We have an apple tree in the back yard. It's been there as long as I can remember, and I have no idea how old it is.

Last year it yielded four apples, yes four apples - one for each kid. We had really, really warm (record high) temps in March 2012. Temps were in the 80s for a couple days in the middle of March. Then, there were three or four frosts in April. The tree (and all fruit trees in Michigan, and other states too?) blossomed, and then the frost killed the blossoms. So, the trees spent no energy making fruit, and that energy was on reserve for this year, and boy are the apple trees yielding.

DW has canned quart after quart of apple sauce the past couple of weeks. We have plenty of sauce now, so we decided to have some cider pressed. We got out the ladders, because all of the apples that are left are beyond our reach from the ground. We picked somewhere between 4 and 4 1/2 bushels of apples, and there are still some left beyond our (safe) reach from the ladders. My parent's also have a tree, and we found three roadside trees, and picked a few apples from them. By time we were done, we nearly doubled our number of apples, and had five varieties in the mix.

My dad had picked some pears at a neighbor's house, so we added half a five-gallon bucket of pears in with the apples.

We dropped the apples off to be pressed on Thursday, and I picked the cider up on Saturday. The yield of cider was 15 gallons! We paid $20 for the pressing.

DW was out of town on Saturday, so the job of canning the cider was mine. I've helped her can fruits and vegetables before, but I've never been in charge of canning before. I had a steep learning curve.

I canned everything into 1/2-gallon jars. There were three jars that I never did get to seal, so we put them in the refrigerator to use first.

The cider tastes absolutely delicious.