Apples

Bury Your Dead

November 1, 2010

Or at least make compost out of it.

It’s that time of year in the garden. Of doing the final tasks.

What amazes me to no end is that the final tasks never actually seem to end. I’ve been doing these final tasks for what seems likes weeks now and I’m still not done!

~~Harvest the apples~~
Dig the carrots
~~Cut the raspberries~~
Harvest the kale almost done!
Dig the beets
Finish transplanting the herbs almost done! Just found 2 more…
Put the tools away
Clean up the pumpkin beds
~~Burn the diseased tomato plants~~
Cook and freeze the kale
~~Make applesauce and apple jelly~~
~~Make pies~~ didn’t make pies. just froze the apples with sugar to make into pies.

I’m probably missing stuff. But even then, as you can see, I’m not nearly done. Harvesting the kale, it should be noted, is about a six hour job, since I strip the stems out of the leaves before I cook it. I tried leaving the buggers in last year, but they seriously depleted our eating enjoyment. So I listen to my book on tape, hunched over a bucket for hours while my shoulders tense up and I cut the leaves from the center stems. I have one more pile to stem before cooking it all and freezing.

Is it sick to say that I enjoy it? I actually told my friend this very morning that I feel guilty for spending so much time at it, because it seems like I am creating busy work just so I can sit on my big butt in the sunshine of my front step and listen to my audible book. (which is coincidently, “Bury Your Dead” by Louise Penny)

“Do you eat the kale?”

“Yes.”

“Would you miss it if you didn’t have it in your freezer this winter?”

“Yes!”

“Then why in the Hell would you feel guilty about it?”

“Ha ha (nervous laugh). Right. Thanks! Bye.”

Mom? Are you reading this?

No?

Good.

I blame my mom for my guilt. I inherited it from her. It’s genetic. I just don’t want her to know that. I’d feel guilty. And she’d feel guilty for making me feel guilty…

Anyway, I’m feeling crazy-behind. I have so many pretty pictures of harvesting.

So I’m condensing. If you want to see more or hear more about any individual event, leave a comment and I will comply. It’s just hard to know if I should write about apples again, for example, after writing three posts about them last year. Or planting garlic again. You know?

I do these things every year, but should I write about them every year? I subject my friends and family to repetitive litanies I guess. I suppose I could do the same here. But I’m feeling lazy. And so I’m going to do a power-post condensed harvest version.

Here we go.

Today, I planned on finishing the kale leaves, but when I went out to the garden to cut the remaining stems, I got waylaid by other tasks. For example, I strode into the garden and saw my garden fork stuck in the garlic bed and said out loud, “Shit! I forgot to plant the garlic!” And ran inside to get the garlic to plant. That took about an hour. And the following two hours were filled with digging weeds — totally pointless at this time of year I would guess, and dealing with those rabid, disease-riddled tomato vines. Ugh.

Here are the three types of garlic I planted

Aside from the fact that, like my face, my hand looks much better in person, can you see the size of the clove on the right? It is HUGE! It’s also the only variety I know for sure by name. It is called “Music” and is a hardneck variety. I planted it for the first time last fall and harvested my first bulbs in June. Very fun. The others are a smaller-cloved red softneck variety and also a red hardneck variety. I’m just grateful to have gotten them in the ground.

Oh my gosh. I just remembered right this very minute that I should also have planted shallots! Will my list never end?

Plant shallots

Last week I worked on my very sad apple crop.

Yes. They really did look like that and yes, I really did use them.

Here is why you can’t always judge books by their covers. Or apples by their skin:

Like with the kale, I got to listen to hours of my audible book. For the apples, it was “The Year of Living Biblically.” I pretty much burned through the last 6 hours of the book. It was a little repetitive, but good. I do recommend!

I separate the “good” apples from the “jelly” apples. The best good apples go into pies. The other good ones get made into applesauce. The borderline apples go into the jelly pot. Not to worry, all you people I have given jelly to: the green bin is NOT the jelly pot. Those went into the compost pile… And yes, Lola did eat her share of apples.

Speaking of Lola, here she is finding some volunteer snap peas that sprouted after my disastrous summer crop. She hunts them like she does phesants:

After sorting, cutting, and peeling the apples, I made the sauce and boiled the peels, cores and borderline gross apples into juice.

Here is something to bear in mind. When a recipe calls for a “heavy bottomed pan?” This is why they do that and what happens when you do and don’t follow directions:

The next day I canned the applesauce and made the jelly. My beloved, beloved apple rosemary jelly:

You can read all about it here, if you like.

