Diary #536

Last Wednesday I collected what I thought a good number of apples from my trees to test my new cider press; after coring them and running them through a food processor for pulping, I used the press (on the deck, because I wasn’t sure how messy it would be) and obtained about 6 liters of fresh cider.  I’m going to ferment a gallon of it and use the rest to make apple butter and apple jelly; toward the latter end, I boiled the pomace (the stuff left over after juicing) in water, strained out the solids, and then boiled down the pulp to extract the pectin.  I was kind of amazed how little pectin the process produced; in the future I may decide it’s a better use of my time to just buy it from a grocery store.  But it’s no waste of time to learn how to do something, even if you don’t do it regularly afterward.  Anyhow, the animals really enjoyed the pomace once I was done, or at least Orville and Shiloh did; Jonathan is a bit of a snob, and though he ate it he didn’t seem as enthusiastic as the others.  I’m off to Seattle today, but I’ll be back at the farm on Thursday to do the last of the season’s canning, get on with the bathhouse roof, and spend more lovely October nights watching horror movies while stoned.