Deer, Take II

Earlier I described a few ways I tried to keep deer out of my garden last year.  They were mostly unsuccessful.  One that was partly successful was a motion-activated sprinkler.  I set it to maximum sensitivity and it would fire a five-second blast of water when triggered.  It seemed to limit the damage, but there was one major problem: the hose bib in the back of the house is right next to the master bedroom.  I could hear the water start and stop for each five-second blast; it woke me up at night.  A couple of times it would fire twice in a couple of minutes; I'd get up and go outside to look; I'd see deer.  However, multiple alerts every night was not really going to work for me.   I only used it for a couple of weeks (if that) then gave up for the year.

So far, this year I am having success with a higher fence.  The original fence was four-foot chicken wire, with one foot bent horizontal as a deterrent to digging under the fence.  That is now buried under grass and thatch.  It works pretty well against rabbits, but doesn't deter deer.

So I drove in some more seven-foot t-posts (in addition to the ones from last year that I strung the twine on) and added another three-foot band of chicken wire.  I stitched it to the bottom section with the remants of the twine, plus some new line.

It's ugly.  It's not at all straight, symmetric, or anything else.  But it's working ok, so I'm not unhappy with it.  So far the only thing I've had to deal with is voles / mice (or whatever they are); they went after my green beans hard when they first started to climb the trellis.  Some Tomcat bait took care of them in short order; the bait was gnawed on; the bean damage stopped; and I smelled something rotting out there about a week after placing the bait.

For the gate I drove two posts and fashioned hooks out of nine-gauge wire I have for a future kiwi trellis.  I lashed the hooks to the posts with 16-gauge wire, then hung a section of welded wire fencing that is about four feet high and six feet long (I hung it sideways).  That's also ugly, but also working.

These pictures show the garden before anything was growing there.  Now it's more populated, with okra, cucumbers, Kentucky Wonder green beans on one of the trellises, tomato plants, some late-planted Blue Clarage, and lots o' weeds.  So far, other than the vole issue with the green beans, most has been well.  Stink bugs like the green beans and tomatoes, and Japanese beetles have been seen on the green beans and okra.  Those problems are manageable.  Deer that clear-cut the okra in one night are not.

Whole Wheat Apple Pie

I've long had an interest in making a whole wheat (w/w) pie crust.  I definitely prefer w/wt bread, and have made w/w brownies, cake, and other things.  Pie crust has been a challenge, however.

My latest attempt, version 3.0, didn't use 100% w/w.  I used a 50/50 mix with unbleached white flour as the other form.  The basic recipe is a cup of flour, 1/4 cup oil, lard, butter, or shortening, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 cup of water.  The standard directions for making a flaky crust are to use butter or lard and cold water, keeping the fat as solid as possible.

I ditched that and used sunflower oil.  I've done w/w "crusts" in which I've just mixed up the above ingredients without the water, made a friable, loose mix without much cohesion, and poured it into the greased pie pan that way, then patted it roughly into shape.  That obviously only works for a bottom crust, but can do a fairly decent job for a pie that normally only has a bottom crust, like pecan, pumpkin, or sweet potato.

For version 3.0, I went ahead and rolled it out with w/w flour-covered bottom and top layers of waxed paper.  In the dish, before the top crust, it looked like what's shown at right.  As you can see, my edges weren't that smooth.  My rolled-out crusts look more like an amoeba than a smooth-edged disk.  However, I more or less got something I could use.

The finished product was not that good (and as you can see below, definitely not ready for competition in the nearest county fair).  W/w flour is denser than white; I would say I ended up more with something like a stuffed-crust pizza (that happened to have cinnamon and apple slices as the filling) than a pie.  While it wasn't all that great, it was still usable.  I will probably lighten up on the w/w content next time.  I gave a slice to a friend at work, who thought it was fine.

This was not made with the Striped June apples.  I canned the filling last fall, following the recipe on the NCHFP site.  I made it sugar free, using Whey Low in place of sugar. It was mostly GoldRush and Stayman apples, with a few Arkansas Blacks and maybe a Yates or two thrown in.   That's a subject for another day.

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...

