Apples are a big deal in Western MA. So every year we organize a day when we get together and make cider out of the few to many bushels of apples we gathered beforehand.

This cider making takes equipment. The apples have to be crushed and then the juice have to be squeezed out of the apples. Some of these equipment I provide along with some of the apples, and then we have to store the gallons of apple cider somehow. Lacking freezer space in the fall we choose the method most used over the centuries, which is to ferment the cider. You can either make hard cider or cider vinegar this way. We choose the first method invariably:-) And while we are at it, we make a whole social event around the gathering, where friends and family join and at the end we all eat dinner together.

Since I don’t have a car and the event was in Montague this year, I geared up my trusty Mundo to carry all the equipment. Then I realized there is a glitch in the plan: Marianne would join us for dinner, and afterwards we would come back to Amherst in her car together. The Mundo doesn’t fit on the bike rack well, and even if it did, it has a considerable sideways overhang, so in general it is not a good idea to try to carry it with a regular bike rack mounted on the back of a sedan. Well, my other option is a trailer. So I unloaded the Mundo, and loaded a trailer being grateful I have all these options. I neglected to make a picture about the loaded Mundo, but just for fun here is a picture of a big box of peaches.

This year the apples were hit hard in our valley, as there was an exceptionally warm week in the spring that set many of the fruit trees to blossom, then came a hard frost, that terminated a lot of the blossoms, so most trees were without apples. I tried to save what was savable of my blossoms by spraying the flowering fruit trees in my yard. It did work but the buildup of ice after that cold night was impressive, as you can see from this picture.

Luckily in my group there are people from Vermont, where the warm week wasn’t warm enough to set a lot of the trees, so the hard frost didn’t cause as wide a damage. So one person was able to gather like eight bushels of apples and bring it to our event.
 
Here we are, Crushing the apples and ready to press the cider. That big jug you see in the foreground? It is now full of delicious cider, that already feels even more alive carbonated with bubbles starting to emerge as the yeast is kicking into gear.