Preserving the harvest: apples

Sep 10

I came upstairs from a round of apple-wrapping to find some questions on apple preserving from Ruth, who is the lucky recipient of a quantity of hangingoverthefence apples.

Like me, she had heard that wrapping apples individually in newspaper is the way to go. She’d read that coloured inks are toxic so to avoid those, but I’ve been told that Canadian newspapers use soy-based colour inks so they are ok (but glossy inserts are not). (I don’t know if this is really the case or not, so if in doubt, avoid them.) I’d heard it from the Compost Education Centre which suggests that you can add newspaper to your compost (for a “brown” layer), which means the apple wrapping can do double duty if you end up with some spoilage later in the season: you can just chuck the whole thing into the pile. The point of wrapping is to keep the apples from spoiling one another if they’re bruised or damaged. Lacking a root cellar, I am fortunate to have a little bar fridge that I use just for apples and it works reasonably well.

My first year of bounty, Adrienne gave me a wonderfully liberating tip: you can peel, core and slice apples and put them in ziplocks in the freezer – works brilliantly for cooking apples. Don’t worry if they brown a little en route to the freezer as they go brown when you cook them anyway. But I suppose if you can’t bear the thought of any brown, you can always dip them in syrup while you work, as the PickYourOwn folks recommend. But I don’t find they brown too badly if you work quickly on fresh and fully ripe apples. The ones in the picture were frozen a year ago with no syrup or preservative: I’d still use them in baking.

If the apples are of a fairly firm texture you can slice and dehydrate them (my tree is a yellow transparent, which produces very soft apples great for applesauce but impossible for drying). Here are some instructions on drying apples in a dehydrator, an oven or a hot car!

I have an apple peeling machine which makes a lot of the labour-intensive aspects slightly less so. As long as you’re dealing with firm, regularly-shaped and very fresh apples. It doesn’t work well on my transparents which tend to be soft and misshapen. It’s also less frugal than I when it comes to peeling and coring: such is the trade-off with labour saving devices of all kinds.

Or you can make applesauce and can that – it’s a high acid food so you don’t need a pressure canner, just a pot large enough to cover the jars with water and process (boil) for 20-25 minutes depending on the jar size and altitude (again from the PickYourOwn website, good instructions on applesauce, with photos) I’ve made it with plums or quince and those are nice combinations; perhaps saskatoon-applesauce or raspberry-applesauce would be good if you have an alternative source of berries.

I own a centrifugal juicing machine so that’s what I use. Because my apples are very tart I always add carrots for sweetener (sugar as a last resort); or blend them with sweeter varieties or other fruit. This year I decided to use up some surplus jam from my larder, so I heated that and added it to blackberries I’d picked, and strained the juice and used that for sweetener. I also used raspberries and carrots. I don’t have a recipe, just go by taste. I put the juice into jars or plastic tubs, cover them and freeze them. Because the liquid expands while freezing, if you’re using screw-top jars, be sure to leave the lids loose until the liquid freezes, to avoid any messy explosions.

I have made apple butter in years past, but find I don’t use it.

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Linen, flax, apples and more apples

Sep 8

On the last day of August I wandered along to a potluck information session on the Linen Project that Denise – who’s been driving the project forward under Victoria Transition‘s Reskilling umbrella – hosted. Although the sun was setting and the day’s participants had scattered, there was a full scale exhibition set up in the garden, and a spinner demonstrating how to spin linen from flax fibre that had been retted, broken, scutched and hackled by willing volunteers. A perfect plant, flax, offering flowers, food and fibre.

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, the fruit continues its burst of plenty in these summery September days. I joined three other Fruit Tree Project volunteers this morning to pick a tree that yielded a spectacular 260kg of apples before we had to leave with promises to return.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After weeks of picking, juicing, freezing, baking and sharing my own apples, I finished stripping my yellow transparent tree on the weekend, which also had a record yield, and squeezed around 30kg into the Fruit Tree Project’s cooler, which is busting at the seams while its coordinators work to distribute the bounty between charities and local processors.

Things continue to flourish at Haliburton Farm too where our veg boxes this week included a first crop of apples from the farm’s replanted orchard, some herb bundles pretty enough to grace a table, and some rather beautiful sweet peppers.

 

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Fruit Tree Project strikes again

Aug 31

I spent a fruitful morning yesterday with a dozen teens from the CISV Peace Bus out at Island View Beach on my first pick of the year for the Fruit Tree Project. As part of their cross-Canada tour, the teens involve themselves in community projects, aiming to make the trip carbon neutral. Picking local fruit fits the bill because it means less imported fruit is needed to feed the communities and enterprises where the unwanted urban fruit is distributed.

We were picking from trees that had been planted in a beachside campsite that the CRD took over a few years ago. Because the irrigation that had watered the trees had to be taken out (not up to code, apparently) there hasn’t been any watering since then, so the fruits tend to be small while the trees adapt to their new micro climate.

The Fruit Tree Project van holds all the ladders and picking equipment, together with weigh scales and as many sturdy boxes as can be found. Jesse, one of the program coordinators, lays it all out ready for the arrival of the bus, and gets everyone started, while a local TV cameraman covered the event.

 

 

 

 

 

A peaceful period of picking passes

 

 

 

 

 

and then it’s time to weigh and load the fruit in the van, clean up the fallen fruit, and head off to store it.

 

 

 

 

 

The cooler at Fruit Tree Project’s HQ – LifeCycles – where it’s normally kept is full to bursting while the team works on distributing the seasonal bounty to community groups and local food processors. So, with the help of Fruit Tree Project co-coordinators Renate and Jesse, we park nearly 500 lbs of apples in a trusted garage while the smaller quantity of pears and plums goes back to LifeCycles.

