Last Strawberries for the year

Last of the strawberries this year?

I have found that using parchment paper is better than the silpat stuff!  It holds more too.

Wine is working! Various late harvest stuff

Wine

Not much going on this weekend.  The wine is fermenting well though!

More tomato gravy!

Didn't have enough to do anything else with, so I figured I would make some more gravy!  Yum!

Summer Squash, cabbage and eggplant harvesting

Just a quick shot of the harvest this weekend.

Cherry Trees Mulched

These trees are in rough shape.  The mulch seemed to help the blueberries a lot, so I will keep putting it down on the cherries too!  I am tempted to use some high Nitrogen fertilizer on these cherry trees next year.  They are old enough to tolerate it better and they sure could use something to get them to grow!

Mulching the fruit trees - making sure everyone has tree cages

But first - wine update!

I pressed the residual juice from the grapes and continued the fermentation process with my wine!

It's fermenting!  The cloudiness is from the pectin.  Now I am thinking that I didn't add pectinase!  Oh well, It will be ok.

Fruit tree care

I finally got some time to put some of the mulch around the fruit trees!  It took a lot, but I still have some left!

The mulch pile is a lot smaller now!

Generator test and start

Generator preparation for hurricane season.

I have been pretty bad at taking care of my generator at the city house, but since there are some hurricanes threatening to stop by, I thought I would check it out.  Of course, it would start and run.  It started (with the cord pull only, since the battery was dead - although i think there might be another electrical problem too), but would only run for a short time.  I looked up the model number for the machine and started some diagnostics. 

As with the lawnmower up at the farm earlier this year, it turned out that the carburetor jets needed cleaning.    I got it running reliably and making electricity!

These pictures aren't that interesting, I know - but I am saving them here where I can find them if I need them again!

Dinner: Tomato gravy and some corn!

Made some tomato gravy, cooked up some corn - delicious harvest time dinners

I like tomato gravy and since we aren't needing any more tomatoes preserved (plenty canned and freeze dried from last several years), I decided to splurge and make some!  Also cooked up some of the corn from the least harvest.

I don't use a recipe for this.  I just put some oil in the pan, slice the tomatoes, dredge them in flour and place them in the pan.  Then when it looks like a pan full, I add some sugar (like a tablespoon - artificial sweetener works too) and some salt and pepper.  Sometimes I put this in the vitamix if I want it smooth.

Kale crackers,

Kale Crackers!

I haven't gotten around to harvesting much kale this year and I felt bad about it.  So I went out to the raised bed and managed to salvage enough to make some Kale crackers!  The recipe is somewhere else on the blog here.  It's something like 3 cups of Kale puree, 1 C almonds, and 1/4 C nutritive yeast powder, salt, pepper, various spices to taste.  These turned out quite nicely!  There is always some variance in the moisture content of the Kale so there may be some tweaking involved to get the consistency correct.  I just spread this on silpat and dry/bake in oven at something like 250F - 300F.  Your choice of when to take them out depending on how crisp you like them.

Kale crackers bagged and ready to munch on!  

Canning more peaches

I picked these peaches off of the "packed" tree last week - it had more peaches than leaves I think! Anyway, I got around to canning them.  They were a little bit unripe - but good for canning.  Looks like 15 pints canned here.

Looks like about 15 pints canned here!

Not bad for one little tree!  This is the first real harvest from this tree too!

Squash, tomatoes, strawberries, and elderberries are still producing

The tomatoes were a bit of a disappointment this year, but that's ok.  I have plenty canned and freeze dried in storage!  In fact, I did not plant these for storage/preservation since we had so many.

Everbearing strawberries are still putting out some fruit!

Not a lot of them, but enough to flavor some fruit leather!

Grape harvest - whats left anyway

The deer and the racoons left me only about 6 lbs of grapes.  That's in total, all varieties included!  Buggers!  Next year there is going to be a fence around the grapes.  Maybe electric header too.  We will see.  Anyway, I picked what I had and mixed them all together to make about 1/2 gallon of wine.   It will probably be awful, but these grapes aren't much good for eating (they taste funky).

Total grape harvest for 2017!  All picked off them stems and ready to squish to make some wine.

Squished and in for the primary fermenting

Air-lock in place.  Now just wait for the grapes to render a bit more juice.  I believe I added some pectinase, but I can't remember.

Apples

I processed some of the Gala apples (and a few of the other apples from varieties that didnt produce many apples)  into applesauce and apple leather.

Didn't make a lot of applesauce, which is ok since I evidently don't eat a lot of applesauce (I still have over 12 quarts left over from canning it in previous years)

The Raspberry/apple leather may actually have some elderberry in it too, if I recall.

Hmm, I guess I didn't get any pictures of the blackberries (not raspberries, despite the label)