Core Blimey!! We Picked a Good One

GoodGym rocked up at the Bath Organic Garden in wonderful Victoria Park on Saturday morning to help sort the good apples from the bad.

There was a particular crop of apple trees, those growing the 'Beauty of Bath' variety, that had reached the point of requiring some harvesting and Cosmo, Ruth and Meyrick were on hand to make a start.

Now the good apples are the ones that fall from the tree, not the ones still growing, so for the first hour we picked the good apples from the floor for collection. Let's not forget that even the bad ones that had been on the ground for too long also have a purpose and we piled these up for composting. Once we'd collected as many as we could, we shook the branches to allow more to fall and collected them as well. (GoodGym T-Shirts turn into a handy pouch for fruit collecting did anyone even know that?)

So efficient were we that we moved onto a second tree, which we were given the responsibility of identifying (we were correct!).

After a good hour we had enough in our containers to start turning the fruits of our labour into juice for drinking.

An incredibly efficient production line developed with Ruth cleaning the apples, Cosmo and Meyrick quartering them and then all three getting in on the mashing/shredding action to reduce them to smaller bits. Finally we ended up with an apple press two thirds full and we all turned the bar to drive the press down, this was the exciting bit!

As time ran out we had enough juice to enjoy some ourselves, and even took some home. There are pleny of apples from our harvest left though, and plenty more to be collected in a future GoodGym Mission!