Fruit preservation continues, final peaches picked and CORN!

Fruit leather

I believe I have already mentioned that I love fruit leather and have committed myself to making a bunch of it as a way of preserving my fruit.  This stuff is great.  I can take it to work easily, its very compact, and is fairly easy processing work compared to canning.  I did several batch this weekend.  Elderberry, peaches and pears and I think maybe some apples made it in.

Corn harvest

I had no need for corn this year, I just planted the old seed I had just to get rid of it.  Didn't do much to take care of it either (although Katherine did pull a few weeds in one section, the bulk of the corn patch was never weeded or cared for).  Nonetheless, we got a fairly impressive harvest of corn!

Katherine did most of the hard work on this.  I simply picked, helped shuck, and put the loose corn into the freezer bags and vacuum sealed them.  All told we got 46 pints!!!

Canning Pears

It's a bit embarrassing, but I have gotten so far behind in these blog updates that I don't know which of the varieties of pear I am canning here!    I believe these are still the "top of the hill" variety of pear, but I can't find any picture records of the other variety.  Quite disturbing.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the canned pears:

I am not even sure how many pints I canned!  Holy Moly, I have to do better!

Gala Apples Picked

I went ahead and picked the rest of (the bulk of) the Gala apples.  We got a decent number of them.  Using these mostly as eating apples since they are in pretty good shape and should keep for a few weeks.

Well, the bottom container apples aren't in great shape - these will be used for leather or apple crisp!

These are "eating" apples!

Picked the last of the peaches

The peaches on the smaller tree started falling so I decided to go ahead and pick them all.  We got quite a crop from just one small tree!  By the way, there are a couple of those "Korean Giant" pears on top of the peaches there - evidently, the only picture I have of these pears this year!

See the two pears?

Amazing amount of peaches off of one little tree!

Pear picking, apple picking, corn, tomatoes and orchard care

Elderberry & peach leather

Elderberries are starting to slow down but there are still plenty to pick and process.  I decided to make some peach-elderberry leather!    I had to boil it down a bit more than for the strawberry leather and I had to add more honey - elderberries aren't very good without some sweet!

B-day outing with family

Tom and Julie were up to see mom and asked if I wanted to go out somewhere with them for lunch!  We went to the King Buffet in Bedford.  It has the best Chinese food around the area.

Asian Pears

Picked a bunch of the "top of the hill" variety of my asian pears.  They taste pretty good!  There is a big-ass yellow bee that seems to like them too.  Looks like a yellow jacket but 4-5 times the size.  They actually consume a good portion of the pears!  After I saw the condition of the remaining pears, I decided to pick all of this variety of pears.

Bee damage!  This is not all of the damaged pears - some were completely cleaned off!

This is the last of this variety of pears - I picked all of the rest to save them from the bees!

Apples

I picked more of the apples this weekend too.  Picked all of the crab apples.  I don't know what to do with the crab apples.  Katherine says she's going to make pie filling with them.  I guess we could try applesauce too.  We will see.  They are a bit unripe yet, so we have time to decide.  The pain in the butt thing about them is they are so small that prepping them for any use takes a bit of effort.

All of the crab apple crop this year.

First real picking of the Royal gala and some yellow delicious apples.

Mulching and caging the orchard trees

I put in a significant effort to get cages around all of the trees in the orchard.  I have seen a couple of deer now with antlers!  So its just a matter of time before they start scraping the velvet off.  I hope the decide to use some forest trees rather than my fruit trees this year.

I mulched a bunch of the orchard trees too.  They are easier to mulch before putting up the cages.

I just sat the cages on top of the mulch for now.  I will come back later and stake them in

I ran out of fencing so I couldn't do these last three trees.  I will probably scrounge some fencing from some of the dead cherry trees for them.

Some veg harvest

I checked the corn and found that it was getting about ripe.  We picked a dozen or so for eating.  We will probably pick most of it next weekend.  Also, the cold nights have made many of the tomatoes rot on the vine before ripening, but I did manage to get a few usable ones. 

As usual, I picked a couple quarts of strawberries

Also got some of the eggplant and cabbage in there!  

I managed to get enough tomatoes for a modest skillet of fried tomato gravy!

With corn on the cob.  Was excellent "first eating" ceremony

Eclipse

Well, it wasn't total eclipse here - only 80%.  20% of the sun is still pretty damn bright!  

