Blueberry Harvest, 2025

 I started harvesting blueberries on June 17.  The bushes were heavily-laden with berries, some of which are the biggest I have ever seen on my bushes.

 

 

The harvest is continuing in early July, but the berry quality is deteriorating.  As it turns out, June 17 was about the time the rain stopped. Summer droughts in north Georgia are not uncommon, but this year the rain held up very well until mid-June before the precip switch got turned off.  June overall was wetter than average at 4.8", but it was unevenly distributed.  I'm now watering all plants, but usually that just enables them to hold on.  The soil wicks away any water I put down fairly quickly.  Still, I'm at about 14 pounds and counting...

  

 

Black Walnuts, 2022

 In 2020 I had a bumper crop of black walnuts.  In 2021, I had hardly any.  I was expecting an alternate-bearing bigger harvest this year, and the trees did not disappoint.

I've been doing them one five-gallon bucket at a time; this is a manageable amount that takes me about an hour to process start to finish.  A full bucket yields very little once the hulls are knocked off.

After washing, they get arrayed in the sun to dry:

Now it's just a matter of cracking them...

Muscadine Harvest, 2021

 I have a muscadine trellis with six plants.  They have been in the ground for several years but had been growing rather slowly, root-hog-or-die style.  Last year I harvested a few from my Ison muscadine vine, and one or two from a couple of the others.  Then last winter I did some aggressive pruning and set them up for a good crop (I hoped).

In early August, the crop was looking very good.  I started picking in mid-August, and have pulled about 10 pounds off so far, mostly from the Ison.  Ison is listed by Ison's, the nursery that developed it and where I bought my vines, as an early variety.  Two others are early-mid season, Darlene and Summit.  I have been picking Summit for a while now--its yield will be about what the Ison was last year, a couple of pounds--and Darlene is just coming into harvest now, in mid-September.  The other variety I will harvest some off of this year is Late Fry, which should be ready in October sometime.

So far I am not doing anything with them other than eating fresh and freezing for further fresh eating.  At some point I might try to do something else with them.  If they continue to grow well, I'll have ... a lot... to deal with in good years.

I'm seeing some fruit flies and yellow jackets around the Ison now that they're ripening, and I have also seen a stink bug or two.  Overall, however, pest pressure has been minimal.  Hopefully it stays like that.

Driveway Blackberries

 At my new place, I've had nothing but heartache so far with planted blackberry cultivars.  The power company sprayed herbicide on ones I had planted--twice--killing about three dozen in the two episodes. Others I have planted have not thrived.

However, I do have wild ones growing in various places. One such spot is along my driveway.  There's a substantial thicket that is heavily shaded, but does produce some decent-tasting berries (although they're rather small, as wild berries are likely to be).

So far, I seem to mostly have luck with wild berries rather than the ones I have planted.  At my old suburban house, I did have some University of Arkansas cultivars that did well (Ouachita and Navajo; Apache wasn't so good).  I have planted both of those at the new place, but am still waiting on my first harvest.  Back in the suburbs, there were berries along the road (at least until the county came along and mowed them down).

Harvest time is now for these along the driveway; they just started to ripen about a week ago (early-mid June) and are now ripening rapidly.  As these are wild, one can end up punctured and ensnared pretty easily when picking.  Inevitably, some clusters of alluring berries are too far back to reach without bloodletting.  However, there's enough low-hanging or peripheral fruit to provide some satisfaction.

 

Black Walnut Harvest

 It's black walnut time.  I haven't improved my process much over what I have discussed before.  It's still a multi-step, somewhat slow process. I have gotten faster: a full 5-gallon bucket can be processed in 30-40 minutes.

The first step is to gather them; shown above are some walnuts that had been on the ground no more than about four days.  They soon start to turn black, as noted previously; the hull rapidly breaks down.  That's what it's designed to do.  The hull contains a hefty dose of juglone to suppress nearby vegetation, thus giving the nut the best chance to sprout and grow.

When the hull is black and soft, it can still be removed, though it gets a little more difficult.  If it dries down around the nut, as sometimes happens, it's extremely hard to remove, as discussed before.

Hammering the hulls off is messy and slow.  I'm still nowhere as fast as Rbeckism.  He spent about 5 seconds per walnut; I average a more (maybe 10 seconds), although speed is improving.

