Processing the Harvest

3 Gallons of Elderberry wine on the go now, our kitchen smells VERY fruity after mashing/steeping al those berrie! I'm lucky enough to live less than 100 yards from a few Elder's. :o

Crabapple wine next...

Steve...

 

Whenever I'm pasteurising and have only part of of full load or part of a part bottle of juice left it goes in the freezer. Yesterday I cleared out a load of PET milk bottles to defrost overnight to process together with the apple juice I pressed yesterday. Despite using different colour caps for each juice I accidentely mixed half a gallon of crab apple juice in with one and a half galls of pear juice.

After an initial feeling of frustration at making such a stupid mistake, I'm now looking forward to making 2 galls of pear & crab apple wine in addition to 6 galls of pear wine.

 

Nutcracking/freezing time now:



Any other nutters here?

 

Started on the passata making today, canning 6 x 1 litre jars at a time. Less than 10% of the beefsteak toms get extracted as skins, seeds, etc. using a passata machine. Roasted cherry tomato pasta sauce production tommorow. Then a load of veggie curries.

 

Cool Scrunge

Just when I thought i'd got enough Quinces to deal with, got a load more this evening, at least these are propper ripe, last ones were sharp enough to cut your taste buds off.

Another sucesfull batch of car dried Tomatoes done now

 

Go for quince wine.

 

Yeeaasss:D

 

Went for Crab Apple & Quince Jelly in the end Scrunge.

Nearly got all the Toms in now

 

Made 25 litres of quince, apple & grape wine with mine and I've probably got enough left to make some quince, pear & crab apple wine.

Got these (plus a stack more in the car boot) to press tommorow:



And I've still got loads of apples on the trees waiting to be picked. I'm running out of bottles to pasteurise in so need to rack off about 15 - 20 galls of wine to free up bottles to fill with apple juice.

Been dehydrating toms:

 

The last of last year's apples about to be processed into apple pies:


And the last of last year's potatoes (still got half a sack) will be processed into croquettes and frozen.

 

Blimey, i'd forgotten half of this stuff.

Most excellent Scrunge, not a drop going to waste in Scrungeeland

 

I had trouble remembering the title of this thread, but still have the last of my stored apples/spuds just about to go off and need to be processed into something that can go in the freezer and then last until this year's crops are harvested. The very last of the garlic cloves were starting to go soft so got made into garlic butter & frozen.

 

I am drying five pounds of green onions right now. They went into the dehydrator yesterday, I turned it off at night and will start it again now. Amazing onion smell comes from it, must be done outdoors - it would make you cry the vapor is so strong - they are going to be good.

I enjoyed my dehydrating last year and this year hope to really go wild with it. The machine is the cheapest, $35 from amazon, and works really well. I hope to do loads of herbs, we used all of last years.

I also freeze and can a bit.

How do you keep your crops?

 

I dehydrate, freeze, press apples & pears, pasteurise juice, bottle (AKA can) fruit & veg, make jams, jellies/chutnies/etc., make passata (& pasteurise), make wine & (hard) cider and steam juice extract fruit (for cordials and juice for wine making) .

There was is a good thread covering all of these 'Processing the Harvest', although it's temporarily unavailable following a server crash a short while ago, but I've just requested Site Admin make it a priority to make it available again. I've located a cached copy of page 2 to give an idea of what's in it http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...arvest.37040/page-2 &cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

@colne As you use the term 'can' and paid $35 for your dehydrator, is your location the USA? Here in the UK there's not such a wide selection of canning equipment (that we bottling).

EDIT: Just found this on another thread

DOUBLE EDIT: Marley Farley has now restored the 'missing thread' and merged with this one, thanks MF!