Harvest

It's harvest time.   Time to gather in all the fruits of your labors.   And that always begs the questions:  What have you been laboring on?   What seeds have you planted?

Harvest time is the time to evaluate things and start making plans for next year.   What paid off?  What do you want to try again, maybe a different way?   What are you absolutely done with?  What would you like to add?

I'm not just talking about gardens.  In your life, what is paying off?   What do you want try again in a different way?   What are you ready to let go of?   What are you ready to start?

2015 Canning and Freezing Report

Here's the summary of what we canned in 2015.   I've probably left a couple of things out but you get the general idea.   Also, I've put in quantities of fruit plus the canned yield so you can get an idea of how far a bushel will go, etc.  I've updated the Canning page [tab above so I can keep a record of the 2016 season.   I'm excited to get this season going.

February:

• Carrots:  7 quarts. [pressure canned].  Great for carrot cake!

March:

• Maple Syrup:   8 pts

June:

• Strawberries - 1 flat [2 gallons] Reeves in Worthingon/Freedom: frozen

July:

• Peaches [Freedom Country Store]:  2 bushels
• Plain peach jam for cookie/pie fillings:  2 batches
• Spiced peach jam with brown sugar
• Peach Chutney: 2 batches
• Peach pie filling:  38 quarts total [Spiced 7, Peach Raspberry Vanilla 20, Peach Plum Vanilla  11]
• Froze several bags full - store flat to freeze.
• Blueberries [Freedom Country Store]:  1 box, 10 lbs - frozen
• Sour Cherries [Freedom Country Store]:  1 box, 10 lbs:  11 quarts pie filling
• NOTE:  Make this after the mixed berry pie filling in the same pot for better color.
• Sweet Cherries [Freedom Country Store]: 3 boxes, 20 lbs each:  
• Sweet Cherry Vanilla jam:  7 batches
• Sweet Cherry Chutney: 3 batches
• Mixed Berries for Amy [Freedom Country Store]:  1 flat  red raspberries, 1 flat black raspberries
• pie filling 11 quarts
• mixed berry freezer jam with instant clear jel:  6.5 pints

August: 

• Tomatoes:  2 boxes [from Reeves in Worthington.  $10 / 25 lb box]: 28 quarts
• Tomasqua from garden produce:  7 quarts 
• Green beans:  from the garden.   I swear we froze a million bags of them.  OK, probably closer to 8-10 gallons.   Way a lot. 

September:

• Apples: 1 bushel Gala = 22 quarts pie filling
• Apples:  1/2 bushel Gala, 1/2 bushel Honeycrisp = 24 quarts apple slices in light syrup. 
• Red Raspberries:  1 1/2 flats [1 1/2 gallons] from Freedom Country Store, discounted for age 
• 3 quarts pie filling
• 3 large batches jam: 12 pints

October:

• Beans, dry off the vine:  Almost 3 quarts total, mixed.   
• The Kentucky wonder beans were FABULOUS to hull and came right out of the shells easily.   I shelled those, plus some Freshette hybrids [a pain to hull], plus a few dragon tongues, plus a few long beans.  And they're pretty!  Great reason not to feel pressure to harvest them all green for the freezer or canner.

I'm so looking forward to this year!

Garden Huckleberries Final Report

I told you at the beginning of the year that I was going to plant a couple of rows of garden huckleberries on the advice of one of my neighbors, who loves them for pies. 

I did my research, was surprised at the fear and skepticism surrounding these little things, but planted them anyway.

I started them from seed in my milk jugs along with everything else last spring.  They sprouted just fine and managed to evade the puppy destruction experienced by the peppers and most of the baby tomatoes and I was able to get 14 plants in a bed [2 rows] along with the brassicas and some later tomatoes.  I planted them 18 inches apart in wide rows. 

They bloomed white flowers in small loose clusters at the end of branches, and kept on growing.   And blooming.   The bees liked them and soon there were green berries on the clusters and soon the berries expanded to the size of small blueberries and turned black.   And the little bushes kept on going. And going. And going.   At one point the margined blister beetles attacked.  They go after the leaves, not the fruit. I spent two or three days picking those little buggers off into soapy water and that seemed to take care of it. 