Once the majority of the hulls are knocked off:

 

I swirl them in water a few times to get them something approaching clean.

 

 

 

 

I'm not going for works of art; these are clean enough.  I've noticed over the years that walnuts are vulnerable to mold when the unhulled nuts are stored in buckets and when they are wet (as in the picture above) after hulling.  They need to be dried relatively quickly, and will retain moisture for a time. Shown above are nuts immediately after washing; below are several boxes of nuts, with the middle three boxes nearly dry.

 

One caveat, as noted previously:  the hulls stain.  If there are no husk flies, the juice from the hulls is a dark yellow, but it causes dark brown stains.  The left glove above is the one that holds the hulls while I knock them off with the hammer; it's badly stained.  Somewhere along the way, I got a small leak in my left glove, which led to my hand getting some stain on it.

This isn't entirely surprising.  The ridges on the nuts are very sharp.  One probably nicked a little hole in one of the fingers, even though the gloves are very thick.

 I'm still in the midst of the harvest.  In mid-October, my tree is at peak nut drop (curiously, the other tree didn't produce any nuts this year--which is fine...the one that has a bumper crop is the best tree for nut quality).

 To some degree, hulling is the easy part.  Next comes cracking...

Harvesting the Kieffer Pears

It's not much of a harvest this year.  But one of my pear trees bloomed, and I was surprised to see that some fruit actually developed.  I've mentioned before that there was an old Kieffer tree at my new house.  The tree did produce some pears, but also had a huge poison ivy vine thoroughly embedded in it, and I cut it down.

Now I have planted two more.  They have virtues--although they aren't the first choice for fresh eating, they do can well and make nice preserves.  They also dehydrate well.  Prime time for Kieffers in north Georgia seems to be late August / early September.  I may have been jumping the gun a little bit, but I went ahead and pulled mine just after mid-August.

I haven't actually cut into them yet, so don't know if I have curculio issues--they got no Surround or other preventive treatment, and I also did not do anything for fire blight.  I had some of that on both apple and pear trees.  It was very minor on this Kieffer.  That is one of the virtues of the Kieffer pear; it is not particularly susceptible to fire blight.

I didn't get much off the tree this year. I will probably just dehydrate them...or I may re-assess and make some preserves.

Muscadines and Figs

For the first time, I'm getting some muscadines.  I've planted six vines (two had to be replanted when the first died).  They have been in the ground for almost three years now, but this will be the first year I'll get more than one or two grapes per plant.  The biggest crop this year is on my Ison vine, and it is the one that is ripening first:

It's only going to be big compared to previous years.  The Ison looks like it has a couple of pounds' worth on it.  The Late Fry has maybe one pound; some of the others have a couple of grapes as in previous years.

I've also picked some figs.  I have yet to get a single fig off of a plant installed by me--actually, I have yet to have one planted by me live very long, a story for another day--but there's an old fig tree planted by the previous owner that I'm getting some off of this year.  There were two originally, but ambrosia beetles attacked one and I took it out.  The other one has probably been producing every year, but I haven't gotten many off of it--as I'm learning, the ripe ones are quickly attacked by wasps, ants, and June bugs.

The harvest from the fig tree is likewise pretty modest--there are many more that are too high for me to reach or that have ripened and been turned into bug food--but it's nice to have some (I got more than the picture shows; that's just one days' worth).  I'm going to guess it's a Celeste fig, but that's only a guess.

I also have apples and pears pending...

Beginning of the Blueberry Harvest, 2020

It's blueberry time.  I've moved, and don't have the five fairly mature bushes that I used to have, but I have five new ones (one of which has not yet produced much).  I won't get 20 pounds off of them this year, but may end up with as much as 6 pounds.  I'll be doing some blueberry preserves soon.

They started ripening in late June, and look like they will continue for another week or so--that's pretty similar to my experience at the old place.  The four producing bushes are largely the same as what I had before, mostly rabbiteyes and of the same varieties that worked well at my former house (Climax, Tifblue, Powderblue).   I have enough for a load of blueberry preserves.

Bumper Crop of Black Walnuts

Last year (2016) I got no black walnuts.  North Georgia had a severe drought in the late summer and early fall; although I had some nuts on the trees in July, by the end of August they had all aborted.

