Pickin' & Pressin'

A couple of weeks ago family came into town, which was perfectly timed for some extra hands to pick apples! One of our neighbors has two large apple trees and said we're welcome to pick as many as we'd like. Apparently this was also one of my nieces first experience picking apples! I think she enjoyed eating them more than picking them :o)

The apples blended in so much with all the leaves, but we still found plenty.

YUUM! Our kind of booty out here in the sticks.

It's a black bear in the tree! Nope, just my brother. He was on the "shaking tree" duty. You had to stay clear below or you got pelted with apples but it helped a ton to get the apples up top.

The men brought the muscle. That 30 gallon trashcan was full!

Now that they were all picked and washed, next was to make apple cider. David knows a guy with a masher and presser so one night we loaded the car full of delicious smelling apples and headed out his way.

I forgot to get a picture of the masher, but this thang really stole the show. His press essentially worked by water pressure. We filled the tank with the mashed apples, and in the center of that tank is a "bag" that gets filled with water and presses the juice out the slits all along the tank. There is a gauge to maintain the pressure you want to so after the initial heavy flow of juice where you need to swap out the buckets often, you can walk away and it does all the work. No turning a crank or anything!

It collected at the bottom and we funneled it into 5 gallon buckets. We made 25 gallons of apple cider in probably an hour and a half!

We gave 5 gallons to the neighbors who let us take their apples, we kept 5 and I canned most of it, and we gave 15 to one of David's coworkers who is going to ferment it to make hard apple cider! (The friend with all the equipment got some too, because he says he leaves it on over night and the small drips end up making about another 5 gallons!) The stuff we didn't can we just drank and it was delicious! This definitely was a team effort and we couldn't be more grateful for friends and family who enjoy doing stuff like this as much as we do.