This is a bad year for apples in our neighborhood. The Golden Delicious tree I usually pick from only produced a handful of apples at the highest branches (ten pounds at the most), and the tree with the red Jonagold-type fruit produced only about 100 apples, most of which the bees and worms got to first. I’ve picked maybe a dozen … Read more
Where I live, there is an abundance of apple trees growing untended on public property. Local ordinances allow anyone to pick the apples, and still most of them do to waste – although I do my part that from happening. Most years, I dry several bushels so I have something sweet to put in my oatmeal the rest of the year. I … Read more
I am really into home food preservation. I have an annually rotating stock of hundreds of jars of canned applesauce, canned pears, apple chutney, tomatillo salsa, jams, jellies, apple butters, tomatoes, tomato sauce and fruit juices. When I worked on a farm and had access to surplus vegetables, I also pressure canned lots of green beans, beets and soups. Every … Read more
Last week, I noticed a couple huge cherry trees on the edge of a park that on my route to work. The fruit hung down in racemes like chokecherries, and the ripe ones were very black. I had never seen a chokecherry tree that big (25 feet or so), plus the tree had rough and shaggy bark (chokecherry usually has … Read more
I was very excited a couple weeks ago when the black raspberries (aka black caps) began to ripen. They sell frozen black raspberries at Trader Joe’s for filthily cheap, but I generally like picking the local ones and, in any case, the local ones seem to have a slightly different and more complex flavor. So, the day after picking a … Read more
I am glad to report that I am finally done processing the 250 pounds of apples that Dekalb and I picked a week before my birthday. (I am sure that Dekalb would like me to note here that they were all free or he wouldn’t have found any thrill at all in harvesting them.) This is what 250 pounds of … Read more
Being an Extension-certified Master Food Preserver, I am of course interested in all things botulism-related. Here’s a great piece analyzing the causes of last year’s botulism outbreak in commercially canned food.