State officials announced today that Washington State has produced 148 million bushels of apples. I think this number is wrong because I am pretty sure they did not count the 9 bushels produced by my apple trees.
Hippy dippy prune drying
My three Italian prune plum trees are loaded with ripe fruit, so it is time to dry them to make prunes. The picture shows my system for drying the plums. The plums are sliced in half and the pits are removed. The fruit is placed on drying racks, and the racks are placed on my green house. Under a hot Autumn sun, the temperature in the greenhouse reaches 110 degrees. I use a 5W solar panel to power a small 12 V DC fan rescued from a dead computer. The fan blows on the hot plums, speeding the drying process. The same system works great for making sun-dried tomatoes.
Saving tomato seeds
This is my setup for collecting and drying tomato seeds. I cut tomatoes in half and squeeze juice and seeds into a small jars or bottles. These are allowed to sit for 2 or 3 days. The resulting fermentation releases the seeds from the gel in which they reside in the fruit. It is not unusual for shocking mold growth to occur during the fermentation, but this does not cause any problem. After fermentation I fill the bottles or jars with water, shake a couple times and allow the seeds to settle. I pour off most of the liquid, add water and repeat the shaking/settling process. After several cycles of washing in this manner the seeds are completely clean. They are poured into a sieve to remove the water, and then transferred onto a piece of tempered glass, where they are allowed to dry. Drying takes from 1 to 3 days, depending on the temperature and humidity. Usually 1 day is enough if the drying seeds are left outside in the shade on a warm sunny day.
And might I mention, the germination rate for tomato seeds I buy from various commercial sources ranges from 80% to 0% (and I won’t name any names) whereas the seeds I produce myself using the method described invariably have a germination rate of 95%-100%.
One last piece of advice – tomatoes are self-fertile, so they tend to breed true even if different varieties of tomatoes are grown close together. My experience with different tomato varieties grown spaced only 3 feet apart is that cross-breeding occurs about 5% of the time, with the seeds faithfully maintaining the characteristics of the plant from which the fruit was picked the remaining 95% of the time. If you need to be absolutely sure that cross-breeding never occurs (as is necessary for commercial seed production) plants either need to be spaced far apart, or manual artificial pollinization needs to be performed. A 5% failure rate is perfectly acceptable for home growers – the occasional accidental cross-breeding may even yield an interesting new variety!
I Love My Remay
For the last 15 years each year it has been a competition with the birds to see whether they or I pick the most blueberries, but I never really knew how much the birds were getting. I never had a yield of more than 3 pounds of berries from my three bushes during this period and the berries never lasted on the bushes for more than a week. This year, for the first time, I shrouded the bushes in Remay as soon as the berries started to ripen. Amazingly, I have picked 20 pounds so far, over a period of 2 weeks, and the bushes are still completely loaded with berries, so it looks like the Remay has increased my yield about ten-fold.
Csikos Botermo
Tomatofest lists this Hungarian heirloom as a late maturing variety and says Csikos Botermo translates as “striped good cropper”. Abundant Acres indicates it is an early variety and suggests the name as “early variety of Hungarian cowboys”. The only thing they agree on is that the fruit is striped. Although I prefer the colorful Abundant Acres translation, I am afraid Tomatofest has it right as Google Translate indicates that “csíkos bőtermő” means “striped, high yielding”. On the other hand, I must agree with the “early” designation by Abundant Acres. This year, Csikos Botermo was the 4th earliest variety to ripen in my collection of 118 varieties..
One less trout
A few months ago I stocked the one acre pond on my property with 205 5″ rainbow trout. Yesterday evening as I sat by the pond sipping a glass of merlot, I heard the distinctive rattle of a belted kingfisher as it flew the length of the pond and then perched in a tree on the far bank. I had more or less forgotten about it when suddenly it swooped into the pond with a tremendous splash, emerged with a trout in its powerful beal, and landed on a branch directly over my head. The trout was only slightly smaller than the bird. The kingfisher bashed the trout’s head on the branch a couple of times to knock it unconscious and then flew away. So I guess now I have 204 trout.
First Fruit
118 tomato varieties presently growing and the first two varieties to bear fruit are …………….(drum roll)………….. Purple Russian and Indische Fleisch. Oddly, neither of these varieties was advertised as being particularly early – both are listed as mid-season varieties. But I have noticed before, tomato varieties respond in unpredictable ways to our odd Puget Sound climate.
Raspberry/rhubarb jam
Raspberry Rhubarb Jam
Cuisine: American
Author:
This time of year my garden invariably produces an excess of red raspberries and rhubarb. Raspberry rhubarb jam is the obvious solution to the problem. This recipe is a slightly modified version of the recipe provided by MCP.
Ingredients
- 9 cups fresh raspberries
- 3 cups minced rhubarb
- 8 cups sugar
- 1 package pectin (Sure-jell or MCP)
- 1 tsp butter
Instructions
- Mash the berries thoroughly.
- Force one half of the berries through a sieve to remove seeds.
- Combine minced rhubarb, sieved raspberry pulp and mashed raspberries in a 6-8 quart pot.
- Mix fruit with pectin
- Add butter
- Bring to a boil, with frequent stirring and when boiling, add sugar.
- Bring to a boil again, with frequent stirring.
- After 4 minutes at a full rolling boil, ladle into jars, cool and refrigerate.
- If you wish to keep the jars for long periods without refrigeration, use canning jars and process in a boiling water bath as described here – http://www.canning-food-recipes.com/canningfruits.htm.
Peas Reaching for the Sky
Happy tomatoes
I don’t know whether to credit global warming, or my new regimen of growing my tomatoes vigorously pruned and trained to vertical posts, but this is the first time in many years I have made it to the first of July without any sign of late blight. Growing tomatoes trained in this way prevents ground contact and improves air circulation – both helpful in preventing attack by the blight fungus. In the Puget Sound region we invariably have a number of days of cloudy, moist and relatively warm weather in June, which the blight fungus loves. This year my tomatoes survived June unscathed and in phenomenally good shape. The majority of my 120 varieties of tomatoes already have fruit. Shown below is Alicante, a British variety, which fruits early and productively, even in cool climates.
