Woo! Getting a very decent harvest of ground cherries from the backyard volunteers, mainly the huge low sprawling one at the south of the central bed. Made my ground cherry pie recipe today -- hoping to get enough more to make a second one later on!
(The allotment ground cherries have been useless due to squirrels helping themselves!)
What a banner year for slugs! Easily over 1000 I rehomed, I would say. The past few nights I've seen only a few each night, compared to the dozen+ I usually see, so maybe the colder nights have sent them away.
TLDR: IT WORKED!!! It set great! It's quite sweet, but works well as jam. I don't really taste much grape though, so next time (ie next year) use a lot less water during the juicing part, so that the juice itself is less diluted.
Day 1:
Harvested 2.5 pounds of grapes from BH.
Put them into sink (stems/twigs and all) where covered them with water. Swooshed them around. Bad ones floated to the top. Put the good ones into the big but low pot, with a bunch of water to almost cover them. I think I put too much water, as my total at the end was more than it should have been for only 2.5 pounds of grapes (which was ~13 cups grapes with stems setc.)
Heated / simmered them while mashing them with the curvy potato mashes. The juice quickly came out. After ~10-12 minutes, stopped.
Let it cool a bit.
Then, used one of the mesh produce bags (with handles) to strain the juice out. Did a few go's at this to make sure no seeds/twigs in the juice.
Put the juice into mason jars -- ~7 cups total. Will refrigerate overnight, to see if that deals with the tartrate crystals issue (https://creativecanning.com/wild-grape-jelly and https://practicalselfreliance.com/grape-jelly/).
Day 2
Gently decanted the juice --- didn't really find any crystals I think, unless they were really mini as there was some sediment type of thing at the bottom but it didn't feel crystal-y.
4 cups juice + 4 cups sugar + 1 box Certo powdered pectin
Added 4 cups of juice and 1 box of powdered pectin (used Certo) to my big but short pot -- must use a big pot because it climbs up a lot when it gets boiling! Stirred to dissolve the pectin and brought the mixture to a boil.
Allowed it to boil hard for one minute.
Then, added 4 cups sugar.
Brought it back to a boil. Boiled hard for one minute.
Removed from heat and spooned it into jars.
I put some of the jars into the fridge right away, the rest on the counter for a bit. They all set great!
How did I never notice these before! Huge amount of clusters -- one east of the raspberries, one on top of the hill west of that tree.
Tasted a few but didn't do an actual harvest yet. Planning to try grape jelly and maybe also red wine vinegar substitute!
That's 8.5-9 weeks to harvest.
Very cool! I had read that bush beans will often produce a second, smaller flowering/harvest after the first, so it's good to leave the plants in place. Indeed, the second flowering happening a while ago, and the harvest from that is now underway!
I'm out there almost every evening with the cell phone flashlight, dropping dozens into the slug bucket to rehome them outside of the yard, and yet every next night there are still tons more -- big ones no less! Quite amazing.
Typically find them mostly in the beans and potatoes. Oh and under tulled chard and kale, from which I haven't been removing them because of the tulle.
Ever since uncovering them a few weeks / a month ago I stopped patrolling and hand-pollinating, but wow in the recent couple of weeks only one or maybe two have taken, the others don't seem to have been pollinated? So I'll keep an eye open and try hand-pollinating where I can, to assist.
And hmmm, after shelling them, it's not looking like a lot of beans! Will wait to weigh them until all have been harvested.
Setting these out on a kitchen towel to fully dry off.
The scarlet runner beans don't seem anywhere near dried yet.
Fun! I imagine these will all get harvested as green (yellow) beans since unlikely to be enough time to dry out.
They were full of rust and mostly done flowering, and looked awful, so for neighbourhood concerns removed them. Removed the seed pods and kept the stalks/stems to use for next year's mulch.
The leaves crisped up, looks like some kind of disease (no wilt, just speckled and dried up / crispy). It was a good harvest though, no complaints. A few last cukes are on the vine, then that will be it.
