I survived another stormy night with tornadoes in the area, so I decided to rev up our new juicer again. I've discovered an interesting fact that I suspected from the beginning -- my brother doesn't like juiced vegetables any more than he likes whole vegetables. One of the reasons that we got the juicer was to see if he could be coaxed or tricked into drinking some vegetable juice if it was disguised with fruit juice. It turns out that his taste buds are too keen for that, no matter how much fruit juice, honey, or other sweetener is added to it. Mom is getting lots of extra vegetable juice as a result.

I did get him to drink some orange juice, so this morning I decided to try making some apple-grape juice. I stemmed, washed, peeled, and chopped until I had a big mixing bowl full of fruit ready to juice. It is amazing how much work it takes just getting the stuff ready to go down the feed chute. I can see why the Vita-Mix company that makes a machine which chews it all up practically whole does enough business to charge about $400 for their machine.

Nonetheless, I persevered in my task and got enough juice for three servings. It wasn't as easy as it sounded in the juicing book. The authors neglected to mention one fact about grapes: they don't juice without a fight.

Now, the other things I had put down the chute had gone down fairly tamely. The carrots took a bit of pushing, but they did go through. Grapes squish through if you use the pusher, but you have to trap them in there first while they try to jump back out. So I was trying to feed more grapes down the chute while the first grapes bounced and splattered and spit seeds out the top in a final act of defiance. If you ever get a juicer and want to try grapes, be prepared for a counterattack of surprising vigor right down to the seeds.

Both Mom and Steve are sleeping in so their waffles are getting cold and their fresh juice is getting warm. Aargh! I consoled myself with a trip to the ComposTumbler with the fruit pulp. That is working fairly well. It actually did heat up and it is digesting the stuff going into it. There is quite a bit of compost among the newer stuff still digesting. I have come to a few conclusions about the thing that the instruction manual did not mention.

It needs more than few easy turns every few days. This thing doubles as an exercise machine. It doesn't take too much effort to turn it, but it helps to give it a few spins every time you put something new in to mix it in. They also didn't mention the work to gather the materials to put in it, assuming that if you were an organic gardener you were already accustomed to being a slave to your garden waste anyway. And be sure to let go of the drum once your hands have gone from the top of the drum to the horizontal when turning the thing or you could end up with a sprained wrist. Ouch! A better plan would be to encourage your strong, loving husband, son, or other cooperative person to turn it for you while you admire the taut stomach muscles he or she is developing. Steve is not going to fall for that here, but you may have more success at your house.

At least we do have plenty of garden waste to put in the tumbler and more growing by the second as long as it looks like something that should be pulled up. Mom has been telling me about all the things that I can remove from her garden with great happiness. Steven is still gloating a bit about all the work I volunteered to do to pay for this.

You have to get everything ready to go in (shredded, non-compostable things like thick branches removed, moistened if necessary which helps for newspapers and the like until you build up enough compost to just pour a little water over it in the composter) and hurry to spread it fairly evenly over the compost so you can get the door closed again before the compost cools. It doesn't help to stand there admiring your compost while it cools and the bacteria eating the stuff go into a coma. You get a quick glimpse of your potential garden manna before you have to latch the door shut and dutifully spin in the new stuff. So gather up enough stuff to top off the tumbler as it digests its load so you don't have to open it too frequently, and don't forget to add warm water to keep it moist according to how much dry stuff went in.

Well, Steve and Mom still aren't up and it is time to spin the tumbler again, so I'll have to wait until they get up to find out if Steve can be persuaded to drink more fresh fruit juice. Here's the link to the ComposTumbler page so you can see my new toy in the meantime. Look for the littlest one at the very end (Back Porch ComposTumbler) to see what I got myself into with this bright idea.