After last night’s triumph with the apple juice from the River orchard, today I picked the rest of the edible apples from the new top orchard. This is only the second year for the trees and they all yielded well and I am sure will do better still next year. However, I reckon that I have room for at least four more trees in the upper orchard and so am minded to buy another three apple trees and one more crabapple tree to assist with polination and to increase the amount of crabapple jelly I produce.
Anyhow, what I harvested this year is now stored with each apple wrapped in newspaper in the food store. A different level for each type of apple should delat rotting if one type goes to pot too fast. But with Joshua having decided that, after a period of not like apples, he does like them, what is stored here will all be gone by Christmas. A couple of apples were blemished. Those were not stored but were tonight turned into a small pot of apple vodka to join the growing vodka and gin range we produce.
I am aware that my food store does not look very impressive. It was the old office when this farm, briefly, became a builders yard. I have replaced the asbestos roof with a slate one above the food store side and removed all the plasterboard on the other side, which still need a new roof. Both parts of this office now have power and over the next three months will get new windows, and a new door, the outside walls repointed and the inside ones plastered, the guttering replaced and a new roof installed on the other half of the building. But, pro tem, I admit it looks a bit of a tip. You should see what it looked like when we arrived!
