Found ’em!

Just of few of the pictures from the wild grape adventure of 2020:

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  That’s a lot of tiny grapes!

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  Separating fruit from the stems

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  SOME of the stems!

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  Boil, bubble, squeak!

The process resulting in about a half dozen pints of Crazy Wild Grape Sauce!

With all the rain we’ve had, our compost pile has graced us with what we affectionately call “Gourdzilla”, a very prolific pumpkin plant that decided the compost pile was the perfect place to propagate:

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This is what happens when pumpkins end up in compost piles and record rainfall saturates everything – at least 18 of these have been sighted, of varying sizes, this being one of the larger ones so far

Next up, not only does the sun grow the plants, it now provides our energy!

The labor of our fruit

After nearly two weeks in Charlottesville, Virginia, on my last full day there I made the climb up the ridge to Carter Mountain Orchards.  I invested in a bushel of peaches.  Ignore the side of that top box that says Chiles Peach Orchard.  Now a bushel is a lot of peaches, but as there are so many things one can do with peaches (can being an operative word here as the punster strikes again), I set about making sure we’d have reminders of summer and juicy, ripe peaches once I got home.

 

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The above post was written on August 5, 2019. This was my last trip to Charlottesville to grade these particular professional exams, COVID-19 forced delays of the 2020 exams, and even once they’d been rescheduled, the grading was a virtual event, as was the one just a few weeks ago. Alas, it’s unlikely I’ll be back to lovely Charlottesville, with its surrounding horse farms and vineyards, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Carters Orchards, out near Jefferson’s Monticello and Monroe’s Ashlawn Park.

All those peaches, hours and hours of hot labor during some of the hottest days of that summer, but the sweet taste of ripe fruit, gently preserved, still graces my pantry shelves. Since this first canning effort here at Churchill House, there have been apples, apples for pie, apple butter, and lots of pale pink applesauce, lightly sweetened and so refreshing, all put up waiting to be enjoyed. Last summer, we harvested a few gallons of the small wild grapes that grace the property, not an experiment to be repeated any time soon, but still, several pints of ‘crazy wild grape sauce’ accompany the peaches and apples put up in the pantry; a sweet/tart sauce that goes surprising well on turkey or pork.

Within the grape bower, midsummer before they ripen to deep, dusty purple.

I had lots of photos of the process, the piles of stems after the fruit had been stripped, alas, this is all I could find. Tiny, tart, nearly all seed, but what juice and pulp could be garnered made an interesting taste sensation when combined with a sizeable dose of sugar and simmered until thick. Crazy wild grape sauce, a la Churchill House.