Fruit | Sprouting Off

Planting Bareroot Strawberries

March 6, 2013 in Fruit

Strawberries are a tricky crop to get really really right. They seem easy. Plant a few plants, watch them grow, harvest berries and then they go nuts. They send runners everywhere and those runners make berries. Pretty soon you go out into the garden and are never heard from again because the strawberries grabbed you by the ankles and smothered you.

Three years ago I put in about 50 strawberry plants in a few areas and they overtook everything. This was great for a strawberry harvest. I would get more strawberries than I knew what to do with. We would get tired of harvesting strawberries (it was an every day thing) and they would rot. Rotting strawberries in the patch is a very very bad thing.

When strawberries are allowed to rot on the vine they create what is called a “mummy berry.” That fully moldy berry hidden under the leaves. That mold then works its way into the soil and the fungal spores fester there and infect the leaves and the future fruit. My multitude of strawberry patches had become victim to this fungus. I could have sprayed my strawberry patches with Lime Sulfur during the dormant season (and I did a bit), but it was time to replace the plants anyway.

Strawberry plants really only have a lifespan of about 3 years. After that they get tired and don’t produce as well. You can collect the runner plants and replant those, but since mine were so diseased I decided to rip out every last strawberry plant I had and start new. It was sad. We’re talking thousands of strawberries. Oh well, it had to be done.

I had a blank slate for strawberries. I selected two containers of bare root plants from my shop. I started with one Ever Bearing and one June Bearing*. I will need many more plants to get back to what I once had.

At my shop we sell both bare root strawberries and potted plants. In my opinion it is more cost effective to plant bare root plants. The only problem is that you can only get them at one time of year and they are available in limited quantities. I have ordered plants from Rain Tree Nursery in the past and that was my intention this year, but it was less expensive to get them from my shop.

Inside of the box there is a paper bundle. Pull off the paper and you’ll find a peat covered group of bare root plants.

The bundle of 15 plants is held together with a rubber band. Remove the rubber band and separate the plants into individuals.

I prepared my strawberry bed with compost and put down a layer of Dr. Earth Tomato & Vegetable fertilizer. Ideally I would have used Rhododendron fertilizer, but I was out of that.

Work the fertilizer into the soil. This particular fertilizer works best with soil contact.

Use your hand or a tool to dig a small hole to place the individual plant into.

Take the individual plant and place it in the hole (roots down) and then firm the soil around the crown. You may or may not be able to see the plant when you are finished. The top of the plant should just be at the top of the soil. Water the plant in and wait for it to grow.

In the “real world” you would remove all of the flowers the first year. Really? Who wants to wait a whole year for yummy strawberries? I have a hard enough time waiting until June.

Any tips? What do you prefer? Bare root or plants?

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*Ever Bearing strawberries produce smaller sweeter fruit over a long period of time. June Bearing strawberries produce larger not as sweet fruit all at once in late June. Ever Bearing are better for fresh eating and June Bearing are better for jams (generally speaking).

Tags: bare root, fruit, planting, strawberries
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15 Minute Applesauce

September 26, 2012 in Food Goodness, Fruit, Keeping the Feast

Last year my friend, Tina, started watching the show Doomsday Preppers. This led to us to believe that we were pretty set with our stash of pickled items and our bug out plan to go to her house where she has a giant TV and a lifetime supply of cheap Caribbean rum (we could totally trade that for necessities). It’s a pretty good plan if you ask me.

Then her doctor told her she had to go gluten free. Man alive was that a difficult transition. Over the past 4 months she has modified her eating habits and I introduced her to GF Joes. It saved her life.

Now that she has that on lockdown she’s gone all crazy food preserver. A few weeks ago she sent me a text and said she was going to go blackberry picking. I somehow conned her into going blueberry picking instead. As we are standing in a field of blueberry bushes we started plotting the expansion of our doomsday stash. We spent the afternoon picking blueberries and then moved on to blackberries. The next week we focused on blackberries, armed with pruners and a 5 gallon bucket.