This year was different.  A lot of nuts were downed in early September by Irma.  As I mentioned in September, I went ahead and cracked some of them right away to see if they were okay and they were.  Lesson learned, however:  The nuts had not cured.  I left the container of nuts shown in the Irma post out at room temperature to see what would happen, and after a week or so the nut meats molded.

I didn't go back for the rest of the Irma walnuts because (as noted previously) it was a total pain trying to remove the husks.  It probably took 30-60 seconds of hammering to get them off each nut.

The remainder of the crop started to drop in October.  In all, I probably got about 20 gallons' worth off of my two trees, and I left many more on the ground unharvested.  I just couldn't get to them all in time.

It takes me about an hour to process five gallons.  I have gotten better at it, but it's still labor intensive.  First I knocked off the hulls with a hammer. The fully ripe ones were much easier to de-husk.  I had some husk fly larvae but not many; perhaps last year's failed crop cut down on the population some. Then I swirled them in water in a bucket, using both the water stream out of the faucet and the nuts themselves to remove remaining husk.  I did about three or four rinses, ending up with what you see here.  That's about clean enough, though I have seen cleaner shells.  People pressure wash them or do many more rinsing cycles to get them cleaner.  They don't have to be works of art.

I haven't cracked these yet--that's actually the most labor-intensive step in processing--but they are ready to go.  They'll be good in the shell for a year or two.

Irma Walnuts

I think about 1/3 of my black walnut crop was knocked down during Irma.  A friend who has several black walnut trees had a similar loss rate.  I figured they wouldn't be ripe yet, but decided to process a few just to check.  As mentioned previously, I hammer off the husks, wash them to get them as clean as reasonably possible, then crack them.  These early nuts had no husk fly larvae in them; there either won't be any this year or the eggs haven't hatched yet (it's possible the cycle is temporarily broken at my place; last summer the whole crop dropped prematurely because of the drought--no husks, no new generation).

The husks from the first few have been extremely hard to remove.  It might be because they aren't quite ripe.  Hopefully later it will be better.  Pretty much everyone says you should let the nuts dry for a while after husking, but this time I cracked them within a couple of days because I wanted to see how good they were.

I used my Master Nut Cracker (also available from 855sheller and maybe a few other places) to do the cracking.  It went pretty well this time. 

The nuts I cracked were from my good tree--the one that I think is an improved cultivar.  As you can see, it has big nuts and they yield a lot of nutmeat.  The cracker easily breaks them up without damaging the nut meats much, so I can get out big pieces.

 

The container shown has maybe three nuts in it.  I only cracked five total as a test.  I'm going to husk the other early ones at this point and look forward to the normal harvest when they start dropping in another couple of weeks.

End of the Blueberry Harvest

As noted previously, this was a lighter than normal blueberry season.  In terms of duration it was also shorter than normal, at about two weeks.  Last year I picked for nearly a month.  This year, toward the end of June, I pulled off what will probably be the last berries I pick.

As the pictures show, there are some berries that aren't even close to ripe yet; that's how my blueberry bushes are.  However, most of what's left is over-ripe (meaning I didn't spend enough time picking while they were at peak), and they're getting infested with ants at this point, making it necessary to carefully check almost every berry to be sure it's not frass-bedecked and hollowed out.

I ended up with about eight pounds, or 40% of what I got last year.  That's pretty decent.  I could've gotten ten pounds if I'd picked more frequently (but last year when I got 20, I could've probably gotten 22 or 23).  All in all, I'm happy with the way things turned out.

Blueberry Preserves

I do things other than mix sugar-laden preserves with the fruit I grow and buy.  However, preserves are easy to make; they maintain quality for a long time (at least four years); and they are a good thing to give people.  Pickled carrots might not be accepted by everybody, but (almost) nobody will turn down preserves of some sort.

That being said, I don't like blueberry preserves all that much.  They're fine, but not as good as peach preserves.  The blueberry flavor is not that strong in the finished product; it's more just sweet.

I got a good harvest this year and did one canner load (six pints) of preserves (the canner will hold more, but six pints is a manageable quantity).

SureJell's package insert has a recipe, but I don't see it at quick glance on their website. It's just four cups crushed blueberries, four cups sugar, one package pectin. This produces three pints, so it could be doubled.   By the way, it's a standard admonition to avoid doubling a jam or preserves recipe because there may be problems with fruit set.  I am happy that I have never had any problem doing that; it's more efficient that way.

