Preserving a Box of Pears

Pears are one of my favorite seasonal treats but their season never seems to last very long.  I was able to get a decent price on a box of perfectly ripe Bartlett pears at the local farmers market and when I finally found a few hours to get some work done I went about the business of preserving them.

I started with canning them.  One by one each pear was peeled, quartered and cored and the pieces were soaked in a lemon juice solution to prevent browning before I processed them with light syrup in the canner.  I only did one canner load so I ended up with 8 pints of canned pears.

The rest of the pears were getting close to being over ripe and were very sweet so I decided to dehydrate what was left.  They were also peeled, quartered and cored before they were laid out on the trays to dry.  The end result were leathery pieces of pear that were so sweet that they tasted like candy.  I was able to dry ten pounds of pears down to a small enough volume that they only filled a quart jar.  I have a feeling that these sweet treats won't be around long, so next year I may have to be sure to make more.

Plum Wine: Round Two

The end of the summer fruit season is closing in and I have been working hard to preserve what I can in what little time I have available for my endeavors.  This weeks farmer's market score was a beautiful box of little Italian plums that I got for $20 and a bottle of Cherry wine.  The Cherry wine was just freshly bottled so I had another large carboy available to make more wine and so that is what I did with my fresh box of plums.

The 24 pound box of plums would be just enough to make four gallons of plum wine, but first I had to wash, pit, and chop up all the plums.  I think the whole process took me five or six hours, but it will be well worth the effort.

The sweet golden flesh of these plums is a stark contrast to the deep red plums that I processed for the other batch of plum wine that I started a few weeks ago.  I am curious as to the color difference in the final product of these two wines.  I also believe that these plums are a bit sweeter, so I am hoping the finished product becomes a wonderful sweet dessert wine.

One by one the plums filled the primary fermenting bucket and when I was done chopping I topped it all off with boiling water and several pounds of sugar.  After it cooled down for several hours I added a few key ingredients to help break down the fruit and add body to the wine and then let it sit for twelve more hours before I added the yeast.  It will spend about a week in the primary before I filter out the juice and transfer it to the carboy where it will finish fermenting and become wine.  I think I have now started enough wine to last me a very long time.  All that is left to do is to find a place to store all of it!

Last Batch of Chickens For The Year

This year I have already hatched out two rounds of chicks.  The first round hatched in late February and began to lay eggs a couple of months ago.  The second round hatched out in the middle of June and have almost reached their full grown size three months later.  In another month, those chicks will be big enough to move into the hen house and will hopefully begin to lay eggs by October or November.  These younger birds should keep me in eggs while the older birds go through their seasonal molt.  Each of these hatches only resulted in a handful of chicks, some of whom were lost to a predator before they got too big, so I decided that I needed to have a few more to make up for this year's losses.

This round I set a dozen eggs for hatching and ended up with four chicks.  It's not the best hatch rate, but for my purposes it is fine.  I don't really want to double the size of my flock each time I hatch eggs, but small increases are manageable. I don't have a broody hen this time, so I will be raising this batch in the "brooder" in my back room.  The brooder is a large aquarium which makes watching baby chicken antics even more entertaining.  The size is a limiting factor and when the chicks are 3-4 weeks old they will be moving outside into my chick tractor.  Here they will continue to grow until they are big enough to put in with the adult birds.

Little by little my flock keeps growing.  I do need to keep in mind that there is a limit to how many chickens I need to have, but I figure that as long as they lay enough eggs to pay for the cost of their feed, then they aren't much of a burden.  They help to clear out the weeds in my yard and they fertilize the soil for me too.  I am trying to put their destructive habits to good use by keeping them in areas that I want to improve.  If my flock grows to be too large I will either sell off extra young laying hens, or cull the older hens when they stop laying eggs for me.  Either way, I will have some time to think about it as these guys grow up.

Digging Onions

Fall has arrived and the main harvest season is still keeping me quite busy in the garden and in the kitchen.  This spring I planted two beds of onions a few weeks apart and little by little I have been harvesting them over the past several weeks.  The first planting was over run with dill and none of the bulbs were very big in that bed.  I had been pulling them as needed and putting them in the salsa that I was canning and I managed to use up all the onions in that bed just for salsa.  A couple of weeks ago the onion tops fell over in the second bed signaling that soon it would be time to pull all of the onions for winter storage.