One of the sites I read through was by a guy who liked eating garden huckleberries right off the bush as soon as they turned black.  Another said to wait to harvest until after the first frost.    I tried one fresh berry in the summer when one cluster was good and black.   It was utterly disgusting.   Think of a blueberry that tastes somehow sort of like an unripe tomato.  

Hmm.    But that other article had said to wait until after the first frost, so I let them go thinking I'd harvest and make one batch of jam in October and if they were awful, I'd chalk it up to a learning experience and never do it again.

And October came and the bushes were loaded with black berries.  And it frosted a couple of times and I shanghaied my youngest and we spent 20 minutes stripping the plants of the berries, except for a few for seeds just in case.

Note:   These babies stain in a BIG way.   Wear junk clothes when you work with them.   The stains do not wash out, which means they are an underutilized plant for natural dyeing.    I got a gorgeous blue on the cloth I used to strain with.   We'll see how fugitive it is and maybe do more experimenting next year.   One very cool thing is that they stain your hands purple, but when you wash your hands with soap, it turns the foam bright screaming blue.  Bright. Screaming. Blue.    I had to wash several times before the foam was the normal color again.  

The best information on cooking them came from Mother Earth News.   Remember - these are no substitute for blueberries.  You can't just drop a handful in muffins.   They must be softened and sweetened before you use them.

I got about a gallon and a half of huckleberries from my 14 plants.   I decided since mine were very ripe, I'd skip the baking soda boil recommended here.   I dumped them all in a large pot and added enough plain water to barely cover.   Then I boiled the living daylights out of them for about 2 hours, until they were soft enough to crush with a potato masher.  I crushed and crushed.  When I'd had enough of the crushing, I strained them through cheesecloth, kept the juice and tossed the seeds and skins to the chickens.   Next year I'll save those for dyeing. 

I made one batch of jelly using my regular jelly recipe - just to taste - and it was.....  Delicious!  And really pretty!   The taste is somewhere between grape and a very bright blueberry.  I had enough juice for three batches total.   Here's the recipe:

Garden Huckleberry Jelly
www.rurification.com

4 cups huckleberry juice
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/3 cup Dutch Gel All Natural Lite pectin [You can substitute Ball or Sure-Jel, just make sure it's the low sugar type.]
2 cups sugar  [or more, to taste]

Bring huckleberry juice, lemon juice and pectin to hard rolling boil.   Maintain boil for 1 minute.   Add sugar and return to hard rolling boil.  Boil for 1 minute.   Ladle into jars and process for canning.

Soooo - I asked the family - Will we plant these again?     The unanimous answer was a resounding YES.  They were easy to start from seed.   The plants are easy to grow in our zone 5B heavily amended clay soil.  I basically ignored them all summer long.   The jelly is delicious.   I'd like to try making pie filling with it next year, too.   I will wait again until after the first frost to harvest, then cook them and divide them up for pie filling and for jelly.  

I will definitely save the spent seeds and skins for dyeing, as well as a bit of the whole fruit to see if there's a difference in color.   Because of the wide difference in color when exposed to acid [fuchsia] and alkali [green to blue], I'm expecting that wools [acid] and cottons [alkali] can be dyed very differently, or at the very least I can get a difference in color on the same fiber with a post dyeing dip in vinegar or ammonia.  We'll see.

May Garden Harvest

May started slowly and built steam [literally] fast.   The garden has been loving the heat and I can practically hear things growing.   Here's what we harvested from the garden in May

• Lettuce,  tons and tons and tons from the cold frame and hoop house.  Planted last fall.
• Arugula, planted out this spring in rows, plus some that self sowed.
• Radishes, planted out in rows this spring.
• Strawberries
• Peas
• Onions - greens from sets I planted out in early April.

I made my first batches of strawberry vanilla jam from a flat of delectable berries that Eric brought home from Melton's and it was to die for.  It's Claire's favorite and she is jealously guarding every jar.

Now that jam season is in full swing, don't forget that my jam cookbook ebook is on sale for a while.  See sidebar for link and preview. 

