Apple pickers recycled from cider containers.
Posted: Thu Aug 13, 2009 8:43 pm
Hello ishers
With apple harvest fast approaching I thought I'd let you know about some ugly but functional recycling I've done. It's all quite appropriate recycling too, since I am hoping to collect urban apples to make cider from - see City Cider.
Anyway the appropriateness of the recycling is that I am using old cider containers to pick apples to make the cider with. Nice, huh?
The first design of apple picker is designed to pick one apple at a time, by grasping the stalk in the cutter and pulling downwards.
But on my very first guerilla harvest I found crab apples and found that it was a very different experience picking them than it was picking larger apples. Since the crab apples were small oval things they sat in big bunches - on the lower branches I could pick about 20 or so off in two hands. Using the cutter of the above design meant I had to dig in more and pull too hard which inevitably led to some apples flying off out of sight.
So I've designed, but not yet tested, a second apple picker recycled from a cider container a new picker for smaller apples like crabs - I'm hoping this is going to do the trick with those clusters of small apples; I'm pretty sure it will.
With apple harvest fast approaching I thought I'd let you know about some ugly but functional recycling I've done. It's all quite appropriate recycling too, since I am hoping to collect urban apples to make cider from - see City Cider.
Anyway the appropriateness of the recycling is that I am using old cider containers to pick apples to make the cider with. Nice, huh?
The first design of apple picker is designed to pick one apple at a time, by grasping the stalk in the cutter and pulling downwards.
But on my very first guerilla harvest I found crab apples and found that it was a very different experience picking them than it was picking larger apples. Since the crab apples were small oval things they sat in big bunches - on the lower branches I could pick about 20 or so off in two hands. Using the cutter of the above design meant I had to dig in more and pull too hard which inevitably led to some apples flying off out of sight.
So I've designed, but not yet tested, a second apple picker recycled from a cider container a new picker for smaller apples like crabs - I'm hoping this is going to do the trick with those clusters of small apples; I'm pretty sure it will.