Grape Harvest

Sorry for the months-long delay in posting. I’ve been a gypsy traveler all summer long. Went to Oaxaca for a month (I’ll post about the incredible farms we saw there), then North Carolina (Bill’s family reunion), and finally, to Lopez Island, up in the San Juan Islands. In between trips, we would come home for 4 or 5 days, long enough to harvest the bounty that grew even though I wasn’t there. In June, before we left, we picked all the plums off the big old Santa Rose tree, and the summer apples before leaving for Mexico. Then, when we returned, the mulberry tree was in full-glory. We ate so many! Frannie’s hair turned purple (from climbing under the tree and having fruit rain down on her).

Now, just getting back, because I planted late, the tomatoes are just coming on, as are the zucchini–I planted a nice one called Zephyr, and the sweet corn is, oh, about 8 feet tall. It was also time to harvest the grapes. They are Thompson seedless, an insipid green grape when eaten at the grocery store, but when grown at home, they pack a punch of sweet juice married to a sour skin. Yum. Course they all ripened at once and I can only eat so many. So we made ’em into raisins:

I have this pretty wimpy circular dehydrator, takes about 2 days of the thing on high to dry out two racks of grapes. Man, they are good, though. Kinda chewy with a big zingy punch. Got 3 pint jars of them from a giant basket of plump grapes. I wager they’ll last us a couple weeks…

Next up for harvest: cox orange pippin apples, figs (the tree is laden), pomegranates, kobocha squash. Have a happy harvest season–and let me know what you’ve been pulling out of the garden.