Plum Jam

Beautiful red plums awaiting 'jamming'. I actually had to pick and process these all in one day because due to a sudden summer rain storm (unusual around here), they were all starting to split on the tree.

Washed, cut, pitted plums sitting in the bowl of my food mill. Aren't they a gorgeous color?

Plum puree exiting the food mill into a stainless bowl.

Jam being cooked.

For this recipe, I used the regular certo pectin and quite a bit of sugar. The jam turned out delicious but a tad sweet for my tastes. Next time, with this variety, I'll use either the low sugar pectin or Pomona's Pectin which sets with calcium, not sugar. I just bought a couple of boxes and I'm anxious to try it...too bad all of our fruit is past! I might just have to buy something at the store so that I can give it a shot this year.

I still need to take photos of the finished product but it is just beautiful! The red color looks so stunning sitting there on our shelves! These plums are probably my favorite item that we grow (right now, once the blueberries are mature it'll be a toss up). I just love these. When my parents were visiting, my father loved running out to the tree every morning to pick a few for his breakfast. They are spectacular for eating and *almost* as good in cooking. I've frozen quite a few bags of these, so I'll hopefully get the chance to use them in a few more recipes this winter.

We have recently been discussing where to put an inside drying line for once the rains start (like today!!) for laundry. As much as it's super convenient to use the dryer, once we are on solar, it'll be virtually impossible (only for emergencies). We are trying to learn to live with less NOW...so that means using a clothes line for more than just big quilts and bicycle clothing. ;-) And since this is so timely - I love Sharon's response on this very topic - to a NYT article... "If you think flapping underpants are scary..."

Slammed with Spring

My appologies to all my readers for my absense. It's amazing how quickly life can fly by when you are busy, no? I cannot believe that it’s been almost a month since I last posted!

I’m not going to recap all that’s happened during that time but in summary: lots of planting , a little bit of harvesting, some dehydrating, some hair cutting, some eye surgery and some biking was had by our little household. And now for the photos:

One branch of my favorite plum tree - full of plums. We are going to have a bumper crop of these babies this year!

The 'row garden' area. The mess down the left is potatoes, in the distance you can see garlic, tomatoes and where the beans are planted (the fencing/trellis in the middle). The black covers to the right are the sweet potatoes.

The grape arbors as they just start to show leaves (and a few tiny grapes) with our greenhouse at the end of the first aisle.


CD's hanging from twine to scare away birds. Garlic in the foreground, tomatoes behind. You can see how close our boxes are to the edge of the row garden, too (in the distance).

The field of boxes - mostly planted at this point. I need to add one more trellis for the cukes and plant a few random items, but these are pretty much done until mid-summer when we plant the fall items.

The pruning begins...

Loganberries - as they looked last summer just prior to being fully ripe.

We have about 20 different fruit trees, two types of berries (both thornless!), and about 4 different varieties of grapes on our property. We are also going to be adding blueberries as well.

While we got more apples, pears, berries and grapes than we knew what to do with this past year, there were some things that could use massive improvement. First of all, many of the grapes didn't mature well and they were extremely difficult to pick. The same could be said of the blackberries and and our loganberries had a lousy harvest. The apples were plentiful, but many were smaller than they should have been. We saw a small plum harvest, but no cherries at all. To improve all of the above, we need to prune (and spray...but that's a different entry!).

Pruning is best done in the winter with the trees are basically dormant. This is true for the fruit trees, the berry brambles and the grape vines. The previous owners used to take really good care of their garden, but in the year before we bought the place, they had some illness in the family and ended up neglecting things in the yard. They also had the house on the market for over a year, so they were probably trying to keep things 'picture perfect' and pruning can be messy. All of this led to some very overgrown things and this winter, we are working to remedy that...

Anyway, this weekend I worked on the berry brambles while my H tackled the grape vines. For the grapes, he first cut a path behind the last trellis and in front of the buffalo fence. You can actually walk back there now (previously an impossibility). He had to cut massive amounts of wild blackberry canes coming over the buffalo fence. Then he had to tame the out of control grape vines working their way back over the fence from our yard. The two were so intertwined that it was hard to tell where one finished and the other began, particularly in the summer! Then he started on one of the trellises (we have three). He straightened it, added and removed wire, and secured it. Then he started pruning so that we can better train the grape vines. We figure that it'll take a few years before we get them in order, so we felt justified in really cutting back some of them. It's such a huge job that he was only able to finish one row (besides cutting the path). The other two rows will have to wait for the next rain-free weekend.

Berry brambles - "before". The left are predominantly blackberries and the right are the loganberries.

For the berry brambles, we have two rows spaced about 4 ft apart. They are oddly assorted in terms of variety. One row is half logan berries and half some other un-identified plant (we need to wait for it to bloom to figure it out). The second row is predominantly thornless blackberries with one logan berry plant on one end. The photo above is how it all looked when I started. There were at least three years worth of canes on the blackberries as it was not pruned last year at all. In the middle of the summer, my H dug into it and tried to cut out all the thorned blackberry canes he could (these are wild and grow everywhere around here). Wild blackberries are actually considered a nuisance weed here and we do our best to keep them under control. Anyway, thanks to his hard work last summer, I only had a few of the painful variety to dig out of the mess.

