Apples, Apples, Apples

At our new place we have about 9 Apple trees, 3 pear trees, 1 Asian Pear tree, and 1 plum tree. This year was a high fruit year and they all ripened fairly close together.

We missed out on the early apples, being busy with other projects. We did manage to pick three trees.

We picked even more after this picture was taken. We filled three wooden apple crates and a plastic storage tote.
The tasty eating apples we piled into the fridge. Anytime someone came to visit, they left with fruit. The rest? I'm still drying pear chips, and the plums were made into fruit leather and dried as halves.

With all those apples we decided we needed to take drastic action. So with the help of friends, we pressed them into cider. We rented a press this year, but I am working on building one for next year.

The process was very straight forward; wash, chop, grind , press. It was very time consuming. We worked for about 11 hours and yielded 18.5 gallons of cider. Of that we are fermenting ten gallons into hard cider and the rest we canned the next day for storage. We also saved out about  a gallon for fresh drinking.