The grapes of wrath

No, we still don’t have any eggs.

Friday, September 26, when I returned from my weekly shopping trip, Terry announced that he had “a little project” for us to do after supper. We had to harvest the grapes. A raccoon had gotten into them the night before, and he didn’t want to lose any more of them. Really, we should write things down. Hilda and I thought Terry was watching the grapes and would alert us when they were ripe. He thought we were doing it.

It was immediately apparent that we had waited too long. Many of the grapes were heavily infested with picnic bugs. The bugs chewed one tiny hole in the grape and took up residence inside. Hundreds of them. Per grape. Some of the grapes were just empty skins.

“I just thought they’d go all raisiny on us,” Terry said. “I didn’t think this would happen.”

We also had labored under the false impression that they would all be ripe at once and should, therefore, all be picked at once. We did pick them all, but some were riper than others. We discovered that some that were not completely dark were still sweet. Some were too green and ultimately were thrown out.

There were plenty of good grapes among the infested ones. It was a messy job, though. I felt like I had things crawling on me for the rest of the evening. We started by filling every stainless steel bowl we had with the thought that we could just add water to wash them off later. After that, we reverted to the pink trays that we use for harvesting everything.

Then what? We couldn’t leave them outside because the raccoon would eat them. The greenhouse was too hot. I wasn’t going to leave all those bugs loose in the root cellar. I would have to find room in the spare refrigerator. I moved all the beverages off the shelf either to the door or to the root cellar. I had to take all the grapes out of one of the smaller bowls and stack them on top of the grapes already in a pink tray. Knowing that I would have to clean bug carcasses out of the refrigerator at a later time, I shut the door. At least they would be contained.

Grapes in the refrigerator overnight

Saturday morning, Hilda and I started sorting through the grapes after breakfast. We set up operations outside, once again to try to avoid bugs in the house.

Our grape-cleaning stations: grapes and water in the pink tray, clean grapes in the steel bowl, discards in the green buckets

We filled the first bowl with water using the garden hose. After giving the grapes a good dunk, we pulled the good grapes off the vine and put them in a big cooking pot. The bad grapes, vines, and leaves got tossed in a plastic pail destined for the mulch bin. We soon discovered that most of the bugs had dropped to the bottom of the bowl. For subsequent batches, we lifted the grapes out and put them in a clean vessel for washing.  Here is a picture of the bugs at the bottom of a pink tray after the grapes had been removed.

Hundreds of picnic bugs among the grape skins

We worked on the grapes for an hour and a half before lunch and two hour and 15 minutes after lunch, for a total of 7.5 person-hours cleaning grapes. We filled both of our big kettles and two stainless steel bowls besides. Halfway through our afternoon session, Hilda remarked that she wasn’t really that mad at the raccoon for eating some of the grapes. We put the bowls back in the refrigerator and carried the pots upstairs. Hilda started heating the grapes to make juice while I cleaned up the patio. By the end of the day, she had the grape juice cooked, strained, and in the refrigerator to settle. It needs to sit for a while for crystals of some sort to precipitate out. The crystals are not good to eat.

She did the canning today while I was at work. We ended up with 12 pint and 2 pint-and-a-half jars, one pint short of two gallons.  And next year, if we start earlier, we could have even more! Oh, wait…

The final product

 

Sauerkraut Day

No eggs yet. I went back in the archives to check when our first hens started laying, and we calculated that, if these hens are like the others (and we have no basis for that assumption), the earliest we can expect an egg would be Tuesday, September 23.
Even though the first official day of autumn is not until that very Tuesday (late this year—what’s up with that?), the weather is autumn-like today. Low, gray clouds are skittering across the sky, blown by a chilly wind. Bah. When I’m done with the post, I’m going to bake some bread and then head out to the garden to continue the end-of-season clean up.

Last Sunday, Pat and Nancy came out for the annual putting up of sauerkraut. We grew some enormous heads of cabbage. We harvested about a dozen or so. We took one or two of the Danish Ballhead and all of the Stonehead, which were sunburned and beginning to split. We left most of the Danish Ballhead and all of the Kaitlin because they have no visible signs of damage and will keep better in the garden. We will eat those fresh or freeze them later in the season.

Part of the harvest. Note exceptionally tight leaves in the cut cabbage in the bowl.

The cabbages were exceptionally solid this year. A single cabbage weighed over four pounds. When we got to calculating, we figured we must be making in excess of 40 pounds of sauerkraut. This will be WAY too much sauerkraut. Yet once we get started, well….

The evidence: a 4.75-pound cabbage

Hilda and Nancy cleaned the cabbages and cut them into halves or quarters, depending on the size. Nancy cut open a cabbage that looked exactly like the brain, right down to having a core at the proper angle of the brain stem.

Hilda (in back) and Nancy prepping cabbage

Nancy and the brain cabbage 

I did the slicing, as Pat can’t even look at the slicer without getting the willies. The wire mesh slicing glove I got a few years ago ranks among the top 10 best purchases of my life. It is so much easier to use than the lame and boxy finger protection device that came with the kraut slicer.

