Juicing season

We got our apples juiced today.

I think I mentioned a while back that we have some apple trees -- five in the back yard, one in the front.  Well, this was a good year for apples.  We have apples.  We brought a hundred and twenty kilos to the juicery, and that was after throwing at least that many away on the compost heap.  (In retrospect, I was probably too picky.  The juicer doesn't worry much about bruises or the occasional worm.)

Picking apples is pleasant exercise; you bend down a lot, then you shake the tree, then you bend down some more.  You whack the tree with sticks.  You send small boys up the tree to shake the higher branches.  You carry buckets of apples around from here to there.  I can imagine that if we had more apple trees it would quickly grow tedious, but we have just five, which means it's just a couple of hours of work, done in ten- or fifteen-minute intervals over a few days: let's go out and collect some apples.