2013 Canning Preserving Record

January: 

• Blood Orange Marmalade: 1 batch
• Honey Vanilla Orange Marmalade: 3 batches
• Four Fruit Marmalade: 1 big batch
• Seckel Pear Ginger Jam:  1 batch  

February:

• Maple flow started Feb 6th. 
• Chocolate Orange Jam
• Chocolate Ginger Pear Jam
• Chocolate Raspberry Jam

March:

• Maple Syrup:   16 pts

April: 

• Blueberry Lime Jam:  3 batches

June:  

• Strawberries, frozen: 2 gallons
• Strawberry Mango Mint Freezer Jam:  4 batches 
• Strawberry Vanilla Jam: 4 batches
• Sour Cherry Jam: 1 batch 
• Cherry Orange Jam:  1 batch

July: 

• Sweet red plums: frozen, 29 pts
• Black raspberries, wild:  frozen, 1.5 gallons
• Blackberries, wild:4 gallons +
• Sour cherries [Michigan]: 20 lbs
• Blueberries: 10 lbs
• Peaches: 1 bushel frozen
• Blackberry pie filling: 5 quarts
• Sour cherry jelly
• Sour cherry pie filling syrup [Fabulous over chocolate cake and ice cream!!]: 6.5 quarts
• Apricot jam
• Peach chutney: 2 batches
• Onion garlic jam: 2 batches

August:

• Green beans: 3 bags frozen
• Grated zucchini and summer squash:  A lot.  Frozen.
• Peaches: canned 1 bushel
• Peach Plum Raspberry Pie Filling:  3 quarts 
• Peach Plum Vanilla Pie Filling:  5 quarts

September:

• Apple Pear Pie Filling: 5 quarts canned
• Apple Pie Filling:  6 bags frozen
• Elaeagnus Orange Ginger Jam: 3 batches
• Applesauce:  7 quarts
• Basil, dried and crushed: 1 quart
• Celery, chopped and dried: 1/2 gallon bag

October:

•  Pumpkin:  pressure canned, 5 quarts

Missing:

• tomatoes:   terrible year for tomatoes.

Bean Harvest

This time of year we're seeing clouds of what looks like smoke coming from local fields. 

It's not smoke, it's bean dust.

The combines and tractors put out a lot of debris and dust.   It's pretty interesting to watch them.

Here's a closer up pic of some of the machinery used.   It takes a fair amount of help to get things done efficiently and quickly.

That trailer is full of soybeans.

Potato Tower Experiment Finished

We did the potato towers again this year and instead of putting wood all the way up the sides like last year, we used chicken wire, so the plants could grow through the sides at will and get a lot more sunshine, etc.

We still had a very poor harvest.  Only a couple of gallons of little bitty potatoes.   It could have been the cooler summer, but we're a bit tired of this experiment. 

We're going back to the regular raised beds.  It's easier to plant and harvest from regular raised beds and all of the plants get plenty of sun and water. 

Deadout Honey Harvest

Our deadout had a lot of honey still in it and even though we opened up the hive for the bees from the lang to rob it out, the weather was weird and the bees were just as interested in their own sugar supply upstairs in their own dry hive and they mostly left the deadout alone except when it was really warm, which it hasn't been.

So I took three frames of honey and pollen from the deadout and put them in the lang and then decided to harvest the rest of the honey in the deadout ourselves.

In March.

When it's cold outside.   Snowing even.

People who know suggest that the best temperature to harvest honey is around 90 degrees.

Hahahahaha!   HAHAHAHAHA!   I laughed in the face of our 30 degree outdoor temp and 65 degree indoor temp. 

And then I crushed all the comb and put it in big pans in the oven, set on the lowest temp, which happens to be 170 degrees, which is warmer than 65 degrees.   And I let it warm up. 

While it warmed up, I set up the new bucket and double sieve unit that I got us for Christmas from Betterbee.com.  It cost about $65.

The sieve has two parts - the top one sits inside the finer one which has props to keep it up on the bucket.   I loved that.

The 6 gallon bucket has a gate at the bottom to let the honey out when it's all done filtering.

We were hoping that this would be a lot easier than the way we did our first harvest in October.

Because that was kind of a mess.   And time intensive.   And labor intensive.   






Crushing was no problem, but the trick was to keep it warm while the honey was actually straining out of the comb and to do that, Eric rigged a sunlamp to shine on the stuff in the strainer.

We took the warm comb out of the oven and piled it in the strainer and let the light shine on it.

The heat system worked like a charm.   A charm, I tell you!   It kept things just warm enough to flow easily.