From there we scouted other fruit sources. Another neighbor has a plum tree. I also have a friend with a plum tree. Tina’s brother-in-law has grapevines. Another friend has a pear tree and we went halfsies on an apple tree at the Curran Apple Orchard.

We’ve been lucky enough to freeze the berries and plums for later use, but apples are a little more fickle. We have picked apples the past 4 weeks straight. The scent of apples is imbedded into everything in my home. There are apples rolling around in her trunk. I never thought I’d get sick of apples. I live in Washington for heaven’s sake.

So what do you do with a metric ton of apples? Why you make applesauce of course. You wondered where I was going with all of that, I know. If you are a lazy sloth like me peeling and coring apples for sauce just sounds like a pain in the ass. Never fear! I have a great method for applesauce that will take you about 15 minutes.

First get yourself a whole bunch of apples. It doesn’t matter how many. You can do this with as few as 2 or 3. I happen to have about 60 pounds of apples floating around my house.

Sweet apples are better than tart apples. Most of mine were Gravenstein, but I like a good Macintosh too. With the Gravensteins (especially the less than ripe ones) you’ll have to add more sugar. Next slice the apples up. I have a corer/slicer that I like to use for this, but yesterday I used a knife and threw the chunks in seeds and all (I pulled out the stems).

Throw the apples into a pot, skins and all. Again, I did some with centers and seeds too.

Pour in about 1/2 cup of water (for a large pot), slap the lid on and turn the pot on medium-high. Once you hear the water start to boil give the pot a stir and slap the lid back on. In about 5-10 minutes the apples will be soft all the way through and look like this.

At this point you can go about and fish out the peels if you like your applesauce a little chunkier. If you’ll recall I’m lazy so I don’t do that. I should probably mention at this point that you’ll need one special tool, a food mill. I love my food mill. I use it for all kinds of things.

Use a slotted spoon and scoop out the cooked apples and put them into the food mill.

Spin the mill around (make sure you go backwards every so often too). Keep scooping cooked apples into the mill and spinning them around. Oh! Make sure you put the mill over a large bowl. Sorry about that.

The leftover apple mash is great in the worm bin. Take the mill off the bowl and you have applesauce!

At this point you have au-natural applesauce. If you used tarter apples you will need to add some sugar. How much depends on your taste. Same goes for cinnamon. I add a bit of nutmeg, because everything is just an excuse to use nutmeg.

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What to do with extra cherries

July 18, 2012 in Fruit, Keeping the Feast

Oh hai! ’Umembah me? Yeah… I ran out of things to post about. That happens in June. There isn’t much to do in the garden so there isn’t much to write about. Rather than force it I just stop writing. Happens every year.

This year, instead of continually not writing I’ve temporarily come up with something. It seems as if I’ve found myself with a boatload of cherries. That gave me an idea. Write about the cherries! Gripping journalism I know.

Exactly how did I come to amass a small fortune in cherries? Awesomeness. It all started with one of my fabulous coop tour hosts, Becky. She stopped by the store to drop off their sign from the tour and she and I got to talking. They were headed to visit her family and it just so happens that her dad has a 100 acre cherry orchard. She mentioned something about emailing Mavis to see if she wanted to barter produce for cherries. This is where I stepped in and said, “Hey! I have gobs of produce I’d happily trade you for cherries.” Sorry Mavis. Becky was all too happy to trade me cherries for veggies. So yesterday she came by with a large bag of Sandra Rose cherries, a small bag of Rainier cherries and a giant bowl of some sort of other sweet black cherry (much like a Bing but firmer). I think I totally won that barter. I gave Becky a cabbage the size of a small baby, 4 stalks of rhubarb and 2 giant heads of lettuce.

