While the summer doesn’t appear to have been that great, it has been quite dry. Nevertheless, we seem to have a good crop of apples in the orchard. It was a bit of a puzzle what to do with them. It’s hard enough picking up the apples from one tree let alone over 100. Mechanised apple pickers cost thousands of pounds. And there’s the transportation and so on. And we need to harvest them as the sheep will be using the field in December and that many apples would not be good for them.
Luckily, we live in the heart of cider country and so Orchard Park Farm are taking our apples to make cider. This is great, they are harvesting, transporting and processing the apples and paying us for them too. All in all a great win for all of us. We are expecting the first harvest to take place in the next day or so and then a second harvest at the end of the month.
The interesting thing is that they wait for the apples to fall naturally (it is common practise to use mechanised tree shakers round here). Apparently, it makes for a better flavour.
We may have to buy a couple of bottles and test that theory.