Pickyourown.org has a recipe that starts with 10 cups of blueberries (intact), 7 cups of sugar, and 1/4 cup lemon juice, plus water and one package of pectin.  I don't add water but otherwise followed this recipe (bumped up slightly with 11 cups of blueberries, 7.5 cups of sugar, and an extra teaspoon of lemon juice because the recipe otherwise yielded about 5.75 pints the first time I tried it).

Blueberry preserves are just about the easiest kind to make.  Rinse the berries; measure the right quantity; stomp them a bit with a potato masher; heat with pectin and lemon juice; add sugar when it boils; return to a full boil for one minute; then fill jars with 1/4" headspace and process about 15 minutes (I'm at 1200' elevation so added 5 minutes to the sea-level recommendation of 10 minutes).

That's about it.

What did I do with the remaining 15 pounds of berries? I froze some, which can later be turned into pies or even more preserves, and ate the rest fresh.

As I noted last year, blueberries can be cheap at the peak of the harvest (here in Georgia, both Sam's and Costco had them for $4.98 for two pounds in July). That means I saved myself about $50 by harvesting my own bushes.  Considering the time it took, in an economic sense I'm probably not coming out very far ahead. I was picking every two to four days for almost a month, from mid-June to mid-July.  But I like doing it myself (this is not to say that I didn't buy some, as well, and dehydrate them).

More on Black Walnuts

I'm starting to process the black walnuts that have been falling.  Most of the nuts are on the ground now, with only a few left in the trees.

The first step is to get the hull off, which requires a bit of work the way I do it.  I mentioned earlier that corn shellers can be used to de-husk walnuts, but I'm not entirely sure whether that's intended to be when they are fresh--like in the picture at right--or when they've dried down.  You'll see various things online about hulling them; generally, people recommend it be done when the nuts are first collected.  If you wait until the husks dry around the nut, it's tough to remove them.

The texture of the husk is fairly meaty.  It's apparently edible, because you can buy pickled walnuts that include everything--shell, nut meat, and husk--in vinegar (the nuts are picked in an immature state for pickling).  I was interested in trying them until I found out they didn't shell the nuts... eating the whole thing isn't very appealing.

So I remove my husks and try to do so quickly.  The picture above was taken when I had just picked up the nuts.  They start to turn black almost immediately.  Black walnuts contain juglone, a somewhat herbicidal chemical that inhibits some other plants (but not all).  The nut falls to the ground; the husk deteriorates around the shell, and limits plant growth around where the nut will sprout and begin to grow.  So one has to be careful where the husks and washing water are dumped.

I use the hammer method, described very well in this video.  He's a lot faster at it than I am.  I pound away on the nuts inside a bag to try to catch the husks--they're messy and will stain anything they touch.  I use rubber gloves. The bag at left probably took me about 10-15 minutes to do.  Inevitably, you'll find some that have husk fly larvae in them (as shown in the picture below).  The first year I picked up my nuts, I was aghast when I discovered a few little worms in the box.  Don't worry about them.  They're pretty harmless.  They eat the husk material but don't penetrate the shell to get inside the nut itself.  I just work around them.

The husk flies may provide a somewhat beneficial service to the tree, by breaking the husks up a bit and making it easier for them to fall apart and decompose once they hit the ground. On my trees, the eggs laid by the adult flies pretty much reach a dead end, because I toss them in the trash. 

 

The adult husk fly itself is a pretty attractive bug.  I have seen a few of them on the trees, though not often; one spring, I even found one in the garage sitting on some nuts that I hadn't gotten around to hulling the fall before (they were well-dried down by then). 

As noted in another post, corn shellers can also remove the husks though I have never tried that method.

After the nuts are close to hull-less (hammering can't get all the material off), I put them in a bucket and wash them in water, similar to the process followed in the video above.  The final result is as shown.  I don't get them completely clean; I get them clean enough.  When cracking, the dried hull material will flake off the shell and make a bit of a mess, but the only alternative is to use a lot of water and/or a brush to scrub the hull tissue out of the grooves in the shell.  I'm not going to do that.

Once cleaned (or semi-cleaned), the nuts will keep well in the shell for a long time--over a year.  I still have some from last year I need to crack.  Ones I have done recently have been fine.

 

In the picture above you can see that some of the nuts are larger than the others; the big ones come from what I believe is probably a named cultivar tree.  The other tree might be native.  I get usable nut meat out of both.

