The Cider Press Rules

"A man doesn't plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity."

Alexander Smith

Sometimes you luck out and end up in the posterity category.

Our small orchard of 17 fruit trees - thanks to Vic and Phyllis - produced well this year. It looks like the pruning we did in the spring really helped. The orchard consists primarily of apple trees: Jonagold, Winter Banana, Northern Spy, Grimes Golden, Granny Smith, McIntosh, Criterion, Seek-No-Further, and a few others. Now is the time to harvest! We've been sharing our bountiful harvest with our neighbors, both human and otherwise.

First, the deer and coyote. The deer do a good job of cleaning up the fruit from the ground. Keeping the orchard "clean" during the off season will help prevent pests from becoming too big of a problem. (We did put up some pheromone traps in the early summer to try to limit coddling moth damage, but it's hard to tell what difference it made. Thankfully the larvae crawl directly to the core, damaging very little of the flesh, so the apples are still perfectly edible.) We haven't seen the coyote in the orchard, but he leaves plenty of evidence behind.

Between our neighbor Jack and ourselves (and the help of Jack's orchard ladder), we managed to fully pick the orchard this year. Our spare fridge is now stuffed full of apples which we plan to freeze, dry, and sauce. But the most exciting for Corinne is the fresh apple cider. Jack borrowed a cider press from a friend and invited us over for our very first cider pressing!

For those who have never pressed cider before (which before this weekend included us)... it's a two stage process. First, you feed the whole apples¹ into a hopper and crank a grinding wheel; the wheel has little ridges on it which break the apples up into chunks and they fall into a mesh bag inserted into a bottomless bucket. Once the bucket is full, a lid is inserted into the bucket and pressed down by turning a giant screw. The cider is pressed out the bottom of the bucket and runs down an incline into a pan at the bottom. And of course every few minutes you stop to empty the pan (and fill your glass!)

Over the course of a few hours the four of us pressed about 15 gallons or so. We now have a fridge and freezer full! YUM!



- Mike & Corinne

¹ But doesn't this mean there are probably worms in the apples, and thus worm juice in the cider? Yes, yes it does.