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!  

Too HOT! First elderberries!

Berry (and 2 apples) pickings

I mowed a bit, mostly around the persimmon trees.  It was too hot to do mush else.  I went out and did a farm inspection and found a few ripe fruits.  Picked maybe 1 pint of strawberries from the ever-bearing plants in the front patch and 1 pint of raspberries from the wild ones along the road.  I picked the remaining two "pristine" (that's the variety) apples.  We ate two of the apples (well one and a half - one was damaged by the birds) and have one left now.

Last year I only got one or two from the strawberries because of weed overload and varmints - we did much better this year.

The "mole spikes" seem to be saving my strawberries!

More raspberries and strawberries.  Raspberries will be coming in fast now - if I can save them from the varmints!

Missing pears!

While doing my survey I checked on the pear trees.  Something removed all of the pears!  ALL OF THEM!   I didn't see any damage to the trees (well, a little damage, but I think that was from a T-storm) and no signs of big animals around the trees.  Damn weird.  Mom says it was probably racoons and/or opossums (which was my guess too).  Those pears weren't near ripe and they were being attacked by the birds like last year so I don't think any human would have bothered (I wouldn't have and they are my trees!).  Its strange though because there are still apples on some of the trees, so maybe the critters didn't smell them or don't like them as much as the pears?  I didn't see any peaches either, but then again I didn't look hard and there aren't many peaches anyway - maybe 2-5.

Pear tree looks ok - just missing all of the pears!

Dying (dead?) plum tree

I noticed that one of the plum trees is dying - or dead.  It is a two-year old, one of the bigger plum trees.  I don't know why its dying - it seemed healthy until recently.  My fear is that it might be dying from exposure to roundup.  I had sprayed roundup around many of the trees to keep the grass down.  I haven't seen any of the other trees looking bad ... yet!  I am scared to death that I will have more dying if its a roundup issue!  The funny thing is that I consciously didn't spray around the smaller trees for fear of this kind of thing - but I just can't say for sure if I sprayed near this particular tree.

On close examination of the tree I found a big split bark area - was this here before I sprayed the roundup?  If so that damage may have allowed the roundup into the tree. Although I didn't think I sprayed close enough to the trees for much roundup to get on them - maybe the surrounding weeds carried some into the tree wound?

See that bark split?  Maybe roundup got in there?  Or is this some other issue?

It sucks!  I will have to replant a plum - need to look up what type this was.

Elderberries!

Some of the elderberries were ripe enough to pick - so I braved the heat and picked!  I split the picking into two days.  All told we got about one and 2/3rds gallon.  We did wash these - submerged in water and skimmed out the trash - then we drained in a colander.  They look good!  Hopefully these will come in gradual enough that we don't get overwhelmed like last year.

Before de-stemming

After de-stemming and washing.

Grape vine status

The vines actually look surprisingly good considering the heat and humidity!  The rust is not running crazy, so far.  Also, some of the wine grapes are finally beginning to look like grape vines instead of small shrubs!

Wine grapes are up to the bottom of the arbor - this one is up to 2nd wire!

The white grapes are looking OK!  I hope they get a lot of growth in this year to catch up.  

Something ate a bird!

Something big enough to take out a crow it looks like!  Found a lot of feathers and some aweful on the one grape arbor.

Deer Damage

I noticed some damage to the beans this time around - looks like deer having been browsing!  This garden is unfenced.  I'd suspect rabbits, but the damage seems too widespread to me; although we do have plenty of rabbits!

See how this area of the beans is thinner?  Looking closer showed the bite marks

They seem to like both kinds of beans!!

Oh, and they trimmed off some of the dill weed up by the house!

Mom's Pretty flowers

We stopped by mom's on the way back to the city.  Her flower gardens are really pretty now!