … Continue reading →

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Pressing apple juice, 2021

Posted on December 5, 2021 by james

It seems far longer than three weeks ago that I collected all of the apples from our orchard that could be used for juice, but today I finally managed to get organised to press them. I collected six 20kg feed … Continue reading →

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Apple and pear slices again

Posted on November 11, 2021 by james

When the apples and pears were done in the dehydrator I took a few slices for a test drive. The Ashmead’s Kernel tasted pretty much how you’d expect, I guess. The Bramley was clearly apple, but with an obvious sharpness … Continue reading →

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Apple and pear slices

Posted on November 11, 2021 by james

I liberated about a dozen of the Ashmead’s Kernel this evening, broke out the peeler/corer/slicer machine and filled five dehydrator trays with apple slices. Then I started looking at the large numbers of pears sitting in the kitchen waiting for … Continue reading →

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And now the pasteurising is also done

Posted on November 12, 2020 by james

Pasteurising 140+ bottles twenty at a time certainly takes a while. But happily it is now all done and I just need to find somewhere to store all those bottles for the next six months or so whilst we drink … Continue reading →

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Finally finished bottling…

Posted on November 10, 2020 by james

After six or seven hours over the last three days I’ve finally filled the last bottle with apple juice. One hundred and forty five 75cl bottles, to be precise, so almost 109 litres or a shade under 24 UK gallons. … Continue reading →

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Once again it’s apple-pressing day

Posted on November 8, 2020 by james

I posted a month back that we’d collected apples for pressing, but until today we’d not actually got around to doing the hard work. I estimated that we had 250kg to 300kg of apples ready to be pressed and today … Continue reading →

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