Blog Time

I've been meaning to start a band called Slack Ma Girdle since I first heard the name, but unfortunately, it is already taken.  I guess that it's too good of a name not to have been used by someone, and it is very fitting for a ceilidh band.  I guess I'll have to forgive them (and they have been going since 1995, years before even know what cider was.)

So the blog gets the name. Slack Ma Girdle Cider Blog.

I used to write a lot.  I have heaps of journals from the last fifteen years, but for some reason I have more or less stopped writing.  Bill asked me why I don't write anymore.  Is it because I'm happier now or less happy?  I certainly don't have less to write about.  I used journals as ways of working through issues, remembering travels, good times and bad.  My head is still full of ideas and thoughts and musings about the world, but for some reason, it's all just staying in my head or being voiced to my lovely husband or Paul and Steve and not being written down on paper.

Yet looking through my things I still have piles of full notebooks.  I always have one on the go.  But looking through the pages I no longer see teenage angst or rants about the world or poems about the joys of life and love.  All I see is apples.

Page after page is filled with lists of apples.

Annie Elizabeth, Tom Putt, Ball's Bittersweet, Captain Broad, Bloody Butcher, Pig Yr Wydd.......

Kingston Black, Dabinett, Yarlington Mill, Coleman's Seedling, Beauty of Cornwall......

If it's not lists of apples, pages will be filled with tasting notes.

Ben's red (Cider)
Very firm and attractive red apple.  Russet around stalk.  Mild astringency, mild acidity.  Well balanced cider apple.

Orleans Reinette (Late Dessert/Cooker)
Picked mid-December.
Green flushed red.  Slight russeting.  Fairly large, dual purpose apple.  Crisp, dense, chewy.  Sharp but sweet.

Or cider bottling records:
Winter Wamer 2012 - 720 bottles
Borders Bittersweet 2012  - 270 bottles
Hereford Redstreak/Bloody Butcher 2012 - 580 bottles

Page after page is filled with apples and cider (with the occasional list of tunes or music or shopping lists or packing lists).  I also have a gardening notebook with lists of seeds, planting dates, wish lists, garden plans etc.

When did this happen to me?  How did my journals turn from morning musings over coffee to lists of orchards and apples and cider.

If this sort of thing interests you, please follow my post.  There will be more to come of my life on a Welsh Mountain, making cider, growing trees, learning about apples, gardening, music, and all of strange things that make up my life as a Californian lady living in Mid-Wales.