New Cider Apple Orchard

I know this doesn't look like much but this is our new cider apple nursery. As in hard cider. During my first trip to England in 1992 I developed a taste for hard cider which is extremely hard to find in this country and when you do it is often too sweet for my taste. An exception is Westcott Bay Cider on San Juan Island who makes cider like I could get on tap in most pubs in England. So after a bit of research into making the stuff and learning that basically what you need are cider apples whose fruit have the necessary bitter and sharp tastes that make cider, cider, we decided that we needed to plant some of those trees. Every year our oldest daughter gives us trees for our birthdays. and this year she had us sent 4 cider apple trees from Cloud Mountain Farm and Nursery. She usually sends us two trees but I think she maybe is hoping we'll start making cider for the family faster is we start with 4. We have a lot of good sweet eating apples to form the basic brew for cider making and in a few years we'll have apples from these trees to add to that. the four varieties that we platned are Kingston Black. Yarlington Mill, Dabinette and Karmijn de Sonneville.

Joel spent days and days clearing this site of rose brush, blackberries and other forms of brush. The black plastic around the trees is to keep all of that from resprouting. We'll leave it on for two or three years and that should do the job. The picture also indicates the problems of agricultural plastics. Note the bunch of remay in a tree deposited there by a wind storm. It is really hard to find places to recycle agricultural plastics as they are always dirty. So they end up in a land fill. For someone who refuses to buy bottled water because of the plastic garbage it creates, this is a problem. I only console myself that it beats Roundup.