Today I finally had time to get around to harvesting the onions.  This bed was overgrown by weeds too, but somehow most of the onions I harvested were still nice large bulbs which would be good for storage.  I worked my way down the bed pulling up onions one by one and removing the tangle of bindweed as I went.  I laid the onions out to dry in the sun for a little while as I worked.  When I was done I had a good sized pile of onions to show for my work.

The yellow onions are best for long term storage so I am happy to have such a good number of those.  The red onions won't keep as well and I have been pulling and eating those first for the last several weeks, so there are far fewer of those in this final harvest.  I took all the small ones, or ones that had grown a seed stalk and made one final batch of salsa with them because they wouldn't keep well otherwise and I didn't want them to be wasted.  The rest were cleaned up and taken into my back room where they will cure over the next several weeks.

Once all the greenery has dried I will trim the bulbs and roots and then put them in the cool closet in my back room for winter storage.  I never did finish using up all the onions from last winter before they started to go bad, so I think that this smaller crop will still be enough for me this year.  I may dehydrate some to make backpacking meal mixes, but most I hope to use fresh over the winter.

Bottling the Strawberry Dandelion Wine

I first started this batch of wine back in May when the dandelions were coming on strong and the strawberries were just beginning to come into season.  It bubbled away on my counter for several weeks and then slowly began to clear.  I racked it once after the first month when fermentation had slowed down to nothing.  I waiting a couple more months until the wine was completely clear and then the day came for bottling.  It was a small batch so the process was short and simple.  I sterilized the bottles and corks that I would be using and then transferred the wine from the gallon carboy to the bottles.  The result was this beautiful wine.

It made almost five full bottles of wine.  Now that it is bottled I will let it age for a few more months before I take my first real taste.  The small amount that I got to taste today was good, though it still had a bit of a bitter tang that is present in young wines.  Time will mellow that flavor and bring out the fruity and floral tastes that make this wine unique.  Because it is such a small batch I imagine this will come out for special occasions and be savored in small amounts.  It is definitely a treat worth waiting for.

Canning More Peaches

At the last farmer's market I bought a box of fresh picked perfectly tree ripened peaches.  The skins were thick with fuzz and the bright orange flesh practically fell off the pits once they were sliced open. This week's peaches were a free stone variety that were sweet and juicy and they would be perfect for preserving some as slices in syrup.

I started by blanching and peeling the peaches a few at a time.  If I had the timing right, the skins would pull away from the flesh of the peach with little effort on my part.  Once skinned, each peach was pitted and sliced and then dipped in a lemon juice solution to help prevent browning.  While I worked on making a good sized pile of peach slices, the canner and jars heated up on the stove.

Once I had enough peaches to fill a round of jars for the canner, I mixed up a batch of syrup and started warming up the peach slices to prepare them for canning.  I prefer to hot pack my peaches as I think the final product looks and tastes more appealing than my cold packed peaches.  I ended up processing fourteen pints of peaches from this box and will be eating the left over peaches fresh until I run out of them.  Come winter time I will be tasting these sweet reminders of summer whenever I need a little pick me up.

A Multitude of Pickles

The garden has been a very busy place for the past few weeks and the cucumbers are producing an astounding amount of fruit.  Currently my canning tally is at seventy-eight quarts of pickles since the season began just a few short weeks ago.  The summer has been hot and dry, but with regular watering the plants are thriving with no immediate end in sight.

We are heading into fall with fairly warm temperatures and if I can protect the plants as the evening temperatures begin to drop I should be able to continue harvesting for several more weeks.  The first frost date for my area is around October 1st, so I still have another month of potential harvests before the season winds down for the year.

I am continuing to pick about a gallon bag of cucumbers every day.  Every few days I have to can a batch of pickles or I will run out of room in my fridge.  Each round of canning has been resulting in at least seven new quart jars each time.  My storage area is also very full already, so I am just going to let them fill up my back room until I can find more shelving for storing all of them.  I always save the boxes that the jars came in to make storing my home canned goods a little easier.

If I can keep this up I may well reach my goal of 100 quarts of pickles this year.  I know that I won't be able to eat this many pickles, but I have many friends that enjoy these seasonal taste treats.  I'm sure I will find homes for them before next year's canning season begins again.