Then we walked away and did other stuff while it strained.

A miracle.  


As the honey strained, we added more of the crushed comb until all that was left was a big pile of wet sticky comb.

So we put a plastic lid on it from a gallon bucket for ice cream, then covered that with a big plastic grocery bag and put 2 nice 7.5 lb weights on it overnight. 

In the morning the honey was pushed out and it was ready to bottle.

Using the gate on the bucket was fabulous.   It went fast and was not messy at all.   Once it was all empty, it cleaned up quickly and easily.

This was seriously the best honey money we've spent so far.    I was able to do most of the harvest by myself and able to do other things while it strained.   So much less work than the first time.  

We harvested 14.5 lbs of honey this time.   I didn't swear once.  

I highly recommend something like this for the hobbyist beekeeper.   If you're harvesting honey from just a hive at a time or so, then this works great.

One thing I wish was that the strainer fit over the whole bucket so you could invert one bucket over the other and let it sit overnight.   As it is, I think we can pack a gallon ice cream bucket with warm crushed comb and it will fit right in the strainer upside down to drain by itself [if we line the bucket with plastic and put holes in the bottom of it so air can suck in as the honey goes out - so a vacuum doesn't form.]

Honey Harvest

I told you before that it's common for bees to rob other hives during this time of year. Given the prevalence of Pirate Bees around here, we decided to pull the supers and condense the hives for winter.

First, we went through the hive bodies and removed the few empty or mostly empty frames down below and subbed in the honey filled frames from the super. Our goal was to have 100-150 lbs of honey in the hives as they prep for winter, per Michael Bush's advice.

The Tardis is a nice hive with a lot of bees. It is a horizontal hive body, 22 frames wide, mostly full. In addition, it had 15 frames in the supers with comb and honey, many of them not fully drawn out. We pulled 1 empty and 1 partial from the bottom box and put in two full frames of uncapped honey from the super to make sure they'd be full up for the winter, but to also give them something to do - finish it off and cap it - before it gets regularly cold.

The Lang had fewer bees and a few more empties in their 2-deep hive body.   [That's two deep boxes stacked on top of each other.]  They had not drawn any comb in their super, so we shared frames with the Tardis.   We subbed the empties in the Lang's hive body out for full ones from the Tardis's super.

Note: The frames in the supers are mediums - shorter than the deeps in the hive bodies. It's not a big deal. A medium full of nectar is still way more than an empty deep and when they're done cappig that, they'll draw comb off the bottom of the medium so that it'll be the same length as the other frames.

In the end, after packing the hive bodies of both hives with full frames, we had frames left with harvest-able honey on them.

Which means....we harvested our first honey from the hives at the beginning of this month. We got about 10 medium frames of honey. Most of them weren't full so our total take after extracting was about 23 lbs. This is what how it went:

We waited until after a few frosts to pull the supers because we hadn't used a queen excluder and they were raising drones in several spots in the supers. Once it frosted a few times, they reduced the brood cluster and pulled the drones all by themselves and filled up the old drone comb they had drawn with honey. I was greatly relieved. [And the truth is, I hadn't even thought of it until we opened things up and the drones were gone. I was glad we waited to pull the supers.] We will definitely do it that way from now on.

Once we pulled the supers off, we had to hide the frames from the bees, which immediately moved in and started robbing. They'll do that.

I took each frame to the front of the hive and brushed/knocked off the bees, then speedily left the hive area and took the frame to a large clear plastic box with a lid. The box was big enough to hold the frames upright with room to stack a couple extras on top. We chased the bees away and got the frame under the lid as fast as possible. It was a good system and we ended up with only 6 bees in the box in the end. It was easy to get them out before we took it in the house. Mostly, they couldn't wait to get out of the box and were happy to zoom away as soon as we opened the lid.

Once we got all the bees out and the frames in the house, we decided to heat the oven a bit, then turn it off and then turn the oven light on. The oven light will keep the oven at around 90-95 degrees - perfect for honey extraction.

I loaded my monster roaster up with frames. It's big enough to fit 5 frames in upright. The light kept them nice and warm.

Then we got a hair dryer and warmed up the pan we crushed in and the pot we strained in.

Crushing was easy. I cut the comb out of the frames into my biggest pyrex roasting pan and crushed it with a large pestle. Easy.

