We are very lucky, or blessed, in many ways, as some of you already know, but one particular way happens to be that we live in the heart of 'apple tree central'. Seriously. There are so many overgrown apple orchards that a short walk down the road can easily warrant you a good cold sore! It's so disheartening to watch so many apples fall, that we always scramble to harvest and process as many as possible this time of year. One of the things we've always wanted to do was press apple juice out of the soft windfalls, but with our big family we knew we'd need a quick method, otherwise it would be consumed as fast as it was produced. Unfortunately, in the last few years, our attempts have ended up being too much work and mess and, as we stood by and scratched our heads, the season would quickly pass us by...
BUT...
Not this year!
Yay! :o)
Thanks to another brainy, big brother homesteading invention, we've been enjoying tons of deeelicious fresh apple juice for little effort!
Behold...
All you need is an ordinary clothes washing machine (that's been thoroughly cleaned) and two grouchy, un-photogenic people to stand there and stare at it. (Haha, just kidding, the washing machine will do the job fine without being scrutinized by two grouches. Honestly--we were having fun! lol!) :o)
Anyway, after you sneak out your wife's/Mom's washing machine to the back yard (good luck with that!), then you need to go get a whole bunch of apples! If you want around 50 gallons of juice, better get a whole pickup truck load... or two!
...Can be squishy, have bird pecks and bad spots, even large bruises, just so long as you have the approval of a two year old and her doll, then you're good to start! ;)
So, the basic idea is you bolt a poky (nails sticking up) round board to the bottom of the basket and attach a shute (PVC pipe) to just an inch or so above it.
Then you run the machine on the spin cycle and when it's going fast, you drop apples into the shute as many as you can.
The pressure apple mass in the spinning basket throws the juice out, which you can see hitting the sides from the open back of the machine (like we were in the first picture).
When there's a few inches of juice in the bottom of the machine, the pump will turn on and suck the juice out out the hose, which Andrew had clamped on a clean five gallon bucket.
Sooo much fun to watch all that yummy juice pourin' out!
After a huge bushel of apples and a full spin cycle, you have to take out the PVC shute and shovel the pulp out of the basket.
The animals enjoy the pulp, so nothing goes to waste...
While we enjoy all this!
Mmmmm!!
We boiled 20 gallons down into just a few to use as a concentrate later in the year. Several gallons went down into the root cellar but we're drinking so much I wonder how long it will stay around!
Everybody is begging to make more, just because it's so much fun, but Mom wants us to put our efforts into getting the garden put to sleep, for the winter is quickly approaching!
...On a different note, I just finished knitting up Snow White and her 7 emotive friends. They turned out really scrumptious and I just listed them the
TOY Barn, so check em out!
...Now to keep em away from Donna! lol! :)
Okay. Later Gators! ;)