This afternoon I did my grocery shopping and the local green grocer had local sweet cherries (Bings or the like) for $1.98 a pound. Considering they’ve averaged around $3.99 a pound this was a very good deal. Consequently the conventional grocery had cherries advertised for $1.48 a pound, but I couldn’t find them in the produce department. Needless to say I came home with about 3 more pounds of cherries (if not more).

I love cherries. However, if I were to sit down and eat that many I would have some really good poos. I didn’t have time to make jam this afternoon so that left freezing them. In order to freeze them I had to pit them. Do you know what a pain pitting cherries is with a knife? With nearly 10 pounds of cherries to pit I invested in an inexpensive cherry pitter.

Now I’ve never used a cherry pitter before. The photo on the box makes it look simple and much less messy than cutting cherries in half and fishing out the pits. Yeah right.

First step is to attach the pitter to the counter top like so.

Then place a bowl under the opening thusly.

Um… That is my smallest metal bowl. Just for a scale reference, the bowl from an IKEA cheese grater came up higher than the opening on the pitter. I resorted to plan B. I put the cookie sheet that I wanted to freeze the cherries on under the opening and was back in business.

Next, load the cherries into the hopper.

One cherry goes down into the chute. Quickly and firmly push the spring handle down and the pit will drop into the catch bin and the cherry will roll out onto ~~into the bowl~~ onto the cookie sheet.

Neat and clean. Just like the photo.

My kitchen looks like Dexter has been there. I had cherry juice on the counter, on the floor, up the wall, on the artwork and all over my feet. My hands are still satined purple.

It may have made a mess, but the pits dropped nicely into the catch bin as promised.

I put the pitted cherries on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper and put the pan into the freezer. I do this with raspberries, strawberries, blueberries and any other fruit I want to portion out over the rest of the year. Once they are frozen I put them into a ziploc bag and label the bag with the year. (I still have strawberries and raspberries left from last year.)

I filled two whole sheet pans with cherries and had a few left over. So what do you do with a few leftover cherries, besides eat them? Why make cherry vanilla ice cream. That’s what. But you’ll have to wait for the recipe until tomorrow.

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Late June Harvests

June 26, 2012 in Fruit, The Sprouting Off Garden, Vegetables

I’ve been seeing posts about the gardening community raving about the harvests. In the Sprouting Off garden things have been a little slow. However, there are a few things that are in abundance.

I took this photo on June 14 and was quite excited to get roughly a pint of strawberries. I picked them after I dropped my son off at the bus just to make sure I was able to actually get strawberries. After school the children run into the garden and fill their faces with fresh strawberries. I absolutely love it, but at the time it made my personal strawberry snacks quite limited.

Since I took this photo I’ve harvested another pint (the next day), and then roughly 5 gallons (or more) in subsequent days. I took a huge bowl to work on Wednesday of last week and then another bowl Thursday. Derek and Oleg picked another huge bowl on Thursday evening and yesterday Derek and I picked a giant bowl. The one we picked last night was frozen for later smoothies. A few weeks ago my husband looked at me and said, “babe, I think we can officially say we have too many strawberries.” I’m inclined to think he’s correct. I’m to the point where I’m going to start selling pints of strawberries along side the road. People pay big bucks for organic strawberries.

At least I’m getting something from my garden. Other than lettuce not much has been of harvestable size. Peas are pitiful, broccoli has been slow (and full of cabbage worms), cabbage is small.

I’ve been waging a war against the cabbage worm. It seems to be common this season. I refuse to spray my food so I’ve used predatory nematodes in the beds. It seems to be working. I’m noticing less worm activity in the red cabbage.

Despite the cool weather I was able to harvest one decent sized cabbage to use for coleslaw on Sunday. There were only a few worms to pick out of the base of the plant.

The kid’s garden is also coming along nicely and they begged me to allow them to pick a few broccoli heads. I indulged them. They had to pose with their bountiful harvest first though.