It was awesome.

It was sticky.

It was really, really sticky.



Straining was not easy. Since we've never done this before and since extracting equipment is not cheap, we did everything by hand with what we had around here. Nothing fancy.

Now we understand why people invest in extracting equipment.

Basically, this is what we did. I do NOT recommend doing it this way yourself unless you want to spend all day...All...Day...extracting honey and still end up leaving too much in the wax.

We lined the chinois with cheesecloth, then put the crushed comb inside. Then we twisted it closed and squeezed and squeezed and used the chinois mallet to squeeze more....all the while heating things up with the hair dryer.

It took for freaking ever. And even then we didn't get enough honey out.


In the meantime, just to test out other methods, I loaded a narrrow mouth quart jar full of crushed stuff and put a piece of cheesecloth over the top. Then I turned it upside down over a wide mouth quart jar.

It was supposed to drain from the top jar into the bottom jar. And it did. Sort of. About 1/3 a cup, leaving the rest of the quart hanging in the top jar. Then it stopped draining, I'm assuming because it created a vaccuum in the top and the honey was too thick to let the displaced air from the bottom up into the top. So that was an epic fail.

It took us 5 [Five!]  hours to extract the honey from only one super. Not exactly my idea of efficient. Also, we ruined 4 cheesecloths. Also, we got wax stuck in the bottom of the chinois, which had to be boiled out later. Also, we got honey everywhere.

Everywhere.

As in EVERYWHERE.  Because honey just does that.

The good news is that honey cleans up easily.

Next year, assuming the bees survive the winter and that we get more honey , we'll get the glorified bucket system that they have at Walter T. Kelly.

It's still a low budget solution and much cheaper than these bigger extractors:

Next year, we'll crush all the comb, and put it in buckets. Then we can strain it a bucket at a time, overnight with some weights on the top to really squeeze it out. And I can sleep at the same time, which seems like a much more efficient use of my time.

The good news is that we did get a harvest this year and we learned two ways not to strain honey. The bad news is that I learned that lesson in the first hour and we still had another 4 hours to get the job done. No fun..

The last thing was did was render all of the extra wax in the crockpot as we strained and that totally worked.  I'd been saving any burr comb trimmings in the freezer all year.   We just put all the wax pieces in the crockpot with 3 cups of water and turned it on high.   When it all melted, I strained out the floating stuff and then poured it through a double layer of heavy duty paper towels secured over a plastic sour cream container.    I let it all cool.   There was a thin layer of leftover wax on the water in the crockpot and a lovely layer of strained wax under the paper towels in the bowl.    We lost a little wax in the process, but ended up with a couple of nice hunks to use in salve this winter.

Next goal: Overwintering.   We'll keep you posted.

Onion Harvest

Remember when I got that great deal on onion sets?    I planted them all and it's time to harvest.    This is the first year I've had that many to harvest and keep, so I'm learning as I go. 

You're supposed to pull them after a day or so of dry weather, which is all the time, lately, except it's been so hot that I have to water every day so the garden reality is that I pulled them after a wet day.

They don't dry as well that way, and with the humidity, it's been interesting getting them to cure.

The theory is that you do it this way:
1.  Wait until the tops fall over and then let them cure in the ground for 10 days or so.
2.  Pull them up after a couple of days of dry weather
3.  Brush them off and lay them out to cure in a well ventilated and very dry place - like Utah.
4.  Let them cure for a week or so and then put them in long term storage.

The reality is that I pulled them up damp and cut the rest of the tops off.  I put them on a holey table. tops down so they'd drain faster.    Some of them were so wet they got rust marks on them from reacting with the table.   It is hot and humid and we're constantly under threat of pop up storms, so I've been pulling them in whenever rain threatens.    Then I have to remember to take them back out and let them dry some more.

Long term storage will be almost impossible here because of all the native molds.   I think we're going to cut them up and dehydrate a bunch.   They'll keep better that way than fresh.

UPDATE:  I found a bunch of old onion bags and I've got the first already-cured batches in bags hanging in our back room.   That might be enough for us to keep them for a while without them getting yucky.  

P.S.  A room full of drying onions smells good.  
P.P.S.   I've got a recipe for onion-garlic jam coming in the next week or so that is To. Die. For.