Harvest Time is Always Busy!

We had a ton of cherries to process today. We decided to try out the hand-cranking machine to depulp the coffee. We realized quite quickly that the bowl was too small and we needed to make some modifications. :)

Our neighbor decided to stick around and help. Yay!!! We were going to get this done fast.

As you can see, we have a large bag of cherries to process. The bag was heavy and even though the cherries were just picked yesterday, they had a strong over-ripe cherry smell. I kept thinking of my Grannie and how she would not enjoy the smell at all. She was picky about cherry type things.

As our neighbor is helping us crank the cherries, his wife is happily watching us and glad that it is not her. :)

In comes Simon. He is the expert here and if I understood Spanish better, I am sure he was making fun of our sad setup. But, with a few modifications, he has a new setup within minutes.

Hrm, those two prongs can hold a bag....who knew?

So, my neighbors, Rick and I became useless and Simon took over and showed us how it is really done! By the way, he is really good at this.

Here is a picture of the coffee he had done a few days ago for my neighbors and it is drying now.

AND....here is ours...haha. I wonder if they would notice if I swap them out tonight. The batches are approximately the same size. Ours just needs to be washed and dried and we are days behind theirs. Maybe they would not notice. It might be funny to try.... :)

Oh...and Round #5 with the bees and my husband won today, or so he thinks. Time will tell if they really gave up on the tree as their new home or not.