Oddly, this year, my final batch did not set up. It made no sense. No sense at all. Same juice from the same batch of apples. Same ratio of sugar to juice. Same everything. The one and only thing that was different was that I actually stood in the kitchen and watched over that batch, making sure it didn’t boil too hard.

Which leads me to the conclusion that it must have to boil hard in order to set up. I knew you needed a rolling boil for added pectin jellies, but I didn’t know that about natural pectin ones. Live and learn, live and learn.

I took a few days off from outside garden work and got back to it this past weekend.

This was sort of fun and unexpected: after-the-frost strawberries! Who knew?

They seriously tasted like candy. Ridiculously sweet. Next year, I’ll have to remember that and be looking for them. Far less bugs to compete with at this time of year, too.

With that, I’m taking my last sip of wine and heading off to bed with visions of sugar-strawberries dancing in my head.

(that almost gets me excited for Christmas!)

Almost.

Your Daily Lesson: Mint is Invasive

May 25, 2010

…Lest there is anyone else as gullible as I.

We are surrounded by things that should illegal: Motorcycles without mufflers, Barbie commercials that make them look like they can walk by themselves, food labeling that want you to believe a fruit snack is as good for you as the real thing, and

…plant descriptions that say, New! Clumping, non-invasive spearmint.

Wow, thought I. Non-invasive mint! Buy, buy, buy, buy. (That means I bought four of them). So excited! Plant, plant, plant, plant. And now…

Dig, dig, dig, dig.

Every. Single. Year.

I will never be rid of that mint.

You gotta admire the tenacity. It’s in the same league as my admiration for raccoons. I can’t deny they should be complimented on their tenacity. I’ve got an idea for a new breed of raccoon: hybridize them to eat mint and not chickens.

Anyway. Please, if you learn anything today, learn this:

What you order at McDonalds will not look like it does on TV, and
All mint is invasive, no matter what the label says.

In other gardening news:

Itty bitty apples have formed. While I can’t see the whole tree, it appears that I will have at least some apples, despite the frost. Yee ha. That means more apple jelly this fall!

Volunteer borage and sunflowers have been relocated to their rightful homes

For those of you with keen eyes, yes, this is the bed I just dug the mint out of, pictured above. Gardening for me is often this way. I go out to do something specific and find I have to complete three other tasks before I do the one thing I intended. In the case of the borage, I went out to plant the corn. But found I couldn’t plant the corn because in the bed I planned to plant it, were several borage and sunflower seedling volunteers from last year that needed to be moved.

You see, rather than start seeds or buy new plants, I just move around the ones that self sow and come up on their own. And this year, instead of putting the borage in with the herbs like I usually do:

(which always gets to be too crowed and chaotic, but you can see a borage volunteer right up against the chives, which I should have pulled but didn’t have the heart to. Oh dear…), I decided to put them in the center area where I usually have zinnias. I do love zinnias. I’m going to miss them this year. But:

I didn’t start zinnia seeds yet
I’m sick of buying them and don’t plan to go back to the garden store, and
They always look crappy by the end of the summer. I don’t know why. Maybe I don’t deadhead them enough?

They will be replaced with the borage which

Looks FABULOUS in a vase with sunflowers
The bees LOVE
Are nice enough to start themselves from seed for FREE

You can also eat borage and though I mean to look into this each year, I have never gotten around to it.

So anyway, I needed to move the borage OUT of the corn bed and IN to the spot planned for them. BUT I couldn’t do that because…

The MINT needed to be dug out first.

You getting all of this?

You starting to understand why I can’t get Jeanette’s brochure done for her?

Anyone want to call Jeanette for me and let her know all of this? If so, I would really appreciate it. Because I’m too embarrassed to call her.

So that’s it. I plan to go pick up my tomatoes, peppers and eggplants up today. I’m getting them from a FABIE local heirloom, organic grower. Total granola guy. He’s gonna change the world. Which is great, but all I really care about at this point are his plants. Which, if they are like last year’s, are stocky little healthy workhorses. Already hardened off. Amazing. It’s called Knightshade Gardens. If you live near me in Minnesota, you can reach them at 952-564-1714. They sell out in the western suburbs around Maple Plain.

Then, all I’ll have to do is plunk the tomatoes into the ground in their intended spot tomorrow:

GAK!

How Not to Prune an Apple Tree

March 18, 2010

See those forks? That’s how NOT to prune your apple tree.

