Jammin' in the Kitchen

     The summer fruit harvest has kicked into high gear, which means that we have been spending far too much time in the kitchen putting up that harvest.  It also means that part of our daily routine is to pick whatever is ripe.  The photo above was taken at the beginning of the Concord grape and the fig harvests a few weeks ago.
  We have over a dozen fig trees planted in our orchard, but only four are bearing fully.  The big purple figs are Celeste from a tree we planted over twenty years ago.  Each day this tree gives us baskets full of purple figs with reddish interiors.  The yellow fig is LSU gold, which was planted about four years ago and starting to bear well.  It is the first fig to ripen in our orchard.  The exterior is a lovely golden green and the interior  is a brownish color. The smaller figs at the bottom of the basket are brown turkey, planted about three years ago and just starting to bear.  We also have a pretty big tree of Italian honey fig that bears green figs with a deep red interior.  That are just beginning to ripen.
    We have many other varieties of figs planted -- Smith, green Ischia, Panachee, Nero, White Marseilles, Petite Negronne, Magnolia, Blackjack, and others.  I hope to spread the fig harvest out  so that we can enjoy them fresh over a few months.  Fresh figs are so delicious with goat cheese or bleu cheese!  We have also made several fresh fig cakes to share with our friends. But, alas, fresh figs are an ephemeral treat -- they go from ripe to rotten in a heartbeat.  So, we have been preserving the harvest as drunken fig jam (a little brandy makes it drunken) that is heavenly on biscuits.  Most of the harvest is getting dried in our food dehydrator, then stored to be a a winter time treat!

   The other big harvest right now is the grapes.  First came the Concord grapes.  You can see Michael holding part of the harvest in this photo.  He was able to make three batches of Concord grape jelly.  Next to come are the muscadines -- black Southern grapes that are so sweet and juicy.  Especially delicious are the Nesbitt, Supreme, Black Beauty, and Southern Home varieties.  We eat as many fresh as we can, but the harvest comes in fast and plentiful.  We will make jelly and muscadine sauce with them.  The last to ripen are the scuppernongs -- bronze or golden Southern grapes also destined for jelly.  We have nearly twenty grape vines in our orchard.  The big challenge with the grapes is keeping the deer, raccoons, fox, birds, etc. from eating them all.  Animals have a real sweet tooth and are not so good at sharing! Thus, we have to drape the grapes with netting -- a hot, sweaty, and tedious job.  Removing the nets after the harvest is just as trying!

Next up are the pears, which are just starting to ripen.  Stay tuned to find out what we do with them.

Summer Canning, Part 1

 Summer's bounty has spurred me into a canning frenzy.  The beautiful tomatoes in the picture above are from our garden. Many different varieties are represented in the photo -- yellow- and red-striped Red Lightning, dark mahogany Japanese Black Trifele, large egg-shaped Enchantment, green-striped Green Sausage, big red Celebrity, small egg-shaped Juliet, and many others, even some cherry tomatoes.  The mix of sizes and colors really doesn't matter as they are all blended into tomato sauce using our trusty Squeezo strainer, pictured below.  

The tomatoes go into the hopper, you turn the handle and push the tomatoes down with the mallet, seeds and skin are deposited into one bowl, and juice and pulp into another.  I added chopped fresh basil and oregano from the garden and cooked the sauce for several hours to remove the excess liquid.  The result was delicious, thick sauce that we ladled into canning jars and processed in a boiling water bath.  When I open the jars of sauce in the fall and winter, I will remember the warmth of this day, the sunlight streaming into the kitchen windows, and the bite of the tomato acid on my hands .

The canning jars above are filled with Dixie Relish, a blend of onions, peppers, cabbage, spices, sugar, and vinegar.  The onions and cabbage are from our garden.   The peppers are from Full Earth Farm, a local CSA (community supported agriculture).  This relish is so good!  We use it on hot dogs and hamburgers.  It is also a great addition to mayonnaise-based salads such as potato and macaroni.  I stumbled on it in the Ball canning book a few years ago when we had a bumper crop of cabbages and onions.  We have made it every year since.  

Tomorrow is the start of a new blogging era for me -- the post-retirement era!  I hope to be a better blogger as I will have more time to blog and more time to take photos of the gardens, the flowers, the orchard, my craft projects, etc., etc.  You get the idea -- I will have more time to do the things I love!  As an introduction to this new era I am posting a photo of the garden gate and arbor that lead into the veggie garden.  The gate was a handmade present from my husband for a long ago birthday.  The arbor was a handmade Valentine present from him just a few years ago.  The lovely pink rose that is rambling over the arbor is Tausendschon, which means Thousand Beauties.  It is a rambler that blooms once, but that blooming period lasts a long time through the spring and into the summer.  The lovely pink flowers bloom in clusters and the rose is thornless.