The Mild Summer is Ending, Let the Preserving Begin!

Found an old horseshoe in the garage while cleaning some things out. Don't know where it came from, no one here has horses. And although the house is 104 years old this year, the garage dates from the 1940s.

For no good reason I put it up over the side door to the garage. Kinda jaunty if I do say so myself.

Fruit Fest, Part I

Things are coming ripe around here, and this year I vowed not to let the overabundance of fruit go to waste. So we have been doing lots of preserving, of various sorts.

Apples

We get three distinct crops of apples around here, depending on the variety.

Grannysmith's come ripe first, and get eaten out of hand first, as we have been watching the darn apples ripen all year. The Grannysmiths are done by the end of August.

They are great dried, and using our little core-it-slice-it-peel-it machine (hand cranked, of course) the apples come out in perfect little disks. (They actually come out in a spiral, but through the miracle of geometry the spiral becomes a stack of rings with a single downward stroke of a knife.)

We also eat and dry slightly under-ripe Winesaps and golden delicious. The goldens are more tart when under-ripe, and dry better when less ripe, and are not even bad out of hand. Once they are ripe they go mealy quickly, and tend to go browner when dried, so the goldens are mostly done too. (In point of fact, I have a few on the tree and many in the eating bin, right at this moment. )

The Winesaps go from green to mixed red and green, the redder they get the sweeter they get too. Since we have been eating and drying solidly since the first week of August, they actually have stayed on tree long enough to get good and red. They are a very white-fleshed, crisp, juicy apple, close to my favorites. They usually finish in the first week of September, but since that week will be pretty busy, I think they will come in to be dried then too.

Grapes

The Seedless purple Grapes have come on in great profusion this year; the neighbor harvested those on his side (at my invitation) several weeks before ours. We have been cutting and eating or giving to friends all summer, and the grapes have gone from tangy-tart to super-sweet. As the last 20 pounds or so were starting to drop, we cleaned the vine last week. But what do you do with all those grapes?
Well, for starters, the other half made grape jam. Yes, jam, not jelly. Came out so good we bought more jars and made a second batch. If you are lucky we will share.

Then, more as an afterthought and experiment than a serious effort, I laid some grapes out to dry in the sun. After about three weeks, we have a small batch of delicious home grown raisins!

If I had put out 20 pounds of grapes to dry, it would have been a failure; but like all our best experiments, we only made one tray, and will have about two cups of raisins. Still, watch out next year.

Indeed, the neighbor likes the grapes well, and we may have to plant more vines along the same fence in the spring. Alas, they do take two or three or more seasons to start producing well, but I think it will be worth it.

Stay tuned for Part II !

Grape Jam, Homemade Raisins, Both From Backyard Grapes

(The mini pumpkins are decorative, also grown here. Anyone have a recipe for mini-pumpkin? )