So … I hurt my arm while framing in the basement. Something about heavy work at ceiling height seems to bother it. Never heard of such a thing.
So I took it easy for a few days and then I picked another 300 # of apples.
I’d been saving those 2 trees for last, and I just. couldn’t. let them drop. Now could I?
As it turns out, picking apples didn’t make my arm hurt worse, so I figured:
Great! Arm is fixed. Problem solved.
We pressed and bottled one last time.
I put one last ad on Front Porch Forum:
Batch X is Here! Fresh Cider for Sale
You know how many flowers a bee has to buzz to make a drop of honey?
That’s how many crabapples it takes to make a quart of my crabapple cider.
It is tasty stuff:
Only the foolhardy make it.
Only the hardy partake of it.
It goes good with gin.
It goes good with sin.
And it makes great jelly.
In fact, if you promise – cross your heart! – to give me a jar of your jelly, please take a FREE quart of cider.
But for guzzling, it’s still a bargain at a buck a bottle.
Start at the Black Diamond BBQ and stay on Cote Hill road.
You can’t miss the sign.
And that, my friend, was the end of cidering season.
It was a lot of work.
It was good, though. I learned a lot. I got a lot out of it. I had fun.
I’d do it again.
The new press was the biggest improvement.
Refrigeration was the biggest problem.
The ciders seemed to be sweeter – and less tart – than in the past, and I ‘blame’ that on picking at the peak of ripeness.
I happened to have 8 colors of duct tape on-hand, and I used them to label my batches.
I raked in $270 at a buck a bottle, selling out of a cooler at the end of my driveway on a dead-end dirt road.
Four relatives strapped themselves into my linesman’s boom and picked from the treetops.
No one got hurt.
Eight town folk contacted me by email.
In six weeks, nobody robbed my money box.
Four strangers knocked on my door.
Three people wanted juice for hard cider.
One guy wrote me the nicest thank you note ever.
But so far, no one but mary has given me any jelly.
Better luck next year.
So I did some more framing in the basement, but when my arm started to hurt again, I put that on hold, and I laid low till my arm felt better.
After 8 years, the ditches along the driveway were starting to get infested with brush and bushes that … had to go. I decided to try cutting down a few of them, just to see how my arm was doing. Nothing seemed to hurt, and it was a nice day, so I ended up doing the whole driveway.
Next day, still, nothing much seemed to hurt too much, so I went ahead and hauled all the brush I’d cut down to the burn pile.
Well.
Next day, my arm hurt. And then it kept hurting worse and worse before it finally started hurting better. And Yes. I’m just a fucking idiot. But at least it got my attention, and I am now taking it easy until my arm is good.
Cross my heart.
My next door neighbor Herbie has an enormous apple tree in his front yard that’s totally loaded with fruit. I watched it ripen over the course of the summer, and I wanted to ask if I could pick it. But Herbie is … unkempt. His yard is a minefield of forgotten debris and, when I scouted the location, I found a rotten woodpile and lotsa rusty metal at the base of the tree, where I’d have to park the boom to pick it. I thought about offering to clear out the area, but that seemed like a lot. And now that I’m out of commission, not a one of those apples has dropped yet, and every time I drive by, it feels like the whole tree is laughing at me.
So what does one do when one is laid up?
C3PR needed work, and I needed to tune the motors. It’s one of those things that’s easy to do if you know how to do it, but I had no idea how.
After much consternation, they work much better now. They are tuned like a fork.
I’ve still got it.
It’s Halloween night, and we never get a single knock.
What the hell is wrong with kids nowadays?