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)

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!