 

Acorns

I have a lot of oak trees.  Mostly I have ones that yield red acorns, but I have some white oaks, too.  And near my suburban house, there's a subdivision with about six Shumard oaks planted at the front. At the office park where I work, there are dozens of water oaks planted at the edge of the parking lots and in small plant islands in the lots themselves.  Because the oaks fall on pavement, they are easy to find and if not collected by me or the squirrels, they get crushed by cars and/or vacuumed up by the landscapers for dumping in an inert landfill.
 

Oak trees in the fall are beautiful--at least some of them are.  Some have leaves that turn a drab brown.  The picture at left shows some of the oaks I'm talking about, in addition to other trees--hickories and dogwoods...maybe a few others.   However, I want to focus on oak trees for food rather than ornamentation.

All species of oaks produce edible acorns, and all of them have too much tannin in them to be palatable straight from the shell.  I have tried with a variety of oaks: red, Georgia, Shumard, and white. The whites are close, but still too bitter--and they are reported to have the lowest tannin level.  Apparently tannin matters to some degree to deer, as well; they like white acorns the best.

For humans, something needs to be done.  Many sites and books suggest using water to leach the tannin out.  This book by Samuel Thayer has an extensive discussion of processing acorns.  However, there are many subtle variations. Generally, 'most everyone I've read recommends several changes of water at temps from room to boiling.

I have been picking up acorns for years and doing nothing with them.  Although drying them for a while is recommended, there is a difference between processing and indifferent procrastination.  Now is the time of harvest; later is the time to figure out what to do with them--so I have told myself for the last several autumns. My co-workers think I'm a little odd for picking up handfuls at the office.  So far, I have nothing to show for the effort.  Finally, I decided to try a pilot project.

Acorns are often targeted by insects; Thayer's book covers this in detail and has recommendations for identifying bad acorns easily when processing a lot. For my pilot project I didn't need to stress about it.  I picked up some newly-dropped acorns earlier this week. I cracked three and one was good (for what it's worth, a much greater proportion of the ones I've cracked from the office park have looked good; they are very clean).  I diced the Shumard into about six pieces, put the chunks into a coffee cup, filled it with water and microwaved it for a minute--not enough to make it boil, but enough to get it to simmering temperature.  Every 12 hours or so I changed the water for a couple of days.  Each time, the water was less tan-hued by the time I changed it.

After several water changes, they were edible--the bitterness was (mostly) gone.  This is less than an epic finding; all I have done is verify what others have reported.  However, it is encouraging that it's a viable process, if somewhat labor-intensive.  The taste of the nut meat itself was pretty bland.  I don't know if it would be any different if I had dried it first, but during the leaching process I assume it'd rehydrate to whatever extent it could--so that might not matter much.

I'm not sure I will do this on a broad scale, but I certainly have the acorns available if I want to.

Update:  The above obviously depicts beginner-style experimentation with the concepts.  This blogger shows the results from decanting and leaching--the latter being quicker, given sufficient equipment to process the nut meats before leaching.

Black Walnuts

It's almost black walnut time in north Georgia.  I've had a few nuts dropping for a while, probably due to drought, but the main drop starts about now and lasts for a few weeks.  The ones that have dropped already probably are not mature.  The ones that dropped in July definitely were not ready.

Nuts are harvested when they hit the ground.  They're covered in a spicy-scented thick green husk, which is removed to reveal the nut itself.  English walnuts, which are the more familiar variety, also have husks but they split apart somewhat easier.

The nuts themselves are pretty tough.  A normal little hand-held nutcracker probably won't work well (though I haven't tried to use one myself).  Forget about the decorative ones that star in Christmas plays.  Once the husk is gone, what's left looks sort of like a normal walnut, except that the ridges are sharper.  The photo is of some of the nuts I harvested last year--you can see that some have mold on them; I'm not sure why, but I cracked a few of those and they were all bad.

The first nuts I processed I used a hammer on; I just carefully whacked at them using the driveway as a backstop.  It worked ok, but was very inefficient.  I damaged a lot of the nutmeat and probably spent upwards of 20 minutes per nut.  That was just a demonstration project to assess the viability of the nuts.  I soon decided that I did want to harvest my nuts and went searching for a better nutcracker.

