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Lemons Aplenty

Last weekend our little family had our yearly lemon harvest and squeeze.  If my memory serves me, we have harvested the lemons every January or February for the last 6 years.

It takes just a little work and then we have enough juice to make lemonade the rest of the year.  In fact, I think we used up the last of last years lemon juice just a few weeks ago.

We used to freeze the lemon juice into cubes and then put the right number of cubes into ziploc bags for making pitchers of lemonade.  The freezing of all the cubes was a laborious process.  We finally discovered it was somewhat unnecessary.  Now we just pour the amount of juice needed for a pitcher of lemonade right into the bag and seal it up.  Way less work AND the bags freeze into little flat sheets that are very easily stored in the freezer.

This year Noah and Emily were both good workers.  Noah did a lot of the washing of the picked lemons and even some juicing.  Emily did a lot of the juicing.  We ended up with about 5½ gallons of juice, a good haul.

Here are some pictures from our day (click on any for fullscreen):

Parker observing the work

Parker observing the work

Emily working the juicer

Emily working the juicer

Noah extracting some juice

Noah extracting some juice

Mommy taking her turn

Mommy taking her turn

Cole wasn't sure he liked the grass

Cole wasn’t sure he liked the grass

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Swollen with Fruit

As per the usual Ferkin Family tradition, January brings the annual lemon harvest.  At this point in the year Grandpa Art and Grandma Dot’s small yet prodigious lemon tree is swollen with fruit so we stop by and unburden it.

(I had chosen another title for this post, but after I looked at what I had typed in the last sentence I decided that “swollen with fruit” was too eye-catching to pass up as a title.)

After the picking comes the lemon washing, followed by the halving, and then finally the juicing.  We believe we set a record this year by extracting 6½ gallons of pure lemon juice.  We even left a few low-hangers for Grandma to give to friends later.

Last year’s harvest netted 5 gallons of juice, which was an excellent haul.  For the math nerds out there you will see that we had a 30% increase in juice over last year.  We’re almost growing as fast as China’s economy!  By the way you might want to check out last year’s post using the link at the beginning of this paragraph.  I did a sweet time lapse that is worth seeing a second time, if I do say so myself.

Here are some pictures from the afternoon:

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The Cedar Beast

I finally finished the Fence on the side of my yard–a few months ago the wind decided to help me with my aging fence and lent a hand by doing some of the demolition. Then Grandpa Joe and Jared Thomas (big thanks to both) came over and with the help of Greenback rentals, we dug in and concreted 13 or so  “Z” posts that i had chosen to provide the support of the cedar beast. Grandpa Joe finished his “vacation” by stringing up the runners and the baseboards.  Leaving me with the rest… the rain being nice and consistent… just how i didn’t like it, had me checking the weather and leaving work early on a day with sunshine. It felt like any waking moment over the last 6 weeks, if it wasn’t raining and no other higher priority loomed i was out there slapping up the  400 planks of cedar and the 2 gates (1 single 1 double). I found working on the fence to be quite enjoyable, so when a few people offered to help– i kindly told them to get lost and go find their own fun 🙂 the most enjoyable part for me was building the Gates– they were a blast to build and delivered a great satisfaction when they completed — all in all, we have a fence that actually keeps Isaac in the backyard, an extra gate that provides access where there was none, less useless area with grass to mow, and about 700 more sq feet to our backyard. — oh yeah, and it looks way better than what we had… we will be paint/staining it as soon as the rains break and the wood dries out.

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Lemon Lapse

[rockyou id=155807105&w=500&h=375]

As is our yearly tradition (see a year ago or 2 years ago), we picked and juiced the lemons in Grandpa Art and Grandma Dot’s backyard.  The good ol’ tree produced another bumper crop and we extracted nearly 5 gallons of pure juice (which will make a lot of lemonade).

Paige has already started on then next job of freezing the juice into cubes and then packaging it into ziplock bags that hold exactly the right amount for a pitcher of lemonade.

We tried to coax Grandpa Art (92 yrs old) into helping us and he did for a short while before quitting.  Grandma even reminded him that it is in the Bible that if you don’t work, you don’t get to eat but I don’t think he looked worried about his next meal.

I teased him by asking if he’d ever worked a day in his life.  He thought that was funny.

Per my latest kick I took another time lapse video with my little camera.  See if you can spot the little dogs that barked and snapped at me while I was picking lemons.  I won’t share with you any of the evil thoughts I had about the sweet animals.