And this is how the neighbours harvest apples

This is just one of many apple orchards which surround our house and grounds. The trees are planted in straight lines to allow tractor access between the rows.

At harvest time each tree is shaken vigorously and the apples fall to the ground.

They are then blown sideways by a giant blower. This puts the apples into positon to be gathered up mechanically.

Finally they are gathered up from the ground by a rotating brush and go up a conveyor belt and into a trailer.




A bit different to the way we do it, but then our farming neighbours do have a lot of apple trees!

Apple picking - a bumper harvest!

In common with many who have apple trees, we have a bumper harvest of apples this year

We have been picking them over several days, this week. The platform I got from Argos is really helpful!

Compostman does most of the picking  - he goes up the ladder; I pick from the ground. I also grade the apples and pass him the newly emptied buckets to pick into

The air is scented with appley-ness   as we are surrounded by cider and juicing orchards here. All our neighbours are doing the same as us, although they do it on a much larger scale.

Still, we enjoy how we do it here on our small scale and love to drink the fruits ( ha ha ) of our labours -cider for us and juice for Compostgirl and friends ( we drink the juice as well and it is lovely to be able to give a bottle as a gift, but we prefer cider!)

We are still drinking cider we made from the 2011 harvest and very nice it is as well - 6.5% abv, so a tasty alcoholic tipple, and free!

 So far this week we have picked more than 300 lb of assorted apples - with loads more to come. This should make around 40 bottles of pasteurised juice and more than 30 l of cider, if yields are good. I will also be dehydrating a load and we will be cooking and freezing some as well as making chutney and jelly with the windfalls.

We have also done a swap with a friend - a large quantity of his assorted cider apples for a similar quantity of our eaters and cookers  so our cider this year will be a rather more balanced mixture rather than our usual "whatever we have to hand to juice". We only have one cider apple tree so this arrangement is a great one and I hope we can continue it in future years :)

I have ordered some more bottles from Vigo for juice and washed all our saved wine and juice bottles again, ready to sterilise. Compostman has got down the scratter and press from the loft and I have washed them and the garage is FULL of boxes and buckets and tub trugs of apples.

Just need to make some time in the very busy next week, to do some pressing :)

Setting aside the worrying  stuff about Fracking - we have been harvesting lots of produce from the veg patch in the last few days.

I feel a sense of dread at what the future may hold for us here around Much Marcle if Fracking does come here :(

I have just told a friend about it and she was shocked - she had no idea of the issues involved or that there was such a threat in Herefordshire.

But life has to go on, even with all the turbulence around us. We have a water leak in our kitchen, and have been lifting spuds, and having friends round to drink tea.

Please, if you could, sign the petition Ban Fracking in Herefordshire

Rocket Gardens Constant Garden - update on the plants and harvesting!

The weather here over the weekend was mostly ok, sunny and rainy on Saturday, Sunday was dull but dry so I spent a lot of the weekend planting up raised beds, re- potting plants into larger pots and generally doing lots of garden related jobs outside. When it rained I ducked inside the polytunnel to pot on plants - have I said how much I love my polytunnel? I think I have, a few times. 

A lot of the veg plants I planted out, or potted on, were the remains of my second and third delivery from my Rocket Gardens Constant Gardens selection of veg plants - I put them as small plug plants into pots where they have grown well but it is now time to put them outside in their final places in the ground. Today into the raised bed I planted out various brassicas, some celery, leeks, onions, chard and spinach, some french beans, beetroot and more salads. Several weeks ago I planted out onions and leeks (in another raised bed) and last week I put in the runner bean, pea, pumpkins and courgette plants.

All these plants are growing strongly and for several weeks now we have been eating salad and spinach or chard from the plants which were already in the garden or in the polytunnel (on my salad bar). I picked the first peas last night :-)/

As I said in my last post, I had to come up with some way to protect the raised bed I am planting them in and I am still very pleased with the results :-) It is easy to unpeg one side to plant more plants or to harvest some.

After all this activity I still had quite a few salad plants left over, so I came up with a way of using some "alternative" containers for planting them in. I know lots of people don't have the space to plant veg in the ground that we do here, so I thought it would be good to show how well plants grow in all sorts of containers, and not just plant pots!

I have a friend who gives me lots of these plastic mushroom trays which get used here for all sorts of things. They are quite shallow so I decided to grow some salad plants in them, which don't need a huge depth of soil.

 I lined the tray with newspaper, so the growing medium stays inside the tray.

I added the growing medium (a mix of Fertile Fibre coir based  and Moorland Gold reclaimed peat certified organic, but any good peat free potting or general purpose mix would do)

Looking down from above to show how I spaced the salads plants out. I was aiming for a "pleasing to the eye" pattern, which also gave all the plants space to grow.

As always I had feathery company around me. Sweetie the Speckledy jumped up to see what I was up to

 Naughty Sweetie! She tried to eat the herb plants I had just potted on! Gerroff!

Finished planter :-)

Lots of lovely cut and come again salad leaves, to add to the salad bar in the polytunnel..

I planted  up an unwanted wicker basket three weeks ago with celery plug plants from my Rocket Gardens delivery #3. I lined the basket with an old compost bag and punched some holes in it for drainage.

 

The celery is doing well and putting on lots of growth, and tastes delicious ( I sneaked a stem yesterday)

The Strawberries which came with the Small Fruit Garden are so wonderful! Juicy and plump and huge :-)

The fruit bushes from my Small Fruit Garden are all growing well, still in big pots as I have not yet decided where to site my new fruit garden. Need to think about that, so as to protect it from the chickens.

