Late Fall to Early Winter Garden Chores

I was hoping for a few more days of open ground here in central Wisconsin. It appears I am not going to get it. The days are just too short. Given I have just a few more tasks I need to do in the garden, I suppose I will trod along in the cold, damp, or outright wet and get them done.

I didn't get my galic planted. If I don't get it planted yet this fall I will suffer a bit smaller yield, but I will plant it as soon as I have open ground in the spring.

I don't cut back my grapes until I prune them in the spring. I did remove about half the foliage to encourage the sugar content in the grapes in late August. As I have wine grapes and I am in a marginal zone for them, I wanted to leave as much of the plant as I could to help it get through the winter.

Sometime during the winter I will top my dwarf apple tree which now has shoots at 12'. I want to encourage it to set fruit where I can reach it.

I will also use some sort of wrap on my fruit trees to discourage mice, voles, and rabbits from girdling and killing my fruit trees.

Now that I can see the structure of my shrub and hedges I will prune off the "wild hair".

I will net or enclose in some fashion the blueberries. Rabbit and deer love to nibble blueberry shrubs in winter. The growing tips where next years harvest will grow are particularly at risk from this type of foraging over winter. I already collected pine straw from under my pine tree and mulched them with about 6" of the stuff.

I pulled out tomato plants and sent them off-site to compost, but I left a couple of the kale to provide early winter greens. I will be attempting baby salad greens under lights in my grow room this winter, so I need to set some soil aside for this purpose. I have salad greens that I am still haresting next to my deck. Even a topping of snow did not deter these greens.

My brother just cut the last of the broccoli in the family garden. I harvested a couple cabbage and still have broccoli here in the potager. I have a honeydew melon I picked before the frost that just ripened which I sliced up the other day.

The period where the temperatures play along the frost line every couple nights without getting down to a really cold temperature of 23 degrees or so has this year been nearly 60 days this year. Although the days have gotten progressively shorter and Daylight Savings Time has ended, with a cold frame this could have been a very viable season for cold frame grown greens and short season crops. I have several radishes and carrots still in the ground that would make very good eating.

My sister-in-law harvested late summer planted carrots and pureed and froze them for the coming baby. She then used her steam juicer and made carrot juice from the mangled bits left over from her puree. It looked filled with vitamins, and as some of the carrots were purple the resulting juice was also a deep purple.

She also blanched a froze our comparably small parsnip harvest.

I will also harvest the greens from the celery that did not set stalks and dry them for the tasty dried greens with a great color they will provide for soup stocks over the winter.

We have a small bag of sugar beets. After Thanksgiving we are going to give it a go and see if we can extract the sugar.

I also noticed the onions I planted for early spring harvest have sprouted and are over an inch tall. I hope this method will prove itself as a way to get early spring onions and economical sets for the family garden .

We would have liked to have gotten the main rows of the family garden plowed yet this fall, but it looks like that will not happen. On the cultivator notes, my son has taken a small engine class this fall in high school and has torn apart the Mantis tiller and is cleaning it as part of his class. I'd like him to tackle my sister-in-law's tiller next.

Grape Juice

'Othello' grapes in my potager

I canned grape juice, tomato sauce, and salsa this weekend. Started some apple cider. I made sun-dried tomatoes with garlic and basil in olive oil. I still have two very big bowls of tomatoes to can and apples to make into sauce. I have a basket of green peppers, some sort of hot, some not. I will probably chop or slice and freeze those, an easy way out as they don't even need blanching. I thought I had a plethora of canning jars, but I am down to about 6 large-mouthed quarts and a few stray others.

This weekend, my brother and sister-in-law have been concentrating on grape juice using a juice steamer. I will have to find out how that went. My brother says the harvest was one of the biggest he has had. His are Concord grapes planted on the old wind-driven water pumping windmill his historic homestead.

The grapes were there before he bought the property and have outlived the removal of the working parts of the drive that would have drawn up the water from the well. My sister-in-law has spoken of restoring it into a functional piece sometime in the future. A lot of expense for something that would be a novelty at best providing drinking water for her only livestock, a trio of donkeys.

Now, it forms the climbing structure for her grapes, however. Grapes that my brother had to harvest using a 16 foot ladder, wisely foregoing the tiny metal ladder running up the frame of the windmill.

Many people harvest what we call "fox" grapes which grow wild and can have a "foxy" taste. Some are lucky enough to have 'King of the North'. I have 'Othello', a true wine grape, and are a bit sweeter than the Concords. We have planted 'Reliance', a seedless red grape in the family garden for future eating as table grapes. We had five grapes this year,which the nephews declared very good with their 2-year-olds chant of "more, more!"

This year my pollination was hampered by the late bloom and rambunctious grow of leaves at the crucial point of pollination. On my two vines, I had ample set of grape bunches, but the number of grapes per bunch was down. Also a dry August affected the end size. My brother received two generous showers which my village missed out on entirely in August.

I had enough grapes to can just four quarts of juice.

I tried a new method. Last year I used an easy cold pack method:

Per quart:

1 1/2 cups of grapes, washed, and destemmed
1/2 cup sugar
Boiling water to fill within 1/4 of the rim.

Adjust two piece caps and lids and use a boiling water canning method for 15 minutes.

This is quick and easy, but requires some very messy decanting for not a lot of drinkable juice.

This year, I tried a slightly different spin on a couple different recipes, which is probably not advisable by the USDA.

Grapes like apples have pectin. Pectin separates out when fruit is brought to boiling. Pectin is good if you want it for making jellies and such. It is not good when you want to make good quality juices. Problem is, boiling is how you can juice and sterilize and pasterize.

So how do you get around boiling and the sediment it causes in the juice, which is not esthetically pleasing to the drinker?

The boiling water bath canning method makes use of boiling to set the seal. Everything is boiling, air is forced out, taking care of bacteria that need air to proliferate. The bacteria that don't need air are dealt with by use of proper pH. The proper pH is typically provided by a combination of lemon juice, 5% vinegars, salts, and sugar. This is why the weighs and measures in recipes are so important. It is also why only certain food items can be boiling water canned, others need pressure canning. It is also why with the advent of low-acid tomatoes the USDA recommends adding two tablespoon of lemon juice to each quart of tomatoes when canning them in a boiling water bath (one Tablespoon per pint).

So my method requires grapes to be simmered until they are soft enough to put through a food mill. It also requires they are brought to a minimum of 165 degrees for at least 10 seconds. (The USDA has found 6 seconds at 165 degrees sufficient to pasterize grapes, knocking out a whole host of pathogens.)

I then worked out the math on the proportions of sugar and boiling water that I would use if I canned my grapes using the cold pack method. This I compared to the syrup recipe found in the 'Ball Blue Book of Preserving' and found it to be in the medium weight syrup range. To be on the safe side, I added two tablespoons of lemon juice to each quart, as well. I canned the quarts in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

Looking at my grape juice, I think there will be some of the pectin sediment that will settle out. Given the intensity of the grape juice, I would guess this concentrate will be diluted 1:1 with cold water when drinking, yielding much more volume of drinkable juice and a tastier product.

The alternative to this would be decanting prior to canning and two or more runs through a juice bag strainer. This method requires two or more days and a lot of handling of the product which can always provide additional steps for the introduction of bacteria and other pathogens.

Just a note, I did have just a couple seeds that the food mill allowed to slip in that I did not manage to remove, but no skins, and for the most part no seeds.


2011 juice on left, last year's vintage on the right.