All these tweets and blogs saying stuff like “10 best ways to…”, “How to make the perfect….”, etc. etc. Well, if you’ve come here for clear instructions on how to do anything perfectly, I can tell you now: you are in the wrong place.

I am an expert at nothing. And while I may write about things and post pictures, I am in no way suggesting you do the same, lest you poison your family (see cutting boards), start a wild fire (see burning asparagus tops) or today, potentially kill your apple trees. (As I am sure I will hear from a botanist that I have completely botched the job…)

In my never-ending quest to improve upon my ugly apples, but also in my never-quite-making-it quest to prune my apple trees in a timely fashion, I have approached things in differing manners over the years.

Last year, I attempted to prune the blossoms. You see, I missed the window of pruning the branches. And, because there were thousands of branches per tree, I had literally thousands upon thousands of blossoms. I knew the apples would be pitiful if I let them all fruit, so I dragged the ladder out and tediously pinched off appoximately 50% of the blossoms in the hope the remaining blossoms would develop bigger and better quality apples.

Aside from being the biggest pain in the ass imaginable, who knows if it worked or not. My apples were ugly, but fine. They were not as large as they had been in previous years, but I am no apple expert, so, like I said: who knows.

I mean, I don’t even remember which kind of apple trees I planted! I remember the first one was a Honeycrisp. I’m guessing one is a Macintosh. The other three? No clue. I even called in a good friend and apple expert, who grew up on an apple orchard for his advise. He told me he could tell me. He tasted each one… paused… and said “hmmmm. could be….” and went on to list every variety grown in Minnesota. He did have some applicable advise though. Which was: “You need to prune.”

Duh.

Frankly, living in Minnesota, that is easier said than done. Opinions differ widely as to when the right time to prune actually is. Most agree that for us, it is in early Spring. Which actually means: late Winter. Which usually results in: never.

Who wants to troop out in 3 feet snow and gale-force winds to prune apple trees in February? Seriously. Who does this?

Not me.

I pruned them yesterday. And, I probably killed them.

I hope I am kidding. But we’ll see. And you’ll get to be my witnesses.

Actually, I did it this late because the StarTribune ran an article about a week ago that said, “Now is the time to prune those apple trees!” Full of happy exclamation points and optimism. So if my trees die, I’ll know where to point my law suit.

And if YOU decide to go out and prune your own trees based on the fact that I just did mine, let me know and I’ll get you the StarTribunes contact information for your files.

I forgot to take a picture of the full Honeycrisp canopy, but it was dense. It was the tree I pruned the most heavily. It is also my favorite apple. I’m crossing my fingers, is all I got to say.

Here are the before and afters:

This is the Honeycrisp. You can’t tell, but I sawed off a 4″ branch that grew to the middle and created a second smaller fork in the tree. All branches that crossed or grew toward a major branch were trimmed. All branches growing straight up were trimmed.

This is the Macintosh (I think). Note how dense the first picture is. I opted not to saw off the smaller side of the fork. The pruning books say to never take off more than one quarter of the tree. I’ll see how it does this year and if the pruning I did is deemed a success, I will toy with the idea of removing the fork next year. I decided the Honeycrisp fork will have to stay, as it comprises at least half of the tree.

This is one of the mystery apples. It is also the only healthy tree I have not to exhibit a major fork. It does, however, exhibit the effect of the prevailing wind.

So there you have it. How not to prune your apple trees. I hope it has been informative.

Next up: How not to plant Shallots. (aren’t you excited?!)

Apple Madness, Part Three: Apple Cider

November 9, 2009

No, I wasn’t planning on a third installment of apples. However, a commenter last week asked me if you could drink the juice from the boiled apples for jelly as apple juice or cider. Having tasted it, I knew you couldn’t. But I wasn’t sure why, so I called my friend Chris, whose husband Joel grew up on an Apple Orchard. They have a cider press, so I asked her some questions about it.

This is where the story gets a little complicated. Suffice it say, I was coerced into participating in the making of apple cider under suspicious intentions. I am well aware how much Joel likes my bread, but it appears he is attempting to one-up me (did anyone see last week’s Office episode with Dwight??) by providing me with more cider we can possibly drink in a year. So that I will be indebted to him.

What do I do when I am indebted to someone? I make them bread.

Are you starting to understand his thinking?

Regardless of the motivations behind the cider making, it was so cool and fun! It was a beautiful Sunday with friends. Yes, I’ll be making bread all day today, but it was worth it!

