Apple Pressing Service

Dean and Kim who run the Market Garden at Ragmans are offering an apple pressing service this year.

If you’d like your apples pressed please read the information below and contact them:

Dean on: 07501 772781

Email: ragmansgarden@gmail.com

Facebook Page:  CLICK HERE

FAQs

What apples can you press?

You can make apple juice with any apple variety, cookers and desert apples. They are good mixed, producing a sweeter/more dry juice depending on the sweetness and mix of the apples. We can also press pears; pear and apple is delicious.

When do we press?

This year we will be pressing in October and early November

Minimum/Maximum Amounts

Maximum limit. We may be able to process commercial quantities of apples. Call us to talk through your requirements.

Minimum limit. We require a minimum of 300kg of fruit. This would be similar to 25+ shopping bags full. We appreciate it can be hard to estimate weight so feel free to send a photo of fruit either harvested or on the trees.

What you need to do:

Pick your fruit – the better quality the fruit the better the juice
No rotting fruit or badly bruised fruit please. We will discard any we find that is turning*.
Bag it up or put it into boxes or crates. Make sure you can lift them!

*IMPORTANT - Please note: If fruit is ‘turning’ or partially rotted (going brown) we will reject it. We may need to store the apples for up to a week from date of delivery, if it is in poor condition a lot of wastage can occur. We will carry out a final check and will sort fruit as we press but if the fruit is in a poor condition and is too difficult to sort we reserve the right not to press. Windfalls can be juiced if they are in good condition. Please ensure any animals grazing your orchards are out of the orchard for 6 weeks before you pick the fruit.

An easy way to tell if your fruit is ready is to taste it (!) and check the pips - they should be dark brown when the apples are ripe.

What we do:

We will wash the fruit, mill it, press it, bottle it (750ml green glass) and pasteurise it.

Fruit will be pressed in batches.

We don’t add anything to the juice – no sugar or preservatives. The pasteurisation process will preserve the juice for 24 months.

We will pack your juice in boxes of 12 to make storage and handling easier, otherwise please drop off your boxes/crates for the bottles.

Our juice process takes 2 days. We will call or message you when your juice is ready to be collected. We charge storage for juice left with us for over a week.

How much does it cost?

Please ring Dean for a quote:   07896 967807

Re using old bottles

Due to strict health and safety regulations it is NOT possible for us to re use your old bottles.

Organic or Biodynamic

Ragmans Juice processing site is registered with the local Environmental Health Service and with the Soil Association for producing apple juice to organic standards. If you have organic or Biodynamic fruit certification in place we can process your fruit separately but need to know this in advance.

Records

We keep records of all the juice we process. You are welcome to inspect our records.

Our Approach to Soil Fertility and System Health ~ by Matt Dunwell

February 15th 2017 POSTED BY: Ragmans Farm




Ragmans Farm is a 60 acre organic farm in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. We use farming practices that regenerate the land, using permaculture as a guiding design principle. Between the three main enterprises at the farm – Ragmans Lane Farm, the Willow Bank and Ragmans Market Garden, we provide employment for about 8 people.

Ragmans Lane Farm has eight acres of organic apples and we make our own brand of apple juice. We also host a series of courses throughout the year on land related issues.

A course led by Jairo Restrepo in 2015 introduced us to a new philosophy of system health, based on building healthy soils.  This had a profound effect on the farm, and led us to set up a full time research post to develop these principles for temperate climate agriculture.  Our research manager, Juanfran Lopez, is half way into a three year programme and this blog is predominantly about his work here at Ragmans. 



Our research goal is to gain expertise in making soil amendment preparations. We will then measure the effectiveness of these biological techniques on system biology and mineral balance on plant-soil health and growth. Over the last twelve months we have put in place a series of soil and plant tests and taken baseline data.


We are testing for pH, salinity, conductivity, a wide range of trace elements and also available nitrogen. In addition to this, we are developing a high quality range of preparations and techniques such as biofertilisers, aerobic teas, mineral chelations, mychorriza, chromatography, lactic acid bacteria, and native microorganism reproduction among other methods….

The objective of this practice is to reproduce the local microbiology, as bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, algae and protozoa working in a complete harmony in a healthy environmental system (forest, farm or even animal and human system).

Whilst it is tempting to try to produce a range of products for sale, we are wary of claims that certain microbe mixes are ‘silver bullets’ to be used in the same way as chemical fertilisers or herbicides. 

We believe it is more important to get a good understanding of the science behind this approach, and then for farmers to tweak them into individual requirements or situations, thereby having a positive impact on the farmer´s autonomy and viability and hopefully reaching a broader scale.

An example of how we can work through these preparations can be seen at Ragmans currently.  We have in the past sampled our soils and found them lacking in certain trace elements.  A conversation with any good soil lab will furnish you with the trace elements needed, normally in the form of salts – magnesium sulphate etc. These are supplied and put out onto the land with a spreader.


The addition of trace elements in this way can be ineffective as both the soil and plant are looking for elements in a bioactive form – ie easily digestible. For this reason sometimes the addition of trace elements can be disruptive and almost always there is waste.

When we make biofertiliser on the farm we build a biologically active system using fresh cow manure that has the gut flora and fauna of a ruminant. To this we add various ingredients – including molasses, yeast, native microbes from the forest soil.   A ferment takes place into which we can place trace elements in minute quantities over a period of three or four months.  These minerals are cycled through countless generations of microbes becoming more and more biologically available.


When the preparation is ready we spray onto the leaves and soil thereby feeding the system through the plants that in turn will feed soil microbes with essential micro nutrients.

This is a basic example of our approach as taught by Jairo Restrepo. We are only beginning to understand the potential of natural agriculture, and there is very little knowledge at all of this work in temperate systems. 

We are also running a six day course with Jairo at Ragmans from June 29th to July 4th 2017.  Jairo's book 'The ABC of Organic Agriculture' is now available in English from our on-line shop.




Back to main blog page