81 days ago
It really feels like Autumn is upon us here at the Welsh Hovel. I am wearing a coat indoors as we battle not to switch on the heating or to start using up the wood stored in my shed, in the wood burning stove.With the Met office warning us again about what a hot year 2025 has been, we really could do with a touch of global warming here in Wrexham.
82 days ago
What else would one do on a rainy afternoon in North East Wales? Whilst I harvested the 40 or so younger apple trees I have planted here at the Welsh Hovel some weeks ago, the older apple trees by the river are still heaving with fruit. And thus Joshua and I filled three buckets…
97 days ago
You look at the photo below and will think, I am NOT drinking that. But you would be mistaken.
104 days ago
I have yet to touch the old apple trees and the new ones I planted by the river. That is the bulk of my harvest. What you see below is just from the trees I planted in what is now the upper orchard and what used to be the jungle, and it excludes the 300 or so apples already stewed, turned into jam or crumble or stored in my rack. The trees are now emptied and what you see below is being turned into juice this weekend.
1127 days ago
I gather that in England drought orders are set to remain in 2023 but here in North Wales there is no shortage of water. As you might gather from the picture below, the River Dee is rising and the rain is still beating down. There is now a small stream running down the lane to the hovel and through the farmyard towards the river. It is my apple orchard, the older of the two, which sits on the river bank and will be the first to be flooded if the water rises by another five foot or so which it might well do.
1154 days ago
As I waited for the pasteurisation of the juice to complete late last night, I threaded another 60 chillies and hung them up to dry. There are now about 140 threaded, 40 more waiting to be threaded and, I guess, 300 more in the garden turning redder by the day and awaiting harvesting. We are still working our way through last year’s dried chillies so I guess what I am producing now will make even more Christmas presents to go with surplus apple chutney and the usual Greek Hovel olive oil.
1158 days ago
The bottle marked vodka contains, of course, apple juice. Producing at 6 litres a day, I am rapidly running out of glass bottles so if anyone locally has any spare I will happily swap eight empties – which you were going to bin anyway – for one full of apple juice. There is a suggestion that the next batch will be apple and damson juice. It is worth one experimental run.
1161 days ago
For some reason, I am snowed under with apples from the orchard by the river Dee this year. This week I brought in two 25 litre buckets of apples. I could easily bring in another twenty if I had the time and energy to process them all and enough bottles to store the juice in.
1167 days ago
There is just so much to do but my target is to harvest at least one crop a day and put it away for winter storage. Tomorrow is the official start of the apple harvest and, having jumped the gun by a week on the crabapples and edibles from the new top orchard I have created, work will, start on the old orchard by the river which is dripping with reddening apples begging to be scratted and crushed into juice. Meanwhile…
1524 days ago
I flagged up the other day that the apple harvest from the old orchard by the River Dee had been piss poor. But still what juice might it produce. As you can see below the press I bought last year was wheeled into action.
1527 days ago
I bought myself two early Christmas presents, the first of which is the apple rack below which is now in use, albeit only temporarily.
