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I’m currently replenishing the juice stores. I run two deep freezers from now till spring,Ìýthe extra oneÌýjust to hold plastic lemonade bottles of juices.

I’ve been reluctant to crush my small surplus of earliest apples - partly as their juice is not quite so delicious as mid-season apples and I prefer to save space for that and grape juice about to come. But the main reason I did not crush was too many wasps about to contemplate such an easy source of inadvertent stings.

Wasps find fruit juice from afar and they soon discover you at work - and falling in the pulp makes handling it precarious. Still, cold wet weather means they’ve gone now. So I’m rounding up surplus apples and storing them temporarily under cover in separate plastic bags and buckets. Cookers as well as desserts, as the former add the tartness needed - much commercial juice is mostly Bramleys.

I’m collecting damaged as well as perfect fruits as they’ll be cleaned when processed. Each evening a mixture of varieties is selected as this gives a better juice like a single cru. Though I dearly love pure russet juice, their fruit goes further when crushed with others.

The selection is washed in a tin bath, an heirloom from Grandad’s days in which I suspect I was once scrubbed. If the apples are muddy, which many windfalls are this year, then I add washing up detergent to help clean them. (Ideally apples with mud on should not be used but the winds have brought too many down to leave to waste.)

The apple press (photo by Peter Cassidy from Grow Your Own, Eat Your Own by Bob Flowerdew (Kyle Cathie)

The apples are rinsed off and two large plastic buckets filled to overflowing. If the majority are ripe and good with little to be removed then this turns into about a gallon to a gallon and a half of juice. Each apple is inspected, all rots, ‘squatters’ and bruises cut out, then the good part cut into chunks. These are dropped into a hand turned machine which uses plastic interlocking cogs to turn them to coarse pulp.

My five year old daughter loves helping turning. The two of us get the apples pulped in about half an hour if they are mostly ‘clean’. The pulp is transferred to the press. I once used a big wooden one much like my grandad’s but his cider was rotgut and I’m after exquisite juice. So I use a small barrel type grape press. Once filled with pulp it’s squeezed by screwing down the top plate with a big nut. (It’s important not to proceed too quickly and to back off regularly so air can be re-admitted and thus more juice expelled.)

Running from the press the gorgeous juice is passed through a fine sieve into plastic bottles. Much is drunk fresh, the rest are frozen (the caps screwed tight after a little squeeze to give space for expansion.) After de-frosting the juice is as good as fresh - for about three days –then it’s on it’s way to cider, but that’s another story.

Bob Flowerdew is an organic gardener and panellist on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time