I am so impressed with the plants I have recieved from Rocket Gardens, they are all growing well and are tasty varieties which we enjoy eating :-) I am also very impressed with their customer service, as when I told them about a couple of plants which were a bit sad in delivery #3  I was sent replacements by next post and they thanked me for telling them, so they could do something about it :-) Which was nice :-)

I am expecting delivery # 4 of my Constant Garden in the next week or so, so I had better get back out into the garden and plant out the rest of the last one, and think where I want to plant out the next lot ;-)

I am enjoying being a Rocketeer!

Juicing and pasteurising the apples.

 Washing the apples - they need to be clean and for juicing you need to use apples you would be happy to eat, whereas for cider this is not so important  - as the fermentation process of making alcohol kills off a lot of "bugs"

Putting the apples through the mill to scrat them

Scratted apple

 Apple press in action.

Juice beginning to flow! I decanted the juice into clean bottles and then pasteurised them at 75 C for 25 mins, to ensure they would keep without spoiling.

Bottles of juice after they had been through the pasteuriser - they will now keep, unopened,  for at least a year, if not longer.

The pasteuriser is a wonderful bit of equipment - I can make all sorts of cordials in it and it is also very handy for use as a "tea urn" !

Harvest

We have been incapacitated, Compostman and I for the last month or so, and very little work has been done around Compost Mansion.

But we did manage to pick our ( pathetic) apple harvest and turn it into apple juice, and gather the last of the various crops from the veg garden which will not stand the winter.

We only harvested 60 lbs this year! That is a tenth of what we normally managed to pick, and we have NO eating apples at all :-(

The ground is still utterly sodden underfoot

And then we took the apples inside to use these  to turn them into juice.
More of that next time :-)

Preserving the Harvest - dehydrating

I love my dehydrator! I have a Excalibur 5 tray dehydrator and oh how I wish I had bought a larger version.

I picked a load of Lavender and Sage for drying today - I gave them a quick rinse in water then dried them all gently on a tea towel. Then I laid them out on the dehydrator trays. Three trays of Sage and two of Lavender

It took two nights and a day for the herbs to dry to the point where I could crumble them into clean jars - our house smelt wonderful the whole time :-)

We have our own electricity supply from the pv's on the garage roof, so I use an electric dehydrator. Other people dry stuff  in the bottom oven of an Aga, or similar stove, and if we had sunshine we could use a solar dehydrator ( except of course there has been very little of that around here, this summer!). You can also dry herbs in bunches in an airing cupboard or hanging from the kitchen ceiling. I find stuff up in the rafters gets covered in cobwebs and fly poo, here so do not like doing it that way!

Because the dehydrator heater is on the very lowest setting it used about 2 Kw of electricity so cost about 30 p plus my time, of course - except, of course during the daytime, if we are not using electricity for other purposes we don't have to pay!

And this is what I had at the end - two very small jars of dried herbs. but home grown and organically produced :-) And they smelt terrific :-)

Thank you for dropping by xxx

Of blight and seed saving

Blight has finally hit the potatoes :-( Given the humidity and totally wet time we have had here since April I am frankly amazed that we have managed to get this far into the summer without signs of blight, but now it is there.

So Compostman has chopped off all the haulms for all three of the raised beds with spuds in them and we will wait for several weeks before lifting the potatoes. If we do this we will hopefully have usable potatoes which we can store over winter.

I have also started this season seed saving. This is HSL Asparagus Lettuce, a soft, buttery tasting cut and come again variety which I love. As this seeded inside the polytunnel before any other lettuce set flowers, I know it will be true to type, so I am saving some of the seed for my own use. I have put the stems in a paper bag, seed heads down and when it has finally dried I will gently rub the flowers to get at the seeds.







I have also got the dehydrator down from the attic :-) yep folks, it is THAT time of year ( finally!) when the harvest starts :-)

Lammas greetings

 The loaf was still in the oven (!) - but here are some flowers and fruits picked today. I hope all my readers have a fruitful and boutiful harvest in the upcoming months.

What is growing here, now.

A sunny, busy, morning in the garden

Well we actually had a SUNNY day today ! at least until 5 pm, when it started to rain .

I did a fair bit of work in the veg garden. A few of the shallots are still growing

But most needed lifting and sadly a lot had rotted away.

The parsnips are doing well -

You can still see the loo roll tube I grew them in :-) Must add this shot to the "How to" guide!

And when I carefully excavated the soil - look! A parsnip!

We stopped for a tea break and, as usual, were joined by cats and hens. This is Babs, she wanted a drink of Compostman's tea.

This ought to be a carrot bed. No carrots grew.

The broad beans have all failed - covered in chocolate spot:-( so I pulled them all up and harvested the few beans on them.

The very pretty Purple Flowered Broad beans got it as well.

This is one of the beds containing early potatoes - I have had to lift them all, even though the harvest is rubbish, because I need the space for Kales AND the haulms were showing signs of Early Blight - not surprising really, considering the wet, humid weather we have had. I am on constant alert for Blight in the Early main crop beds.

This was the result of digging up 5 roots of Orla . Not good!

I had a delivery of plants from Rocket Gardens, today - they come packed in hay :-) What a very good idea!

 

 I am hoping the courgette plants I purchased will produce something as all my outdoor courgette plants were smashed to bits by heavy rain.

 So, not a great yield of produce    from the garden, but at least we have something to eat - I was beginning to worry we would only have tomatoes and lettuces!