Days Cottage is one of the founder producer members of the Stroudco cooperative, having helped to set up the not-for-profit Food Hub in October 2006. Helen and Dave, the owners of Days Cottage Apple Juice, run a small business from their family farm in Brookthorpe pressing apples and producing delicious apple and pear juice blends as well as award-winning ciders and perry.

They are now offering to use their juicing and pasteurising facilities to produce apple juice and cider from your surplus apples. If you take your fruit to their farm they will wash it, put it through their scratter (which cuts up the fruit), then press it in their traditional apple press which produces one 75cl bottle of juice from each kilogram of fruit. Your fruit needs to be ripe and sound (not windfalls). The juice comes back to you in green screw top bottles which you can label and give away as Christmas presents or keep for up to two years – just in case next year’s apple harvest is not as bountiful as this autumn’s!

For producing apple juice you need to deliver a minimum of 100kg of fruit – ideally a mixture of cookers and eaters. Why not talk to neighbours and friends, pool your fruit and share the juice? If you want to make cider, you can take smaller quantities and collect your juice for fermentation using traditional local recipes available from the Gloucestershire Orchard Trust.

To book your apples in for juicing phone Helen on 07879 226031.