Bryce’s friend Bevan built a heavy duty juicer/press using a garbage disposal to crush the apples, and a car jack to press out the juice. Pretty ingenious, I would say. We have great intentions of building one or two apple presses of our own in the near future, but Bevan was kind enough to let us borrow his in the meantime. The night these photos were taken, we were at Spencer and Shanille’s house. Baby Boy wasn’t quite sure what to think of the puppies, but they sure seemed to like him!

 

 

I was loving the sunset light, and the effect it was having on his fly-away hair. (He still hasn’t had a first haircut!)

Watching the action happening up in the apple tree!

 

In the tree, shaking and throwing apples down to the “gatherers”.

 

Now for a game of “Where’s Baby Boy?!”

There he is!

Considering how much time his parents spent in the trees as children, I guess he comes by his interest in climbing honestly.

 

 

Since the apples were unsprayed, they had a few worm holes. We cut out the bad parts of the apples, and used an apple slicer to cut them into smaller pieces so that the disposal could be more efficient.

This cutie stopped gathering long enough to give me a smile!

Observing…something.

Baby Boy helping to gather apples.

 

Enjoying the sunset…and the homing pigeons.

A quick trampoline break!

Feeding apples into the disposal! Our process went something like: Collect the apples, cut/core/deworm-hole the apples, put apple slices into BYU bucket, fill the bucket with water and rinse the slices, drain water out of bucket, feed apple slices into the disposal, collect apple mash in a mesh lining, press the juice out using a carjack with a round wooden piece attached, collect juice in the bottom tray and finally dispense juice into the clean buckets.

Ta dah! Apple juice!

Bryce hauling the apple cores out to the animals.

Overseeing the apple press.

The outcome of our labor! Fresh apple juice! Hooray!

I didn’t get photos of the buckets filled, but we divided the apple juice into BYU creamery icecream buckets. The buckets are large, 3-5 gallons I think, but it’s possible to fit at least one into our refrigerator. Since we intended to drink the juice fairly quicky, we didn’t bottle or freeze any. That will be an experiment for some other time.