sat oct 5
OK, so maybe I am getting carried away.
I cidered all of September, and I’m still at it. We’re into the late season now, and I still have 6 trees that are chuck full of apples, and just about ready to pick. So this morning, I Picked.
Last time I used it, the Boom worked fine, but this morning, I noticed that when you raise it, it doesn’t stay there – it slowly drifts downward. And the more I picked, the worse it got. It got to the point where, if I picked really fast, I could get maybe 8 apples before I’d have to raise the boom back up. I managed to pick a ton of apples, but it was exhausting instead of fun.
So what’s the problem? Is it a leaky piston seal or a stuck solenoid? I sure hope not!
Then it ‘came to me’ at lunch. There is an obscure bleeder valve that was open. I closed it and …
Problem solved! Picking was fun again.
sat oct 12
The specific gravity of my hard ciders from my first picking of the cidering season finally bottomed out (like it’s supposed to), so this morning, I transferred the musts to glass carboys with airlocks. I sterilized everything I touched. I wrote down everything I did. I followed the directions. The must smelled good. Healthy. Right. Everything went smoothly.
This was the high point of my cidering career to date. The best result ever, and I was feeling pretty good about it. I drew off a sample from each carboy into shot glasses and took them upstairs for Mary to admire. She tried the first one, winced as if in pain, and steadied herself against the counter. “Yuck!” she cried. “Ugh!” She wouldn’t even smell the second glass.
I went back downstairs. Thanks a lot!
sun oct 13
It was a beautiful day, so I picked apples.
Two medium trees, full of tiny ripe apples, took me 3 hours, and I’ll get 15-20 gallons out of it. I’m trying to think of a business model in which this is OK.
tue oct 15
It must be the apple juice. Something is turning my hands black.
I have thick, dry skin, full of millions of tiny micro-cracks, and every one of them is full of dirt. I wash. I scrub. I soak. I rub. Nothing gets it out, and I keep my hands in my pockets in public. Today, I was digging a ditch for Juliet and, naturally, my hands got dirty. Cleaning up afterward hardly made a difference.
My hands are an embarrassment.
In order to dig that ditch, I brought along a backhoe, a shovel, a hoe, and a pickaxe, because sometimes there is just no substitute for hand digging.
First my hoe fell apart, and then it broke when I tried to put it back together.
Then my shovel cracked. But not so bad that I couldn’t keep digging if I just babied it. I babied it for quite a bit of ditch, but eventually it just plain broke in two.
Then the dam in the flooded swale that feeds the ditch gave way, and my whole hole was filling with water! I flailed about, looking for a log. A rock. Something to stop the water. I took the broken shovel, raised it high above me, loosed a mighty howl, and drove it hard into the ground.
It stopped the leak.
So there I am. No shovel, no hoe, and my whole hole is full of water.
Lets just say I am a clever man, and I put the backhoe and the pickaxe to work, and it came out great.
I was hungry, but two sandwiches sounded like too much, so I made one big one.
wed oct 16
The weather is the talk of the town. It’s supposed to get windy and then wet and then cold, and nobody is happy about it. Weenies. I worked outside all day and bottled and picked and couldn’t help noticing that the wind was picking up.
Mark my words – It looks like rain.
fri oct 18
It rained like crazy, and my ditch worked perfectly.
I bet I could make a living digging ditches.
mon oct 21
I know you’re tired of hearing about cider, but ….
I picked and pressed and bottled and cleaned up one last time. I labelled all my bottles, moved them to a temperature-controlled corner, and swept the floor. I disassembled all my equipment and I hung it up out of the way. I scratched my head.
How much cider did I make this year, anyway? Let me see….
264 bottles in the closet + (that’s 66 gallons)
30 gallons for fermenting +
Spillage + spoilage + gifted + drunk.
That’s 100 gallons, and then some.
You get a shit ton of cider from about a ton of apples.
Reid gave cidering his best shot.
Reid cidered until he got it right.
Reid cidered like there’s no tomorrow.
Reid cidered his little heart out.
Reid cidered obsessively.
Reid cidered to his heart’s content.
Reid cidered to the last drop.
Reid got carried away.
Seriously, folks, this was a great learning experience. I wanted to know what it takes to scale an operation up from making 10 gallons using kitchen tools, to … using as many apples as are available. What are the bottlenecks? What would I have to fix to whole hog?
Now I know.
So what am I going to do with all this cider, anyway?
Don’t worry. I have a plan.
How about ‘what am I going to do with all those pressed apples?
The garden smells ‘fermenty’, and the varmints don’t seem interested.
And don’t forget the applesauce.
I was cleaning up, and the two biggest eyesores were a huge old pile of kindling, and all the boxes that all the cider bottles were shipped in. So I cut the kindling to fit the boxes, and then stacked 14 boxes of kindling near the mailbox.
30 minutes later, this was all that remained
I cleaned the refrigerator and came up with:
5 packages of tortillas
4 open jars of pickles
many fragrant – um – sauces
and a zucchini in the wine section.
wed oct 30
It’s almost Halloween, and I’m ready.
We haven’t had a trick-or-treater for years, but every year, I buy a bag of miniature Snickers, “just in case,” and then end up eating them all myself. (I just hate that) This year, in a break from tradition, I bought a bag of Reeses PB cups instead. Soon, they’ll all be mine!
(you probably thought I was going to give them each a quart of cider)
thu oct 31
The brush hog is in rough shape. It’s got two gaping wounds, but it keeps on ticking, like something out of the Walking Dead. I like to blame it on Dad (who was an aggressive brush hogger in his day), but really, I did most of the damage myself, and it’s gotten to the point where I need to either fix it, throw it out, or hurt myself using it.
So I fixed it.
Adjustable to any height you want, as long as it’s zero.
Behold the power of an immovable object!
Angle iron, rrrripped in two.
Good as new