There was a time a few of us remember when there were practically no apple trees at Hollin Lane Allotments. Recently, more of us have planted them, and now we have to figure out what to do with all our surplus apples.
This year (2018) we tried a new approach – large scale juicing. We hired equipment from Leeds Urban Harvest and spent Saturday 6th October up to our elbows in apples and juice. Anyone with apples could come along and make their own juice, or just donate their surplus.
We had plenty of helpers, so we quickly developed an assembly line:
- Washing the apples and cutting out any bad bits.
- Scratting: putting them through a fierce machine to cut them up into pulp.
- Pressing out the juice from the pulp using a traditional hand press.
- Bottling the juice.
By the end of the day we had made about 70 or 80 liters of delicious juice. Most of this was for drinking fresh, but some is being made into cider. That will be very interesting…
Here are some photos from the day:
And a short video of the pressing: