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!