Fall is a beautiful season, not just because of the colorful nature prepairing for winter sleep but also because all the hard work on our gardens has finally paid off. Our fruit and vegetables are ripe and it’s time to harvest it and store it in a way that we will be able to enjoy it in the following months.

This season our apple trees were full of apples. Even though we love apples it is impossible for us to eat that many. So we gave it some thought and decided to make apple juice.
If you have some extra apples and would like to make juice just follow the next steps.
 
First we harvested the apples from our trees. We washed them and cut them to half, bigger ones to quarters. After that we put them in a grinder (note that if you have a huge grinder, cutting the apples would probably be unnecessary, but ours is not so big, so we had to), to get smaller pieces of apples, which we could squeeze. After that it’s just a few more steps. We put grinded apples in a press, same as the ones used in wineries.

We altered it a little, since we have a “mr. DoItYourself” at home, and we used our wood splitter to press down on the apples so we did not have to do it manually. It made the whole difference since the wood splitter has around 6 tons of preasure and we got much more juice than ever before. Freshly squeezed juice contains some parts of apples so it has to be poured trough a strainer to remove them. After that you just heat the juice to about 85 degrees Celsius for about 10 minutes and put it in a wine barrel. This way it will stay fresh and will not go bad during the winter. Another way of storing it is in botles. Heat the bottles in the oven and put hot juice in. Close the bottles well and let the bottles cool off slowly.

Same procedure can be followed to make grape juice (or wine 🍷). And believe it, we made some of that juice too.
 
And as the shout goes – NA ZDRAVJE! (Cheers to your health!)