I basically started by cutting out all thorny branches and anything thornless that had given us fruit last year. All the branches that had leaves but no fruit yet are the branches that will give us fruit this coming year (they give fruit on their second year). I also had to cut away a lot of dead grass and a few other types of plants that had flourished under the protection of the blackberries. Then I set about restringing all the wire. I did three rows of wire between each t-post (and I had to reposition a few posts, too) and pulled them as tight as I could. Then I carefully worked each remaining cane into the trellis taking care not to break them. I tried to spread them out as best I could. This will allow the sun to better reach all the berries and make them all much easier to pick. I think this might also make them much more visible and accessable to the birds, so we do have bird netting set aside should that be needed next summer. All in all, it was a LOT of work, but I feel really good about having it done. All I have left to do is to spread some compost at the base and then mulch on top of it to keep the grass at bay.

Berry brambles - "after"... Hard to see in this photo since so many canes have no leaves, but they are woven around the wire trellis. I still need to add compost and mulch.

Next opportunity we have, we'll finish up the grapes and get the trees done (apples, pears, cherry & plum). The trees will be a team job. I should also mention that we took a few clippings from our neighbors who have this apple tree that produces absolutely delicious apples (for both eating and baking). We are going to graft those branches on to one of our red delicious trees (we have two). We figure we'll do it on those particular trees for a number of reasons. 1) we have way more red delicious apples than we'll ever need and they aren't good for anything but eating and drying 2) those trees did really well last year, so they are clearly nice strong healthy trees and 3) the red delicious apples are the most distinctive apple (throughout it's life cycle), so it'll be really easy to tell the new variety from the old red delicious apples. Neither of us have grafted fruit trees before, so wish us luck! I'll definitely report back on our progress...

Frost at the farmette

Tomatoes in the laundry room window - please excuse the over-abundance of yellow - we have not decorated this room yet!

We had our first frost last night! The timing was pretty much perfect. Yesterday evening when I got home, I had a few extra minutes so I grabbed a bucket and headed out to the garden. Something had triggered my urge to pick tomatoes. I started out just picking the red ones, but then I decided that it was time to bring in the whole crop. I picked all the green tomatoes that were of a decent size. I just read somewhere that as long as you pick them with the stems still on, they'll ripen nicely in a window. Keeping the stems on keeps the tops from rotting. Anyway, now we have two windows lined with tomatoes and every last one of them was saved from the damaging frost. Phew!

Most of the super green ones are in the kitchen widow.

After lining up the tomatoes, I opened the packages I got in the mail. I actually had 3 waiting for me! One was a new deraileur for my bike, one was a couple of books from Amazon and the last one was the garlic I had ordered over the summer. The place I order from doesn't ship until it's the right time to plant for your zone. I opened the box, inspected the garlic and read the instructions. "Plant after the first light frost". What perfect timing! We will be planting garlic this weekend. I'm really excited about this - I love garlic and I've never planted it before.

Lastly, instead of parking my fat butt infront of the boobtube last night, I figured it was time to do something with the sugar plums our neighbor had dropped off. The dehydrator booklet says that foods with tough skins (like plums and grapes) should be blanched (boiled) for 1-2 minutes to crack the skin prior to putting them in the dehydrator. I tried that the last time and while it worked great for the grapes/raisins, the plums made a mess and turned out all mushy and gross. That could have been because they were too ripe, but I really didn't want to break out the boiling water if I didn't have to. I figured I'd try one other method. So I picked out all the plums that weren't too ripe (there were some that were over-done) and washed them.


Then I cut them in half, removed the pits, and placed them skin side down on the dehydrator trays. I did 6 or 7 trays worth and let them dry overnight. This is how they look so far:


They have a few more hours until they reach 'done' status, but it looks like they are working out just right! Now - do I even like prunes? I have no idea!

Growing things

Grapes - white variety. These are sweet and will probably be excellent table grapes in a week or two.

Unknown plum variety - this is a HUGE tree in the way back of the property. We think it's likely older than the house. These plums are tiny little things - but taste pretty good (they aren't quite ripe yet).

One of our two first watermelons! We planted 3 varieties and so far, this is the only one producing.

Our first full sized tomatoes - about to turn red! (we've already had some grape and plum tomatoes to harvest)

Grapes - this is the red variety - we have way more of these than the white ones. I forsee grape juice in our future.

Pears - the pear harvest will be HUGE this year. I picked the first 4 ripe ones today. The cold wet spring that affected the apple harvest apparently did not bother the pears!

Plums - these are prune plums. We need to harvest them and dry them as they taste weird in their current state - should be interesting!

These are one of 4 or 5 apple varieties we have. This one is very small. Small trees, small apples...but they taste a little like Cortlands (if I remember correctly).

We also have identified two red delicious trees, three tress of a variety that looks like fuji and one tree of a totally unknown variety that is tart and makes a good baking apple. That particular tree ripened well ahead of the rest of the apple trees. Lastly, we have a tree on the other side of the property that is well behind the other apples. The variety is yet to be determined as the apples are still small green things with only a slight blush on a few...

I also harvested our first potatoes last night. I've never grown potatoes, so I wasn't sure what I was doing when we started. We basically just took a regular potato that had sprouted in a few places and cut it into smaller pieces. Then I planted these pieces in the garden in a row. H said that his father used to cover the potato sprouts with dirt, so we did that for awhile. They bushed up nicely:

Potatoes on the right, corn on the left.

Eventually though, the potato plants started looking sickly. I'm not sure if it was lack of water, lack of sun (the corn kind of shadows them now), or some bug issue. They never flowered (I thought they were going to) and now they look sort of dead. Last night, I picked the worst looking one and pulled it up. I then dug into the mound. There were no potatoes in the mound at all, but there were 5 or 6 under the ground (below where I first planted the spud). How easy was that? I'm definitely going to leave the rest of them where they are for awhile yet. And we also have two types of sweet potatoes planted that don't look sickly or dying at all so we should be harvesting potatoes this fall. We definitely have plans to expand next year - both corn and potatoes.