I soon found one:

It's available at:  http://www.masternutcracker.com/.  The website is not the most user-friendly, but there's a form that can be printed out and you can e-mail in advance with any questions you may have. There is at least one reseller I know of, and may be others:  http://855sheller.com/.  The tool does a great job and can crack the nuts with ease (it works on other tough nuts, like hickory).  There do appear to be some knockoffs available for sale from a lot of outlets; they do not seem to function as well:  Master vs. copy.  I've ordered from the Master site twice and have had very good experiences.

855 Sheller also sells other crackers, including one that can be used with a drill to process nuts quickly--they have posted videos on their YouTube site showing it in action.  If I had more trees, I would probably have to do something other than crack them one at a time, but I don't get a very big harvest.  It's more of a novelty for me at present.  Maybe someday the trees will be producing more, and I have just planted a new improved cultivar tree (Thomas Myers) that is advertised to yield big nuts with thin shells (I think one of my existing trees is something like this, or another big variety; the nuts run 20 to the pound).

A much easier option is just to buy them; the little packages at the grocery store are expensive but chopped black walnuts can be had from Amazon and other places relatively cheaply thanks to the business model of Hammon's, a Missouri company that buys nuts from small-scale harvesters who pick the wild nuts up off the ground.  There do not appear to be very many commercial producers.  The trees themselves are more often grown for their timber value, which can be substantial.


 

In Praise of the Striped June

I harvested my Striped June (also known as Margaret) apple tree on Sunday (July 19).  This is an old tree, planted through the the diligence and foresight of the man who owned the land before me.  The total take was about 20 pounds, which is maybe a bit small for a mature semi-dwarf tree, but it was neglected for a long time before I began caring for it.  I've pruned it some, which has helped.  This year I neglected it; I didn't thin the crop much and didn't do any spraying (for disease or plum curculio, so I'm just lucky--for now--that the nasty bugs haven't found it).

Despite the name, it usually ripens in July.  Still, that makes it a summer apple.  It's an old variety.  The only way you'll get one these days is to go to a nursery that specializes in old apples, like Big Horse Creek Farm.  Striped June is somewhat tart/sweet.  Partly that might be due to harvesting a bit too soon, but the apples were looking good Sunday, with a few already on the ground.  So I picked it clean.  I'm not out there every day--this isn't in my back yard; it's a ways away--so there wasn't any viable alternative.  As you can see, the apples aren't exactly ready for retail.  Most have some degree of insect damage (though I've verified that mostly it's just a few small divots, not really affecting anything else), and many of them have sooty blotch and/or flyspeck.  Both of those are benign plant diseases that don't affect anything.  They can be rubbed off the skin with a wet paper towel and some diligence if you must, but as far as I know, they're harmless.  They certainly don't affect fruit quality, except for visual appeal.  I also see russeting on a lot of them, not all, and that doesn't bother me, either.

Here's an interesting thing about Striped June/Margaret: According to a Jurassic PDF from Auburn University I stumbled across one day, it's resistant to cedar-apple rust.  Look on page eight of the PDF (which, surprisingly, is searchable).  Early Red Margaret, which I assume is the same apple that I have, was found to be free of cedar apple rust way back in 1908.  I have cedars near where the apple tree is growing.  The woods have cedars here and there, and there was a huge one about 50 feet away from the tree, which I cut down with a friend.  There's still one within 100 yards.  And there are others.  I saw galls on the closest one.  The disease can travel some distance (it's transmitted back and forth between the two species, and others--like serviceberry--get involved, too).  I have another apple out there that has issues with cedar-apple rust, getting it every year (so far).  I planted a modern disease-resistant variety, GoldRush, another of the PRI apples I have, along with a few others.  GoldRush, alas, while resistant to some of the worst diseases plaguing apples, is susceptible to cedar-apple rust.  The new apple trees are too young to set any fruit yet, so we'll see what happens.  GoldRush did have a small one this year but it fell off (as do a lot of the leaves about now). At any rate, my Striped June has always been rust-free (at least for the few growing seasons I have had it).

So did the guy who planted it select it for that reason?  It might date back to the 1960s or so.  Given some of the other things I see out there, it was probably carefully chosen rather than selected at random from whatever was available in the nursery trade back then.

Some of the other resistant varieties in the Auburn circular are available if you look hard enough, but again, you won't find them at a big-box retailer (with the possible exception of Arkansas, which I assume is the Arkansas Black--that's a not entirely uncommon apple, but it's not exactly one of the major ones, either.  It's available from all or most of the nurseries I list at the left).

