After a lovely five days in Carlsbad, CA, we’ve returned home to find two of our apple trees in dire need of harvesting. One, the Chehalis, had super pretty fruit because I bagged it all to prevent pest damage. The other, an old unidentified tree, had mottled skin that just didn’t look too pretty. No matter, all the fruit, thrown together, is going into cider. With 100 lbs of apples, we have just enough to have it pressed into cider at our local cider place, Minea Farms. We have our own cider press, given to us by Derek’s parents, but it needs to be rehabbed. Maybe it will be fixed by next season.
Even though the Chehalis were perfectly beautiful eating apples, we decided to use them in cider because I’ve already made enough applesauce (from the Gravenstein trees) and we have a Honeycrisp and a Winesap that will provide additional eating apples quite shortly.
I’ll let you know how the pressing goes! This will be our first time making cider, some of which will be made into hard apple cider.
Sandy
I really love cider – not only does it taste wonderfully… but it feels like you are taking in a bit of the atmosphere of fall when it is consumed. Envy you your many fruit trees.