| 5 acre Farmgirl |
Posted - Oct 09 2008 : 1:38:05 PM
Once a year our private School has a cider day at my house. It all strted out as just a fun day for the children, 6 years ago. But, now it is tradition to have Cider Day in the fall at our house. The children(ages 7 to 15) start getting excited 4 or 5 days before and can hardly keep their mind on their work...the teachers have to really keep on them to get their work done for Cider Day is almost here.
The day constists of gleaning and gathering apples from the various orchards around us, tossing them in the pickup and riding in the back of the pickup to our house to wash, cut, and grind them into Cider...
The excitement is almost unbearable for the youngsters....
The day arrives...schoolwork is ever so hard to concentrate on and whispers are throughout the classroom, while teacher looks up to keep order(which is near impossible)..... the time is after lunch and the lunch is never so gobbled down as on this day...the children arrive, with wayyy too much energy, they all get in the pickup and off we go to the orchards to glean apples from the many kinds of apples around...Golden Delicious, Jonagold, Gala, Red Delicious, Rome and Macintosh are just a few.
Then we go back to get started..
First, we must wash all of the apples, the youngest children put them into buckets to be carried over to the "washers"...in an old fashioned wash tub, they are scrubbed by the children and mothers, then into more bowls, pails and containers to be cut into pieces..
Next, carried over to the "Cider Press"....The older children know well how to run this press, it is electric, the apples are dropped into the chopper and drop into a slotted bucket and then put under the pressing mechanism....the older boys turn the crank and it presses the chopped apples into juice and it runs into the bucket..
Then the older girls, pour the cider into cleaned jugs and whatever the mothers want their cider in to freeze for the winter....
Long about 4 pm the dads start arriving, they then build the fire...cook the hotdogs over the fire and the mothers get the rest of the food around, chili, fresh vegetables, hot spice cider and chips, with s'mores for dessert, games and fun were the day and all are ready to go back home around 8:00pm....
Doesn't that sound like fun?
Our children look forward to it every year, with 6 years behind us, we look forward to many more.
Farmgirl Sister #368
http://froccsfrillsfurbiloesandmore.blogspot.com
|
