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