Taking Advantage of Peak Blueberry Season

Here in GA, blueberries are usually at their most available and least costly a couple of weeks on either side of July 4th. Sometimes there's another period of similar pricing in mid-August.  While fresh ones can be had year-round, and are readily available from about April through September, they can be expensive outside of peak North American production months.  What's showing up now are berries from New Jersey; recently it was North Carolina; before that it was Georgia and Florida; soon it will be Michigan.  Georgia, btw, is the biggest producer of blueberries in the country (at least in 2014, but production has been ramping up a lot in the last few years).

For me, 2014 was a good year, too--my five rabbiteye blueberry bushes produced 20 pounds.  This year, about a handful.  In late March, it dropped to about 24 degrees when the plants were nearly in
full bloom.  I tried hosing them down at 4 am, to no avail.

So I'm on the blueberry market this year.  I like them and eat a fair amount.  If you want them year-round, it makes sense to stock up now.  While you can get them later, you can end up paying more than shown at right for less than half as many. That's what they were going for at Sam's Club yesterday.

If you buy now, you need to preserve them somehow.  The easiest is freezing, and I froze about 6 pounds' worth today (and froze the same last summer from my own bushes).  I use frozen ones for pies.  Another way is to make preserves, which I also did last year.  And they can be dehydrated.

Dehydrating is pretty easy.  I pick over them to pull out the moldy ones (sometimes that isn't an issue, but it often is with store-bought berries), wash them, dump them onto a dehydrator tray, and subject them to a 135-degree breeze for two days.  What's left is a pile of shriveled berries dry enough to keep without molding in the container.

Some people recommend poking each berry with a toothpick, and you can see why at the right.  Some of them end up looking like little balloons--however, they will still dry out even if not pricked.  That's too much time and effort, and if I tried to do it, I'd still miss some.  I shy away from methods that require intensive handling or processing whenever possible.


One does have to be careful to check to be sure they are really dried out.  I did lose a whole container of berries one time to mold because I didn't get them sufficiently dehydrated.  So I'm a little paranoid about it now.

Some fruits I do not particularly like when dehydrated, but blueberries are okay.  I probably prefer fresh ones, but this is definitely a case of constrained optimization: is a dehydrated blueberry worth at least 40% of a fresh one?  At times, that's the price differential.

It took me a while to get into the swing of various food preservation methods, and I'm still learning new ones (plus learning which ones don't work).  With my own trees, bushes, and garden, it's a must, but it makes sense sometimes with store-bought produce, as well.

Cornbread

I'm not very innovative with recipes.  Usually I just replicate something I find somewhere.  Usually that works fairly well; I can't think of very many disasters I've had in the kitchen.

One recipe that I have altered a little bit with surprising results is what I use for cornbread.  I found this one online:

2 cups cornmeal
2/3 cups flour (not specified, but I assume all-purpose or maybe bread)
1/2 Tbsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
3-4 Tbsp of bacon drippings or oil

Bake at  400 for 25 min.


I modified it to use whole wheat flour and added 2 Tbsp. vital wheat gluten to help the rise (not necessary, but it seemed to be beneficial versus not using it). I also used 3 Tbsp. of sunflower oil, since I don't usually (or ever) have bacon drippings.  The whole wheat flour plus vital wheat gluten required more buttermilk, so I used 2 cups and baked it for 30 min at 400 degrees. I also used an 8" greased Pyrex dish instead of cast iron.  That all worked okay, then one day I made a mistake and dumped 1/2 Tbsp. of baking soda in the bowl.  I decided to essentially switch the soda and powder, and put 3/4 tsp. baking powder in the mix, added a tsp of white vinegar, and kept everything else the same.

It worked.  It was good enough that I made the switch permanently, though I no longer add the vinegar--it does not seem to be necessary.  The flavor is slightly different, but it's fine (as far as I'm concerned).  Plus it rises more when baking and seems to stay moist longer.  It takes me a while to go through the whole dish of cornbread, and the original recipe got rather dry.  The new one is not so affected.  Adding more salt, 1 tsp total, will make it seem moister still.  When I have baked it for others, they liked it saltier. I don't use 1 tsp when baking just for myself, however.

The pictures show the process with Blue Clarage cornmeal (above is two cups of cornmeal; below is the finished product).

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).