Adventures in fruit

As my dear followers know, we have a garden. It's actually a relatively small plot of land, but it's nearly completely covered in raspberry bushes and fruit trees. Now that it is July, and the raspberries are in season, I am in a desperate fight against time to save all that fruit before it rots away.

Why, you ask, do I bother?

Because all that fruit is good! And expensive if purchased elsewhere. And honestly I don't know. But for some reason, we are compelled to harvest and freeze and dry and store, in preparation for the long cold winter in which nothing grows for months and months and months. I actually think it's some sort of biological compulsion. The longer you live in places with miserable winters, the more your genes tell you to gather food like mad in the summer.

Perhaps?

At the very least, I can post our efforts here, and you may mock us from a distance. Ah blogging.

So the fruit season is in full swing here at Artax Orchards. The black raspberries have been ripening in shifts since the 4th of July. We've spent hours picking them. Each hour yields about 2 to 4 pints.

The red raspberries, which are hiding in and around the black ones, have been ripening for a week, but they're really just taking off this week. For future reference: Red raspberries one or two weeks after the black ones.

So far, we've been eating them and freezing them. Alas, we cannot get double cream in this country, and so we have been making due with plain old whipping cream on our berries. Still very nice, even if not perfect.

What else do you do with about 10 pints of raspberries? I am not inclined to make jam. Especially raspberry jam, with all those little seeds to stick into your teeth. I'm thinking lots of smoothies.


Aren't they pretty looking? Who wouldn't want to collect all those? Especially given those hunter - gatherer genes?

For your further edification, let me tell you about the two major downsides to picking raspberries. The first is the fact that the average daily temperature is between 95 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I realize that my Arizona and Texas friends are not impressed, but let's just say those temperatures are not conducive to fruit harvesting. The other downside are the thorns, and the scratches.

Isn't that an ugly hand? It's mine. The scratches will fade away in just a couple of days, but I am stuck with the hand. It will grow uglier and uglier until I die.

Anyway, for future reference: Raspberries from the 4th of July through the 21st, still going strong. Some of the smaller ones have shriveled and dried on the vine. How do you get all your berries to be the big, fat, juicy ones?

Topic #2. Sour cherries.

For future reference: The sour cherries just began to ripen around the second week of July. We are trying to pick them early this year, before the cherry flies find them. Our tree is smaller -- we have been trying to prune all the fruit trees down gradually to manageable sizes -- but we've still hauled in several quarts.
What do you do, you ask, with sour cherries? Well, Jonathan eats them. The rest of us extract their pits:
And then try to come up with some other ideas. As we are not bakers, we are not going to make pies. Actually, what we've found that we like is sour cherry fruit leather.

For future reference:
Recipe (which I made up, so I am going to write down for next year):
2.5 cups sour cherries, ground in blender.
Add about 2 tablespoons sugar or more, to taste (these are really sour)
2 teaspoons of vanilla
1 can applesauce, for texture.

Pour immediately onto fruit leather tray in food dehydrator. Do not think, "ah. Now I am done with cherries. I will put this mixture in the fridge until tomorrow and then dehydrate." For future reference: ground up sour cherries contain a lot of natural fruit pectin. If you put them in the fridge, you will have lumpy jelly the next morning rather than smooth fruit for drying.

So dry overnight. Then wake up early to check them, and realize they still aren't dry. Give them another hour. Keep checking on the stupid things every hour for the entire morning. Finally give up and wrap them up still sticky. Remember that this happened last year -- even if the manual says 5 hours of drying, it will be 10. Remind yourself not to wake up early just to check on the dehydrator. Stupid thing.

Topic #3. Currants.

We have picked the red currants, dear Reader. But we don't have an excessive amount of these. So we don't know what to do with them. I asked Google, and apparently the only thing you can really do with red currants is make jelly. My friend Lena, who knows these things because she has an honest English accent, suggested a bread pudding recipe. So maybe we'll go there. Meanwhile, the currants are keeping themselves company in the fridge.

Now, you are saying that this is an excessively long and boring post about fruit.

Reader, you have no idea how long and boring our fruit has already become.

Stay tuned for next week: the apricots are beginning to turn yellow.