Vegetable harvest - more fruit

Green beans

Well, that bean patch had some issues this year, no the least of which is that it was a stream bed for a good portion of the growing season.  Also, there were a couple of varmints, I suspect a groundhog and definitely saw a rabbit munching on the green beans!   It was interesting to note that neither varmints seemed to go for the pinto beans - just the green beans.  Also, because the rains kept the ground too wet to get into how, the weeds pretty much took over!  This weekend I went in to pick and had to de-weed the beans to find them!  The yield was quite poor.  No surprises there.  About 2 quarts.  We just cooked them up and had them for dinners during the week.

Green beans piled on some cornbread for dinner!

Canned more peaches


I picked some more peaches.  Most of these were yellow peaches this time.  I have 4 trees that produce yellow peaches (of 2 different varieties).  I canned 8 pints of these.

I should point out that I used the new type of canner that Katherine bought.  It's actually quite useful in that it frees up the stove for canning prep work.

Strawberries and Blackberries

Strawberry harvest continues.  I froze some and used some for more fruit leather.  Also started picking the blackberries.  Seems we missed the start of the blackberry season by a week or so.  Just so busy with the elderberries!

Elderberry harvest continues

Not much to add here.  Just processing away!  This actually takes most of our time during the weekend due to the fact that we having to manually pick these little berries off the stems!

We have determined that if we pick this contained to heaping full that it produces about enough for 5-6 quarts of canned juice.  Also, if you have the option, do not pick more than you can destem in one day.  Working full day we can do about 10-12 quarts of  canned juice (two of the above containers worth of pickings)

Fruit harvest continues!

Elderberries continue

They keep ripening!  Gathered more.  Canned the juice.  Repeat.

BTW:  Here is the canning "recipe" and info:

• Expected juice yield: 2 Gallons of fresh berries should produce about 2.5 to 3 quarts of juice. This corresponds to the 4 lb or berries per gallon number I found last year.  About 3 lbs of juice and 1 lb of pulp per gallon of fresh berries.  The juiciness of the berry is a function of how ripe it is (and the variety of berry - mine are mixed variety evidently).  Note that when I freeze dried a gallon of elderberries produced about 4-5 pints of water.  This would suggest that 1 gallon of berries should produce 4-5 lbs of juice, which is about what i get.  

• So, bottom line: 1 gallon of berries = 4-5 lbs juice = 4-5 pints juice

• Best method of juicing:  Slowly, on low heat, bring fresh (de-stemmed) berries to boil.  You can use a potato masher to help a little, but don't overdo it!  Once boiling, cook berries for 10-15 mins.  I stir about every 5 mins to make sure there is no burning going on.  Watch the heat! The berries are then strained through a muslin bag or sheet.  Compress the ball of skins and seeds in the bag as best you can - its hot so be careful!  Measure the amount of juice that you extract, then remove the seed/skin ball from the bag and place it back in cookpot.  Measure the amount of juice you got and add that amount of water into the cookpot with the seeds/skins.  Now bring this to a boil as before.   After reaching boil and cooking for 10-15 mins, strain through muslin again.  Take the juice from the second straining and add to the juice from the first straining.   Throw the seeds/skins out. 

• DO NOT run elderberries through a squeezo or similar device!  The "meat" around the seeds contains a very sticky and hard to clean substance that will gum up everything!  However, there is literature that suggests that the "sticky goo" is the stuff that contains the anti-viral substance! I just hope that the regular juice I extract had enough of the substance to help me!  That goo is too damn hard to deal with.

The juice-count continues.  

Fruit leather 

Faced with a certain amount of damaged fruit that made canning impractical, I considered fruit leather.  I took the peaches and strawberries from this weekends harvest and simply cleaned, cooked, and pureed them in my vitamix.  I sweetened to taste (tricky for dried foods - don't over sweeten!) and then poured onto the silicone dryer mats.  I placed in the big dryer at 135F for 23hrs.  Turned out very nicely!

Seriously considering getting more of these mats.  perfect for fruit leather.

Grapes

The grapes are looking good so far!  I keep spraying with the myclobutanil fungicide.  The stuff really seems to work.  Unfortunately, the rains come so often and washes the sprays off!  I am also applying sevin to counter the japanese beatles.  I am spraying all of the fruit with sevin.  I am occasionally using the fungicides on all the fruit and nuts too because some are looking diseased.  This is especially true of the sour cherries.

Peaches

Besides the damaged peaches that I made into fruit leather, I also harvested some nice peaches for canning.  These are the Raritan Rose peaches (I think).  They are a white peach.  They taste milder than most yellow peaches.  I only canned 9 pints of these.  A lot of these were given away at work and in the neighborhood to friends.

Canned white peaches