So now I have 20 pounds of apples to process.  I will probably dry all or most of them, but I might also do something else with some.  As a summer apple, I don't expect a long shelf life.

I never would have planted it, but I'm happy to have it.  I just need to make the time to make the most of it by ensuring none of the harvest goes to waste.

Preserving Tomatoes

I grow mostly indeterminate tomatoes.  The darker ones, like Black Prince and Cherokee Purple, are my favorites.  A couple of years I grew Frankenstein Black and liked them very much.  At any rate, some years my tomato harvest is a bust.  Deer will eat the plants but don't seem to go for them very often, and stink bugs can be found on them but do not seem to do too much damage.  Even in good years the best I get a slow, steady level of production that is very drawn out over a period of weeks.  I pick them as they ripen (or a little before, then let them ripen indoors).

I do two things with tomatoes (well, three, counting tomato sandwiches).  One is dehydrate them, the other is can them following the NCHFP's recipe for crushed tomatoes.  I then use the tomatoes for a sort of spaghetti sauce that ends up being somewhat runny and very chunky once I add the onions. It's not like Prego, but I still like it. Normally I don't grow paste tomatoes (though I did like the Amish Paste ones I raised one year), so the end product is pretty watery (see below).

Canning requires peeling the tomatoes, which I'm definitely not a fan of (I also hate peeling peaches).  So it's not my first choice, and I find that when I can them, it takes me a while to use them.  I'll use them, but slowly. And, btw, I wouldn't characterize the peeling process as "slip[ping]  off [the] skins."

I haven't done them for a few years, and the last time I did I failed to note the raw amount I needed for the canner load I processed.  So the NCHFP guidelines are probably as good as any.  This can require stocking them in the refrigerator for a few days to build up enough supply to make canning worthwhile.  I'm not going to go through all that work for two or three pints.  I've heard that some don't like refrigerating tomatoes, but it has worked out okay for me.

Dehydrating is another matter.  It's easy to process the tomatoes in small batches as they come in.  Then I just cut the tops off, cut them into 4-8 radial slices, and thrown them in the dehydrator.  They dry down quickly, in 24-48 hours (at 135 degrees; using a cooler temp would extend the time).

Dehydrating them is a little problematic for other reasons: I eat them too fast.  I like the end result very much and down them as snack food.  I think they could be rehydrated, put on pizza, or otherwise used in recipes, but so far I've just eaten them about as fast as I produce them (that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much).

My tomatoes usually stop producing in August or so, then start blooming and producing again with the cooler temperatures of late summer and early fall.  I always have green tomatoes on the vine at the time of the first frost.  There's a recipe for pickled green tomatoes that looks appealing but that I have never made.  I usually try to ripen them, then end up tossing them when that doesn't happen.  Maybe this year...

Dehydrating Apples

I harvested my Williams' Pride apple tree yesterday.  It's an early-maturing apple, but this is a bit earlier than early, so some of them were not quite ready.  As the link notes, Williams' Pride is an apple that matures slowly, so should be picked more than once.  I went ahead and pulled almost all of them (except for a couple) because 1) I knew I was going to dehydrate them, and 2) some of the apples were getting attacked by bugs and were getting watercore.  As the page above (and this one) note, Watercore is a problem of Williams' Pride, particularly if left on the tree to maturity.  Watercore does not necessarily ruin the fruit, but it also doesn't help it much.  So I harvested them. The picture at right shows watercore at the left side of the slice (the water on the plate ran off the slice itself; I had just pulled it out of the water bath described below). More (and more positive) information on watercore can be found here.


My harvest was modest--the tree is still relatively young, and I didn't really properly manage it this year.  I neglected all of my apples (I have three in production, with several more that haven't started fruiting yet).  Last year I got a mere two and a half pounds; this year I've pulled four pounds so far, but there is another pound on the tree and a number were ruined by disease or insects while on the tree.

