Schoolkids spend a day hand-cranking fresh cider.
By Andrew Jenner

It was well below freez ing that Saturday last October, when the work began around sunrise at Henley’s Orchard in Crozet. For the next 12 hours, 15 third-graders from the Charlottesville Waldorf School, plus some parents and teachers, worked in shifts, sorting and chopping apples, straining at the hand-cranked press, and filling jugs with gallon after gallon of cider.

By nightfall, they’d pressed 50 gallons—and had drunk an untold amount straight off the press, necessary for quality-control and one of the joys of cidermaking. “It was quite a bit of work,” says Tony Lagana, a parent and owner of Ploughshare Biodynamic Farm in Louisa County.

While Henley’s Orchard doesn’t press cider for commercial sale, owner Tim Henley says the circa 1929 wooden cider press, which was donated by a customer, is available for people who’d like to make their own cider on-site. Henley always has plenty of no. 2 apples—bruised, scarred, undersize, or otherwise imperfect—waiting to be pressed into cider.

“Pressing is good exercise,” says Wayne Clark, who runs the Henley apple shed and supervises cidermaking there. “It’s a good way to lose weight and build up your muscles.”

Pressing cider is also good for the palate. Clark recommends experimentation with blending sweet and tangy apple varieties, such as Jonathan, Red Delicious, Jonagold, Grimes Golden, Winesap, Golden Delicious, and Cameo—some of the 28 varieties grown at Henley’s, an orchard that has been in the family since 1932.

Lagana’s recommended cider blend is roughly one-third Stayman, onethird Winesap, one-third Rome, spiked with a bit of wild crabapple. Wild crabapples can be tricky to find, but along the edge of old homesteads on the Blue Ridge Parkway is a good place to start looking, Lagana says.

The Waldorf third-graders earned $500 selling their cider to friends and family, helping to fund the class’ annual spring trip to the Hawthorne Valley Biodynamic Farm in Ghent, New York. There, they spent a week working as student farmers, the culmination of a yearlong concentration on agriculture that is a major component of the curriculum.

“Our whole philosophy of education is head, hands, and heart,” says Cam Martin, the school’s administrator. Everyone hopes this year’s October excursion will prove to be just as stimulating for all three.