Harvest Fest

On Saturday, I went to Somerville's community garden to volunteer with their Harvest Fest that they have every year. It attracted a lot of toddlers and their parents. We had apple bobbing, cooked veggies that were grown locally, pumpkin carving, and apply cider making. I went and helped with the apple cider making because I was attracted by the cider press. A couple of people were trying to make it work and I was trying to figure out how it worked.

So their way was a pretty long process. Someone would cut up the apples into small pieces, someone else would need to feed it into a grain grinder thing, and we would collect the ground apples (and the juice) to put into the press. The press has sleeves that lets the juice filter out. The result was really good. The only problem was that the cutting and grinding of the apples took a while. The press needed a lot of ground apples to operate. A lot of kids wanted to help grind the apples (turn the handle).

So I let them all help me grind apples. I mainly fed more apples into the grinder and pushed the apples down so that they get grinded. This grinding process can actually go prety fast but not with the kids. They're too energic and jumpy and was just concerned about turning the handle rather than producing any output. I didn't think this was a problem at all but a lot of the adults were complaining that it was taking too long. I'm not sure why they were complaining anyhow. I think we were producing enough cider. We just weren't going very fast. I was just concerned that all the kids who wanted to help, had the chance to help. There was a three year old that was really sweet who didn't do too much, but I didn't mind. If the kids are having fun, who cares if the process is inefficient? Who cares if we aren't really producing a lot of cider? I really hate it when people miss the point because they were concerned about efficiency, production, and doing things fast. Not everything has to be competition. Who cares if one kid can turn the handle faster than the other one?

Actually, I don't think cider making was supposed to be a hands on activity but just a "watching how it's done." But the kids just kept coming and wanted to help out. These other volunteers and parents, though, they just kept commenting on how this grinding the apples was a bottleneck of the whole process. I'm just like, "The kids don't mind! They don't even care about the cider. They just want to turn the handle and see mush come out the other end. And if they learn a little something out of this and get to drink cider, that's great. Seriously, as long as they're having fun and get to do what they want to do, that's good enough for me."