Abundance part II: apples

Last year's apple harvest was a bit modest. We got a good supermarket carrier bag off our Egremont Russet tree in the garden, and did so again this year.

Much of this crop of sweet, marzipan-tasting apples went into apple crumble tray cake, which OH and I ate with our coffees or I took into work to keep my fellow combatants' morale up. They also go very well with after-dinner cheeses. But they didn't keep so well this year so it was good to use them up quickly.







Then my friend M rang me to say she had humungous amounts on her sole tree in her back garden, inherited from the previous owner. "We don't like them," M said, "they're too tart." I had thinned that tree out last year upon which it immediately went into a protracted sulk and produced absolutely nothing that summer. But the pruning must have done some good. So OH and I rocked up on a rainy Saturday mid-October afternoon and picked about a dozen supermarket bags of small, red apples. The single-variety juice that came out of those was indeed on the tart side but it did not actually need any added sugar and the juice was surprisingly clear and fresh-looking. I bottled about 20 litres.

Round about the same time, our other neighbour, she of the single Bramley apple tree, approached us with her windfall, bags and bags of it. "Yeah," I said, "keep'em coming." More appley desserts, crumbles, cakes. For a week you could not walk in the kitchen, there were apples and pears rolling around everywhere.

Our neighbour's Bramleys plus some of our own pears

We had the boys, now 12 and 13, over during Halloween week and as it happened, our next-door neighbour's mum had telegraphed that she had an orchard heaving with apples. They'd already harvested what they needed for the year and if the rest wasn't picked by anyone, the windfall would simply go to the pig farmer down the road.

"So," we said to the boys, who were lounging on the people eater, glued to their smartphones, "are you up for a Sunday morning's worth of apple-picking and an afternoon of juicing?" They surprised us by instantly putting their phones to one side.

The apple-picking was a joyous affair and went on for hours. Our neighbour's mum and her partner properly got into the spirit of things and were shaking away at the trees. There was a competition on to see who would be knocked out most spectacularly in the bombardment of falling apples. I for one went totally apple-greedy -- no sharing THOSE beauties with pigs! If anything, I'm boss pig. My precious. In the end, we ran out of carrier bags and OH had to do a double car run because that's how many apples there were. We reckon we took away about a third of a ton. Together with all the other donations and harvests, we're probably up to half a ton of apples.

The boys were brilliant, running back and forth and carrying dozens of bags of apples to the back of the garden. We set up the press and the shredder and divided up the tasks. The boys would be preparing a pile of apples for shredding and we would do the rest -- pressing (which is potentially dangerous as you need to position the bottlejack so that it won't slip on the wood and barrel into you with the force of 3 misdirected tons) and pasteurising, which if truth be told can get a little boring and samey, what with dozens of bottles and rubber rings needing to be washed, scrubbed, filled with juice and then slowly brought up to temperature

The session can begin.

Wash them first, then cut them open to check for codling moth or rotten areas.

First juice.

The apples from our neighbour's Mum produced a juice that was incredibly cloudy, almost creamy, and very intensely appley.

I had badgered OH to turn off the main road and visit a place that sells drinks in swingtop bottles in large crates. Swingtop bottles are like gold dust at the moment. Everyone and their dog are juicing apples and are making and bottling home-brewed juice and cider. You can get clean bottles for about £2 or so online plus postage (steep because the cargo is heavy) but that's starting to make a litre of home-made eye-wateringly dear. Even allowing for the fact that you can reuse those swingtop bottles, if you end up spending about £5 all-told on cloudy home-pressed apple juice per litre, then you might as well load up on the posh cloudy stuff they sell in the supermarket chains that only costs between £1.60 and £2.50 a litre. Or even buy it off some outfit by a trustafarian who is monetising the apples off his Dad's country estate and who'll still charge £4 a litre, but you won't have the bother of making it.

So I tried it on with the off-the-road drinks guy, who agreed to sell me 5 crates of 20 not-yet-cleaned half-litre bottles for £1 a bottle. 100 bottles, 50 litres, that's still £2 a litre just for this year on bottling alone, not counting the invisible cost of electricity to run the shredder or several bathtubs full of hot water and washing powder and the time it takes to scrape a year's worth of beer mould from the bottom. (If I ever end up doing this commercially, the first thing I'd invest in would be an automatic bottle cleaner.) So this year, we're not really saving money on our juice venture. But next year, we will. And there is something very satisfying of knowing that we will be self-sufficient in apple juice and cider for an entire year. OH has filled two giant buckets with apple juice and they're now happily bubbling away in the shed.