I have 2 apple trees in my yard, and there’s a buttload of fruit that I’ll pick in about 2 weeks. The wife wants to make homemade apple sauce.
The apples are not pretty. They’re very dirty, and it takes a while to clean one off in the sink with a sponge, maybe 20 seconds. It’s a safe bet that I’ll fill 3 dozen 5 gallon buckets when I pick them, and at 20 seconds each, it’ll take me a few days to clean them all.
An orchard near where I grew up had an automated apple washer, but they had a couple hundred trees, too. Any ideas? I doubt the garden hose can do it, and I suspect my pressure washer will make them mush…
What kind of attachment do you have on the garden hose? I’ve got the kind with various settings, and the “jet” on that is pretty good, but well this side of pressure washer.
Maybe put them in the bathtub, fill it up and have at em. Maybe not perfect if you still have to hand scrub each apple but if a solid rinse would do it may work.
I wouldn’t bother with the scrubbing. Dump 'em in the sink or tub and get to 'em over the next couple hours. Scrubbing doesn’t actually remove that much bacteria, soils will soak off, and cooking will take care of the rest. If you are kinda paranoid that your neighbors have been crapping in your fruit trees and you’re gonna get E. coli, you could add a little (just a little) bleach to the tub.
If your close enough…I could, ah, ‘help’ you with some of those apples.
I’m not worried about bacteria; the point of the exercise is the physical removal of the grime. Now that I think about it, I have several plastic barrels. I could use those to soak the apples, if I can get them clean first.
My property was neglected for for many years, and there’s an astounding amount of dust and dirt covering anything that hasn’t moved in a single year. I’m no Monk, but even I have my limits. If I find a leftover that is useful to me, I have to clean it before I can use it.
Ok, this might be a crazy idea,but they’re going to be apple sauce. . . clothes-washing machine, if it’s an old horizontal spinner and not one of the newer euro-style clothes-flensers?
I seem to remember seeing programme on cidermaking where they just soked the apples in a big water bath, then hosed them off with a glorified power shower as they trundled down an big chute of perforated plastic or metal.
We’ve done this at home, for an orchard of a couple dozen apple trees. Basically, let soaking do the work for you.
Put the apples in a big container of water (we used extra horse water tanks). Let them soak for several hours. Every hour or so, go out and stir them around a bit (gently). (You will have to dump the dirty water and replace with clean fairly often.)
Remove from the water, and spray with a hose while doing so. Putting a fishing net in the tank before adding the apples makes it much easier to remove them, and spray them.
Peel and use. Keep a damp towel handy; you will occasionally encounter an apple that is still dirty. But not very many. This process gets nearly all of them clean, without requiring you to individually scrub each apple.