I was running late and my camera had my big honking lens on it, so I told Morgan to grab the point and shoot (that she has all but claimed as her own). What happens when a 14 year old claims your old point and shoot camera? Anyone?

I’ll help you out: the battery is in a continual stage of dead.

So these pics were taken by Morgan with my iPhone. They capture the day just fine.

The Making of the Apple Cider:

Due to Apple Madness Part One and Part Duex, I only had the motley bin of reject apples I discovered behind the pine tree last week to contribute. Joel, however, knowing he wanted to provide me with high quality cider, had purchased some frozen Honeycrisps from his family’s old orchard. Minnesota orchards suffered a mostly devastating 2009 apple season. First it rained all October. (It seriously did). Then we had two very early hard freezes before the month was out. Depending on where they were, many orchards lost huge amounts of valuable apples in that weather. Joel bought some of those weather damaged apples at a huge discount to make the cider.

I, of course, offered to split the cost with him. But he was having none of that. It would interfere with his well-laid plan… He also got some apples from the top of a neighbor’s tree. Plus, another friend, Tim, came to help and brought a huge amount of really nice looking apples.

That is, apparently, the key to good cider: you gotta have a good mix.

The first step was to wash and cut out any rot, or very obvious “yuck” from the apples. The few that I brought along? Well, they garnered many laughs and snickers from the crowd. If only they knew that was what ALL my apples looked like. Well actually, maybe it’s best to keep that to myself since I will be gifting these very people with pies and jelly very soon…

Then, those apples get put into the grinder — the craziest home-spun contraption I’ve ever seen! But it gets the job done. I don’t have a picture of the whole thing, but inside the wooden box is a large wooden cylinder with screws protruding from the surface that grabs and grind the apple. It is run with a little motor and a belt that turns the cylinder.

The ground apples get put into a mesh bag and that goes inside this other ancient tool, the press. The handle is slowly screwed down and the cider comes out through a hole in the bottom.

We ran out of plastic jugs, which were purchased from the orchard, with lots of apples to go…

So we started filling one of those five gallon water cooler bottles.

We filled that entirely up and still had a few more pitchers worth of cider.

All in all — and I could be wrong about this — I think we made about 25 or 30 gallons of cider.It lasts about a week in the fridge since there is nothing but pure apple juice in the bottles. But it freezes really well.

So, I’ve got my cider and Joel gets his bread. The only question is. How much and for how long do I provide him bread before I am, once again, ahead?

Apple Madness, Part One. Ugly-But-Useable-Apples Recipes.

October 21, 2009

Ugh.

I wish I could be more upbeat about this whole harvest thing, but MAN. I’m ridiculously SICK of it. How do orchard people stay happy? How does anyone stay happy? It’s just one thing after another thing after another… it’s never over. I’m never done!

aah. I digress. Again.

Not only do I sit and think “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to deal with those _______.” (fill in the blank with apples, peppers, eggplant, kale plants, beets, carrots, parsnips, etc.) But then I think “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get that apple post up on the blog.” And then I wonder “What the hell am I even doing this stupid blog for?” For which I do not have an answer.

Aside from my petulance about all the harvest things I have yet to do, I am really, really excited smug about this pairing of apple recipes.

First, know this: I grow organic apples.

Second, know this: I grow organic apples because it is the easiest way to grow apples. You basically do nothing, versus spraying chemicals on the apples every two weeks. I can’t be counted on to do anything “every two weeks.”

Third, know this: my organic apples are very ugly and hard to give away.

Fourth, know this: I hate to waste garden food and therefore I have a lot of ugly apples. Very tasty, ugly apples. Hence this combo of recipes.

Backstory
We had two hard freezes before September was over. Normally we have a few frosts, things wind down slowly and the apples are about the last garden item to be harvested, along with carrots and parsnips. This year however, our first frost was not a frost, but a freeze. The apples were mostly OK that night (26), but a week later the temps dipped down to 20. Not 25, but 20! So I spent the day picking all the apples and sorting them into 3 piles: compost, really ugly but useable, and maybe-I-can-eat-this-apple-fresh piles.

I use the “Really Ugly but Useable” apples for pies and sauce. I basically just cut away everything gross and use what I can. Last year, I was making tons of pies to freeze. I had a bucket of peels and cores under the sink in the compost bucket. I think I might have even emptied some coffee ground on top of them. Then I read something about boiling the peels and cores to get juice that you use for apple jelly. Honestly! That’s like making food from garbage!

