Should have included sci.bio.botany

wrote:
Well yesterday marked the start of the black-walnut harvest and the
end of the pear harvest.
I love canning pears because they are the fruit that are the least
preparation and paring. Pears
are easier than apples and far faster because with pears they are
seldom containing worm holes
or other insect attacks. The pear season ended abruptly for me after a
strong wind storm and
all the pears were on the ground. And funny how the roaming roosters
and hens of the neighborhood
hung out near the pear trees. Roosters love pears more than I do, it
seems.

Now for me, pears are a last pick as favorites to eat, but when pears
are combined with whip cream
or heavy cream milk, well, pears instantly become my first pick as a
dessert after a meal.

My harvesting of fruit, vegetables and nuts is going swell this year
for I now have 360 liters (quarts
to our USA readers) set for winter. I did not get any glass liters of
strawberries this year as I had
to move the plants last year, at least the ones I was able to save
from the horse and donkey and
llama. Boy, put those three into a pasture that has strawberries and
you are lucky to have any
strawberries remaining. But this coming year I have a system of
putting the strawberries in
pots and for winter I dig holes in the Fall and cover with straw and
then put in pots by Spring.
So next year I should have 200 or 300 pots of strawberries starting
out and thus able to
cann as many liters as I desire.

The apple harvest is soon to end and I made plenty of ginger and
cinnamon applesauce. Here
again I had to compete with the horse and llama over the apples and
ended up having to
separate them out of the pasture from the apple trees. Llamas are very
destructive of young
trees.

Yesterday I started the black-walnut harvest and here I have to get an
optimal strategy for
harvesting and preparing. The trouble here is to get the hand staining
coat off and to store
the nuts safe from squirrels and rodents. Once I get the nut clean
from the coat, then I can
store in buckets in the back room of the house. The best way I see for
removal of coat is to
have set out on the ground and let Nature take off the coat, but the
squirrels get to them.

After the black-walnut harvest remains the remainder of the tomatoes
and the potatoes. I usually
make a fresh potato salad with the potato harvest. Fresh celery, dijon
mustard, mayo, organic
onions, fresh squeezed lemon, sliced eggs, and a sensational potato
salad. Fresh potato salad,
not refrigerated.

Then there is a few liters of rhubarb to cann and I usually end the
canning season by buying
organic cranberry and making about 10 liters of cranberry sauce.

I have hazelnut bushes coming and maybe see the day when I can harvest
fresh organic
hazelnuts along with black-walnuts.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

I wrote yesterday:
(snipped)

I have hazelnut bushes coming and maybe see the day when I can harvest
fresh organic
hazelnuts along with black-walnuts.


Hazelnuts like acid soil and alot of water so I have to struggle to
get
them established here, but black walnuts are native to the region
and they freely volunteer.

Just last night I had one liter of pears in its glass jar spoil on me,
I noticed
a cheezy smell which alerted me that one had gone wrong. I test the
jars frequently with a ping on the lid. If there is no ping I open and
eat
if alright. A jar of pears canned last week had spoiled and was about
to explode the jar. This usually happens to about 2 or 3 jars out of
360
every year. The thing I question is whether it is better to add the
sugar
while cooking or to cann the jars with no sugar at all and once I open
them, add sugar to taste.

There are advantages and disadvantages to either method. I suppose
if I wanted to be frugal on sugar I should add to taste and that way
probably cut down on sugar loss as well as cut down on the amount
of sugar intake into my body.

In fact, I think I will try a entire season of canning next year
without ever
adding sugar. So that I add sugar only when I open a jar.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

Apple harvest ended yesterday with a marathon canning of 12 liters (12
quarts) of ginger
applesauce. Hard for me to tell if I prefer ginger over cinnamon. The
wintertime will tell whether
I like one over the other. Sometimes I include both in a jar. If too
much ginger it has a acrid
taste, but too much cinnamon is pallatable. In my desire to keep my
weight down, I am now
often eating for a meal only a few spoons of peanut butter and a 1/2
liter of fruit. So which
goes better with peanut butter? Ginger or cinnamon applesauce?

The black-walnut harvest started last week and now I have a 50 gallon
plastic tank full
of the unhusked nuts. As the husks turn black and removable will wear
plastic gloves
and dehusk them, and then storage in a back room over winter. So if I
can get enough
black-walnuts then along with the peanut butter will have the so to
speak "meat" of
the meal.

My goal in all of this is to be self sufficient in food for a 1 year
time period if in case
birdflu pandemic scourges through. If not, well, I have a constant
steady year supply
of excellent organically grown food that is a joy to eat.

The remaining food to cann is the tomatoes. I let the horse into the
pasture where
half of my tomatoes were, figuring a horse does not like tomatoes. He
spent a day
eating up both the red and green tomatoes.

And I have the potatoes to harvest. I am waiting for the grasshoppers
to die out
and give the potatoes one last greening before harvesting.

And I have a few rhubarb to harvest.

Finally, I buy in the store, organic cranberry and cann them. Looks
like I end up with
400 jar liters of fruit.

Next year I am going to try something different with the watermelon
patch. Here the
trouble is that the vines like to grow into the mowing area. What I am
going to try
next year is a use of tires with rims and to train the vine out of the
small hole and
to surround the vine with tires, so I can mow and weed easily and give
the vine
plenty of area to spread on top of tires. I also have some old sheet
metal to serve
as another weed suppressant.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

I still have small round yellow crabapples that I can harvest
but seem to not be in the mood. Perhaps if not too busy I will
harvest some of them. Now I want to say something about my
strategy for having crabapples. Many decades ago I was frustrated
by codling moth infestations of apples full of worms. But South
Dakota is perhaps too cold for codling moth to destroy apples.
So I decided to have crabapples of a size that they are still
useful but would escape being wormy. That was the gameplan, but
since the cold weather eliminates the worms, well, the crabapples
are not that much in use. My biggest problem with apples is a
small hard shelled beetle that seems to burrow inside and when I
go to wash a bucket of apples, floats to the top all these tiny
black beetles.

Now I wrote a long time ago that I wondered if the ingredient in
these fiery sensory liquors like Drambouie or B&B Benedictine whether
that secret to fiery taste is a chili or hot pepper derivative?
It may also be a fermented herb like ginger. Ginger in large dose
is acrid tasting. I suspect it is the hot pepper in those liquors.
But to experiment, on my last batch of applesauce I added a pinch of
chili peppers along with cinnamon and ginger.

Now this new sort of meal menu where I just eat some spoonfulls of
peanut butter and a 1/2 liter of some fruit. Today I opened a liter
of Juneberries I canned last summer and had two tablespoons of
organic peanut butter for lunch. The thing about such meals is they
are very fast, and very nutritious and low on calories. The thing about
proper dieting is that we eventually have our stomach's shrunk to a size
in which we feel full. The stomach of a "thin person" is small and
when you eat something like a tablespoon of peanut butter, it takes
a long time to digest and makes us feel full. All of my applesauce
canning has sugar added, since I added cinnamon and ginger and they
make the apples too sour or bitter without sugar. But next year
I will not add any sugar and only after I open a cann and taste will
I add sugar as a better control of how much sugar.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies