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