Yeah, I instagrammed that one. As soon as I snapped the photo they asked if they could eat the broccoli. Children asking for veggies for a snack? Why yes! Yes you may have broccoli children! They decided it was slightly spicy, but deemed it delicious.

I don’t mind the slow growth. We aren’t inundated with produce quite yet. I think I may have found the balance of succession planting that gives us enough food to eat, but not so much that it’s going to waste or I’m giving it all away… with the exception of those damn strawberries.

How is your garden growing?

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Blueberry Black Currant Jam

September 18, 2009 in Fruit

This time of year is spent canning, freezing and generally preserving the harvest we’ve worked so hard to create. I also scout out deals on produce at the local markets to fill in what I don’t grow. Apples are a prime example of this. We will head down to Portland, OR for our annual trip to Portland Nursery”s apple tasting and come home with hoards of apples that will need to be made into applesauce.

Another bit of fruit I happen to have an excess of is Black Currants. Somehow I got talked into planting a Black Currant bush in our garden despite having no clue what to do with the actual currants. The first year we had a small little crop that the birds ate. The next year I got a slightly larger crop that I picked and then let go bad in the refrigerator. Last year I grew quite a decent crop and made sure to rescue the harvest before the birds had their fill. I managed to freeze that batch. This year was much the same, only my yield was huge. Well, if you consider 1 lb. 10 oz. huge. After all, it is one small currant bush.

I carefully picked off all of the stems and flower end bits and froze the berries on a sheet pan so they didn’t stick together. I did the same with the Blueberries we gathered from Blueberry Park.

Yesterday I had grand intentions of making a grand batch of mixed berry jam with the blueberries, black currants, strawberries (from the freezer) and the blackberries my son and I picked. Sadly, I didn’t get to the blackberries before the fruit flies and mold did. That left me with one less berry. I didn’t think that strawberry/blueberry/black currant jam sounded all that delightful (not that adding blackberries would have made much of a difference) so I scrapped the strawberries. They are now thawing in the fridge and hopefully I can get back up the hill to get a fresh batch of blackberries.

I did some looking for what to do with blueberries and black currants and oddly enough it was mentioned that they can make a nice jam if mixed together. Might as well.

My pantry is in a state of disarray and I’m short on a few things. Sugar happens to be one of them. I only had about 1/2 of the sugar I needed, but somehow it worked out.

Blueberry Black Currant Jam

(These are the weights I had to work with)
2 lbs. Black Currants
3 lbs. Blueberries
1 1/2 lbs. sugar
little over 8 ounces of water
1 whole cinnamon stick

Combine the water, sugar and cinnamon stick in a large pot. Heat over medium heat to dissolve the sugar. Add berries (fresh or previously frozen). Cook fruit down until it is syrupy. I let mine go about 2 hours. Remove cinnamon stick and mash the remaining whole fruit. I put the mixture through a foley mill with the largest size screed on. Transfer the mixture back into the pot to keep warm.

Sterilize 12-13 4oz. jars. I do this by washing them thoroughly in hot soapy water and then placing them open side down in a skillet of simmering water for 10-15 minutes. Bring a small pan of water to a boil and then turn it off. Put the clean lids in the pan. Heat a large canning pot of water to a rolling boil. Remove the jars from the skillet and dry with a clean towel. Fill the jars with the hot jam mixture. Leave about 1/4″ of head space and run a small spatula around in the jar to remove any air. Clean the rim of the jar with a clean wash cloth and place a lid and ring on each jar. I can fit about 6 jars in my canning pot so I only do 6 at a time. Put the jars in the boiling water (using a jar lifter) and process for 10 minutes. Remove jars from boiling water and place on a towel on the counter to cool. The jars have sealed correctly if the lids get sucked in.

I happened to only do 12 jars and had enough left over to fill another 9 ounce jar. I could have processed that one too, but I just put it in the refrigerator to enjoy now. The jam is not super thick, but more like a fruit preserve spread. It tastes delicious on toast.