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Heirloom schmeirloom

Aug 27

The LA Times has a good article on heirloom fruits and vegetables. The word “heirloom” is one that’s widely abused, but one that’s also treasured by many farmers and gardeners in these days of hybrids and genetic engineering.

There is much to commend, for example, the complex flavour and charming fissures of an heirloom tomato over its supermarket version, round and hard and bland as a tennis ball. Here’s one of mine, as discussed on my gardening blog recently.

But woe, or perhaps that should be more woe, has befallen my tomato kingdom. I’ve had to pull up one of my beloved Auriga plants as it suffered sudden and catastrophic wilt. Was fine one day and flopping over the next. Because it perked up at night before flopping out again the next morning, and because the stem cross-section revealed the tell-tale dark ring that shows fungal damage to its vascular tissues, I assume it was vascular wilt – which apparently means either Fusarium or Verticillium… although the plant didn’t show any yellowing of the leaves which is said to be a symptom of both these fungal diseases.

So I don’t know for sure, but I had to pull it up to be on the safe side. My tomato garden will have to move to a new location next year in any case, since several of the plants were infected with early blight (Alternaria solani). Aside from not growing in the (now contaminated) soil for several years, the main suggested procedure for controlling vascular wilt is to buy seed that has been bred for disease resistance. In the words of one source of advice, “The incidence of these diseases has increased with the growing popularity of heirloom, non-resistant, varieties.”

Well that’s the problem, isn’t it? The old conflict between taste and functionality. We may complain mightily that new food plant varieties are bred for longevity in shipping containers and on supermarket shelves rather than for taste or texture, but they are bred for other useful purposes as well. Disease resistance and other useful qualities like drought tolerance are key objectives in many plant breeding programs. Good breeding should aim to keep those most important qualities, the ones that made us love a food – flavour, nutritional content – while secondarily working on other aspects. But in a world that seems to have forsaken its tastebuds if a cheaper product can be had, this doesn’t always happen.

And maybe it’s not possible. If it’s not, then it means urban (and other) farmers who want to grow heirloom varieties need to be skilled and knowledgeable about avoiding the risks that can do in their crops. Gaining that skill and knowledge is the tricky bit in a busy world.

Meanwhile, I will have to look into wilt-resistant varieties that grow around here (apparently the resistance has to be localized as there are so many variations of the wilt fungi). Perhaps tempt fate and see how well they fare in the same garden bed. And how they taste!

There are ambiguities around the term “disease-resistance” too; this was a term used about one of the tomatoes I’m growing this year, the Bearo plum. In fact it was said to be highly resistant to blight, but I’ve managed to prove that its resistance hasn’t extended to early blight, unfortunately, as it’s one of the plants affected in my garden this year (so far only the leaves). But its enthusiastic growth and ample fruits make me want to try it again, and next time somewhere it can have room to reach for the skies.

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Farm tour: salad greens and looong greenhouses

Aug 19

The COG-VI tour this month was to 30-acre Kildara Farms, organic since 1994 and run by Brian and Daphne Hughes. They started off with an apple orchard; went into strawberries but tired of feeding the deer, and are now supplying year round organic greens to local supermarkets.

They rinse the greens, then wash them in food grade hydrogen peroxide solution (1:1000) and then rinse again and spin them dry (equipment and surfaces are sterilized with 1:25 solution). When asked why they use this rather than bleach, which many organic suppliers in the US use, Brian replied, “One word: chlorine.” He says there’s always chlorine residue regardless of rinsing. For two years they have used a strict testing protocol, to avoid any issues with food-borne illnesses. As many travellers have found, salad greens, because they are eaten raw, are particularly vulnerable to these – if birds or other wildlife come into contact with them while growing in the fields or in open greenhouses. So Brian has the greens tested twice weekly for peace of mind, and provides test results to the retailers as well.

 

 

 

 

 

We looked at two different sets of greenhouses. The first were designed by British farmers whose company – Haygrove – quickly cornered the polytunnel market. They’re immense structures which can be extended to cover acres of ground, and use y-shaped posts that allow them to be extended efficiently in rows. They’re also simple to construct and inexpensive (by greenhouse standards) to erect, using legs which can be screwed into the ground and hold fast to clay soil. You can add deer fencing around the perimeter, which is open for better ventilation. Because the plastic is lashed in place by ropes rather than clipped, it is simpler and quicker to put up and take down. Any greenhouse is vulnerable to bad weather and these are no exceptions: during one particularly bad storm the plastic came loose twice in the same day. But they are otherwise working very well and are easy to ventilate further in hot weather, by just lifting and clipping the plastic as needed.

 

 

 

 

 

Next we looked into some Harnois greenhouses, made in Quebec. Fancier and more expensive, and full of winter greens – in this case Mizuna – which can grow unheated, or be covered by row cover if it get very cold. The watering system mists from overhead: more efficient than watering tapes, according to Brian, but in need of constant checking as the heads get clogged very easily.

 

 

 

 

 

The greehouse sides are enclosed so need to be ventilated during hot and sunny days. Pickers were at work while we were there, taking advantage of the evening cool (the greens start wilting by about 11 am). They chill the greens overnight before washing, sorting, weighing and bagging them. Kildara uses biodegradable bags – they used to use plastic clamshells but discovered that people were failing to recycle these and sending them to the landfill, so opted to change to bags for environmental reasons.

 

 

 

Kildara is one of a number of farms and food places on the North Saanich Flavour Trail this weekend.

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