Today 4C made apple juice from Spartan apples grown in the school orchard.

Our first task was to pick the apples and although it had been raining heavily earlier we didn’t get too wet. We next washed the apples and checked to make sure we hadn’t got any rotten ones. The cleaned apples were put into a scratter. This is a device that breaks the apples up into a pulp so that it is easier to extract the juice. The pulp was collected in the blue container under the scratter.

The pulp was then fed into an apple press, Once the press was full we put the top on and wound the handle round crushing the apple pulp so that juice poured into the collecting bucket.

After all the hard work it was time to enjoy the fruits of our labour – or rather, the fruit juice of our labour.

The remaining pulp, now almost dry with all the juice extracted, was added to the compost heap to make new soil which we can use around the school grounds to grow more exciting plants.

If you want to know more about our orchard and the fruit we are growing visit our orchard pages.