Todays big job is to harvest all the remaining apples and pears, then juice them all and make a big batch of cider/perry. Then it will be back onto the tomatoes and passata.

There will be sure to be a lot of weeding needed after all this rain clears and the heat returns.

We haven’t been able to make cider for over a decade now, as there was the terrible drought culminating in the 2019 bush fires that took our pottery, yard, gardens, fences and orchard trees. We replanted a new orchard in 2020 and this is the first year that we have had sufficient fruit on the new young trees to be able to make a batch of cider. 

This morning, I managed to get out there into the orchard and strip the trees of all the remaining fruit and get it indoors before the rain started. I used the wheel barrow as my basket on wheels. a good measure of fruit volume. 

We are due for a whole week of rain – if the forecast can be believed. It usually rains less here than is forecast on most occasions, but it will still be a wet week by all accounts.

So today was excellent for inside jobs like washing and juicing apples and fermenting cider. It took us all day to process all the apples and juice them, then get the fermentation started.

We have a really big, heavy duty, industrial grade, juice extractor. The sort of machine that you need if you are going to be juicing apples for 8 hours straight. Before we bought this one many years ago, we burnt out 3 small domestic sized ones. 

While extracting the juice, we filled 30 litres of pulp into buckets for the worm farm and compost. The juice is now in the fermentor. We can leave it for a week at least now while we get on with other jobs around the garden and pottery.

We managed to slip in a small bisque firing in the solar fired electric kiln while we were making cider. That’s one very nice thing about electric kilns, they fire automatically on a pre-programmed schedule. This allows us to get on with other jobs, like making cider, recycling clay slip/slop/slurry, pugging recycled clay, doing a bit of kintsugi? Possibly even start throwing those new ‘test’ clay bodies that I have had ageing since November? 

And of course there is always weeding.