Pat weighed the cabbage, mixed in the salt, and packed the cabbage into the crocks. 

Pat mixing in the salt

We used our new crock and crock weights for the first time this year. The latter is another top 10 purchase (at least among items that get used once a year), much superior to the plastic bag filled with water that we have used previously. Also, the crock has a heavy ceramic lid which seems to be preventing spillover as the volume inside the crock expands with the accumulating carbon dioxide. We filled the crock way too full. I forgot all about the expansion problem while we were packing the cabbage. I remembered in time to put a tray under the crock when we set it in the root cellar. I learned that trick last year after cleaning up a puddle of sauerkraut brine from the cement floor. One would think that one could remove the gas by pressing down on the weights and get the level down to where it was, but one would be wrong.

The crock beginning to bubble on the day it was made

The crock this morning on the brink of overflowing

Terry has had a spectacular squash harvest this year. The Delicata are really, really good. So creamy and delicious! Last year some of them were unpleasantly fibrous. So far, we are two for two at having the perfect custard-like texture. Who would have thought I would ever be one to go on and on about squash? I used to hate squash as a child. It is a good thing I have learned to like it. We have literally ahundreds. As I contemplate my winter menus and take into consideration what we have in the larder, I realize we need to eat Delicata four times a week and sauerkraut at least twice. I wonder what sauerkraut-stuffed Delicata would be like.

Part of the squash and pumpkin harvest. The round orange squash in the foreground are Golden Nugget, a new variety for us this year. The Delicata are the white squash with green strips in the bushel baskets and the two boxes in the back.

It's a miracle!

There are always some oddly shaped potatoes that come to light during the digging. It isn’t every year that we find something divine. One of our potatoes looks like a sculpture of the Holy Family. It would be a better story if the potato variety was Superior (which we also grow), but it is actually a Kennebec. I think this is much better than the BVM on a piece of toast. I wonder if I can sell it for $10,000. Make an offer!

The Holy Family spud

 

Any finite task

As harvest reached its crescendo, I had little time to do everything I would have liked to have done, such as writing blog posts and going to the bathroom. I thought a lot about a time long ago when I first started graduate school. A faculty member explained the dissertation process as follows: you figure out how to do something; you do it a thousand times, and we give you your Ph. D. From this, I inferred a larger principle that I chant to myself frequently this time of year: any finite task, no matter how daunting, can be accomplished if you just chip away at it.

This principle has guided me through harvesting and trimming 200 onions, digging 75 hills of potatoes, washing thousands of cherry tomatoes and hundreds of red raspberries, and on and on. All of these are finite tasks. Just keep at it. It will get done.

The onion harvest was remarkable. Onions of every variety got to be enormous. Here’s a photo of the rest of about one quarter of the total inventory.



These onions are in a standard wheelbarrow. I can't get my hand all the way around this red onion.

Even though I heard Terry say several times that the rains came back in the middle of August, I never found time to pull up the landscape cloth between the rows of potatoes. When the rains did come, the potatoes did not dry out very fast. I don’t worry much about it when the plants are green as the leaves will pump plenty of water out of the soil and keep the potatoes from rotting. By the end of August, however, the leaves are dead. When we had two days in a row without rain, I pulled up the landscape cloth, and the next day, we dug the potatoes. It was muddy work. Hilda spent the next several days washing potatoes and laying them out on screens in the garage to dry. After a few more days, Terry put the potatoes in boxes and moved them to the root cellar. Dad finished putting the onions in nylons, and we were finally able to reclaim the garage for our cars.

The next weekend, I spent the morning putzing around in the garden. I got my pants a little dirty. I was supposed to be at Jane’s house for lunch. As usual, I was running late. I learned a long time ago to never wear my good jeans to Jane’s because more often than not I will end up doing something that requires being on my knees in the dirt. I quickly changed from the jeans I’d worn in the garden to a clean pair of work jeans from the dresser drawer. An hour later, when I pulled into Jane’s driveway, I looked down to discover that my jeans, which I had last worn for the potato digging, had not come clean in the wash. A fashion faux pas! I would have looked cleaner if I hadn’t changed pants.

Fashion faux pas: The "clean" pants I wore to Jane's house

The girls are just about full size now, but no eggs yet. Shouldn’t be too long now. It’s just getting light when I go out to do my chicken chores these days. For a while there, Gracie hung out on the perch, pacing back and forth until I picked her up, petted her, and set her on the floor. Only then would she run out to the yard to join the others. I mentioned this to Hilda, thinking that Gracie did it every morning. No, Hilda said, Gracie always ran right out when she opened the coop. We thought maybe Gracie liked me best. It seems, however, that she just doesn’t like to go out in the dark. When I was late with my chores recently, she was out with the others right away. Also, when I had to do my chores very early one day last week, none of the hens wanted to go out. They set up quite a ruckus when I started scattering wood chips.

Gracie waiting for me to wish her a good morning