25 Aug Peaceful Earth Gardens Fruit Harvest Part II
The harvest keeps on rolling as tree after tree prepares to drop gallons of fruit. As soon as we finished with the first two plum trees and the cherry tree, we were onto the first of the apple trees overhanging our communal kitchen. Aaron got the idea to make a DIY apple press from his brother, and we got to work immediately making a prototype to test the plan. The press is a simple wooden frame, using a wooden board cut into a circle as the press, and a basic auto bottle jack as the mechanism. Within a few days we had a working model, and no time to waste as the apples were F A L L I N G by loads daily!
We sorted all the apples into buckets by freshness, keeping the oldest ones separated with the goal of fermenting their juice after pressing. The freshest apples were peeled and cored, and stored in the freezer for pies, smoothies or whatever! The cores and peels were added to the rest which were JUICED JUICED JUICED! We juiced about 5 gallons total from this one tree, and stored 2 freezer bags of peeled and cored apple. The fresh juice was INCREDIBLE and was gobbled up by everyone on the farm within days!
We spent another afternoon picking chokecherries off several trees at the edge of the property. These tiny cherries are tart, sweet, and extremely astringent! They are fun to eat but even more fun to make into wine. We harvest several gallons in an hour, with 5 of us working on ladders, bending branches to harvest the tiny berries. We boiled down the chokecherries in a pot, then strained through a mesh bag to put in a fermenter.
Keeping up with our first harvest products, I spent an afternoon helping Aaron re-rack the apricot wine and two kinds of plum wine. Re-racking is simply straining out solid matter and re-bottleing, adding more sugar to keep the fermenting process going).
The days continued, filled with fruit. The plum grove on the property began dropping our 3rd variety of plums: Japanese plums. These are so sweet and dropping hundreds on the ground for days and days.
Muna uses Japanese plums for making umeboshi (salted plums) and other infusions. We also dehydrated a load and made a plum syrup with the first gallon or so of harvest.
The season continues! We have another GIANT apple tree, several pear trees, elderberry, peaches, blackberries still to come!
Deborah
Posted at 13:40h, 26 Augustwow … living in the land of bountiful fruit harvest!!!! ENJOYing it with you!