My approach to dehydrating apples is pretty simple.  I'm all about making things easy.  I prepare a bowl with some citric acid and water to dunk the apples in after slicing (to limit browning), then use one of the radial-style apple slicers to core and slice the apples into eight wedges.  Some people spiral slice them using something like this, but that's slower and more of a hassle.  Then I just place them skin-down on the trays of my dehydrator (I have a nine-tray Excalibur; it can hold about 12 pounds [when cutting slices as described above, I have to pull out every other tray to allow room for the thicker pieces before they dry down and shrink]).  Currently, I'm setting the temp to 135, what they recommend for fruit, and drying them for two to three days.  I used to use a lower temperature, 125, to hopefully reduce vitamin loss, but that took forever.  I dry them until they are pretty firm so they won't spoil while in storage.  They may not snap when I'm done with them, but they are far from tender.  My big wedge-shaped slices are more of a mouthful than the ones you'd get with a cranked slicer, and require a lot of chewing. Nonetheless, I like them.  I actually like dried apples better than fresh ones.  This is how they look when dehydrated:

This is not the only thing I do with apples--I also make applesauce and apple pie filling (subjects for another day).

Shelling Corn

I'll write in more detail another time about growing, harvesting, and using corn, but this is all about what happens post-harvest and pre-consumption.  I'm talking here about dent corn, grown and dried down on the plant, then shelled and ground into meal (usually) or shelled and roasted for parched corn (which I have never done).

For just a few ears, shelling by hand is possible, but it rapidly gets unworkable when the number of ears to shell increase.  For a larger amount, some kind of sheller is useful.  There are little handheld ones that might be viable (and are certainly better than twisting with your bare hands), but a cranked sheller will be fast and save much pain and suffering.

This is a link to a video featuring a big one in action, and the amount of corn it can shell is amazing.

International Harvester Corn Sheller in Action

Although he seems to be shelling for animal feed (given that he's putting it into a kitty litter bucket), there's no reason you couldn't get one of these and shell corn for your own use (I eat all of my corn at present, since I have no livestock--for now).  However, as far as I know, the only way to get one of these big floor-mounted machines is to buy it on eBay.  In decent condition they usually go for $300 or more, and even in bad condition they are expensive.

Smaller ones are more practical for a lot of reasons, and their throughput is very good, although not as great as the standalone model.

Small Corn Sheller


The one in the video above is new manufacture, but antique ones are available on eBay, too--new ones go for about $70+ and used ones on eBay sell for a wide range of prices, anywhere from $50 to $300 or more.  The antique ones are often in bad shape, but many have been taken care of or are reconditioned.   They're generally cast iron, so liable to be rusted, but can be sandblasted and repainted.  I have bid for several and never won one.  The new ones are sold by a few places; there is sometimes a vendor that lists them on eBay (they usually settle at a price around $75, +/- $25, the last time I checked).  Pleasant Hill Grain sells one, too.  I have seen it as cheap as $49, but it's currently closer to $70.

Pleasant Hill Grain Corn Sheller

Video:  Pleasant Hill Grain Corn Sheller

That's where mine came from (it was a Christmas present), and I just ordered another one.  The reason I mention Pleasant Hill is that, while I don't know of a corn sheller shortage or a reason large numbers of people would be trying to buy these, they have been out of stock for some time (update 7/3: they are showing as back in stock).  This could all mean that nobody buys them so they are only ordering ten at a time, but if you're expecting to have use for one and like the looks of it, it may be worth backordering if it's not immediately available.

Lehman's also sells corn shellers; a crank-operated version and one of the small handheld one-ear-at-a-time types:

Lehman's Corn Shellers

To use these, you can mount them to a wooden box, or in some cases a 2x4 over a bucket--although the corn will scatter a bit as you crank, so there will be some that gets flung outside the bucket if you do it this way.  I slowly and incompetently threw a box together out of scrap lumber, and it works--the mounting system has changed for the Pleasant Hill sheller since I got mine, so a different arrangement will be called for with the new one than I used for the old one.  You can shell corn pretty quickly; I shelled the basket above in just a few minutes, and I wasn't rushing myself.   Then it's necessary (or at least preferable) to pour the corn between a couple of buckets in front of a fan to get rid of the chaff and bits of cob.

These shellers are marketed as walnut dehullers, too (there's even a place that sells them for that purpose; video is also available [though I know nothing else about the company]).  I have a couple of black walnut trees and just planted a third, so processing black walnuts is something I'm interested in.  My current method is very  s l o w.  I haven't tried running my freshly harvested walnuts through my sheller yet... seems like it'd make a mess and I always have lots of husk fly larvae in mine.  So I do it the non-automated way.  That's a topic for another day.