So I brushed the coffee grounds off the browned peels and cores and dumped them in a pan with some water and started boiling. I got only 1 pint of jelly out of it, but oh MAN, it was so insanely good! In my opinion, it’s way better than my raspberry jam that everyone seems to want. The jelly was too runny last year, but I didn’t care. This year, I was hoping I could do it better.

So here is my process. And if I may be allowed to say so, it’s brilliant. I don’t know how many other people have ugly apples, but if you do, please don’t throw them away: try this!

Apple Sauce and Apple Jelly

The ugliest useable apples go into the Sauce/Jelly pile (this is a very complicated pile system) while the prettier ones go into the Pie/Jelly pile (that’s Apples Part Two, coming soon). Just for the record, my apples are a mixture of Honey Crisp, Haralson and two mystery varieties.

I take an apple, and cut it in half, then quarters, and assess the situation:

if looks OK, I cut the core out and put that in the jelly pot. The quarters go into the Sauce Pot.

If it looks über yucky, I use what I can.

Nice bright pieces go into the Sauce Pot.

Mottled brownish pieces (trails from the Apple Magot Fly) go into the Jelly Pot.

I do confess that we often just eat the less disgusting brownish ones. They are only trails of worms long gone. You can hardly see some of them. Just so you know: I like to think I’m preparing my family for some apocalypse that will take place some time in the future. My kids are going to be way more immune to gross food than yours will be.

I work my way thru the pile (which isn’t disappearing nearly fast enough). And yes, that’s a trash can and yes, it’s kind of dirty…

The pectin for the jelly comes from the peels and the seeds, so you need those for the jelly. The peels stay on the sauce apples because I will put those thru the food mill and they make the sauce pink, which is very pretty. I could leave the cores on the sauce apples as well, but they are helpful for the jelly and it’s easy enough to just cut those out. Is this as confusing as I think it is? It shouldn’t be…

Oh my gosh I have a terrible headache… But I still have 42% battery left on my laptop, so I must press on!

I basically just keep going until one or the other pots fill up. Then I add about 1 cup of water to the sauce apples and turn on low and cover. I almost cover the Jelly Apples with water and add a whole bunch of ROSEMARY (my favorite flavor). Do not skip this step. If you don’t have any, go buy some. Seriously.

Add 1/2 cup of fresh squeezed (not!) lemon juice. (I’ll squeeze up to 1/4 cup. More than that, and I use this stuff, kindly given to me by my friend Chris when I complained that real lemon juice — as opposed to RealLemon brand yucko — didn’t exist. She got this at CostCo.

Stir it up and turn on low, cover and cook till apples are soft, at least an hour.

Once soft and tender, line a strainer with several layers of cheese cloth (or use a jelly bag, whatever the Hell that is, if you happen to have one. I do not.) set over a large bowl and pour in. Do NOT push or force apples thru.

This mixture needs to sit a good long time, preferably overnight in a cool place. I’m thinking that maybe it’ll be cool enough on my porch tonight. Ya think?

Meanwhile, the Sauce Apples should be soft and ready to process. Put the Sauce apples thru a food mill to get rid of the peels and any seeds.

I put the food mill right back over the pot they cooked in because once you are done processing them, turn the heat back up, add 1/4 c lemon juice for about 4 lbs of cut apples and sugar to taste. I added about 1/2 cup. I also add about 1 teaspoon of cinnamon because we like that. Bring to a simmer and ladle into clean, hot sterilized canning jars.

Heat process (steam or boil) 10 minutes for 1/2 pint jars.

You are now done for the day, go to bed feeling like a superstar. Tomorrow, though, it all begins again, so sleep well.

In the morning (or several hours later), put the juice from the strained apple rosemary mash into a measuring cup.

I have just over 4 cups, so that means I need to add 4 cups of sugar. Put it into a big-ass pot, because the jelly needs to be cooked at a full rolling, foamy boil.

It took me about 20 minutes to reach the magic temperature of 220 degrees F. Be sure to skim off as much of the foam as possible because it makes a bigger difference for clear jellies. I don’t worry about it too much with my jam, but you can see it below, suspended in my jelly. As soon as it reaches 220, turn off the heat and ladle into hot, sterilized 1/2 pint jars, wipe the rims and seal. Heat process for 10 minutes. Refrigerate any jars that don’t seal.

See the foam? Really ticked me off, I have to say. But then, just another reason to keep it for myself.

Apple Sauce and Apple Jelly. Leave it on your counter to admire for a couple days, then trudge it out to the garage or basement or where ever you store that type of thing.

And this year, It’s the PERFECT consistency! So happy.