The forecast tonight? -4C!?! The ‘big white combine‘, as farmer-friend Andreas puts it, cometh. It was go-time in our yard today. We started with harvesting the tomatoes [nearly all green], then the fall squashes, any remaining summer squashes, the cucumbers, celery, celeriac, the significant beet crop, onions, shallots, pole beans, bush beans of many types – and a couple hundred pounds of Red Sparkle apples from our tree. The afternoon was spent crushing and pressing the apples to get the 2010 vintage of Red Sparkle apple wine underway. Then cleanup and stowing away and trimming and sorting of all the produce. I can recall few times that I’ve been this tired.
Tomorrow morning, plants will die.
Soon enough, hardy crops like leeks, potatoes, carrots, chard, kale, belgian endive, rutabaga, parsnip, etc will need to come up too – but for now, this first push of harvest has taken a weight off my shoulders. It was the first big indicator, looking around the empty sections of my previously full-to-the-brim garden, that the fall craziness will soon slow, and winter will bring rest.
3 Comments on “Killing-Frost Harvest Sprint 2010”
And I didn’t know. I was too ill to pay attention to the news… Thursday. So, the tomatoes were not brought in. The ripe ones can be roasted and dried or made into sauce. The green ones (most of them) will be lost. I cried. I only lost the basil – but had already been harvesting it in water, so still have lots. The baby squash also went and the flowers. But, the large ones (mostly already used) are still ok. Shockingly, my new lettuce survived the frost. But, I had big read (and green) tomato tears yesterday morning.
:)
Valerie
Kevin
wondering how the first batch of apple wine is doing? i noticed that after it had settled out in your video, the juice was quite red in color. was this a factor in the type of apple you were crushing? what does it look like now?
the apples i crushed had mostly red skin but after crushing and primary, the juice started kind of purple/grey and is now a nice pee yellow color.
Got my large carboy doing secondary ferm. with a whack of light hungarian oak cubes. plan on leaving them on for approx two months- until my first racking.
I like a slight oakiness in this wine and wonder how long you left your last ones on the spiral.
cheers.
it’s cool chatting with a fellow “from scratch” local apple wine maker. lots of the internet info is vague at best.
Jeff
Jeff – it was red, wasn’t it. It came around, and is now the apple-juicy color one would expect. I’ve never seen grey-purple. My Red Sparkle batch goes from brown to the apple juice color, so it was likely a function of variety of apple.
The spirals are supposed to fully infuse in something like 6 weeks – says on their website at the Barrel Mill. I did some for less on some batches, some for more. In all cases I was pleased with the results. I’m also a big fan of oak and apple wine – they seem to love each other. The oak gives it some structure and aromatics that seems to do nothing but good.
Agreed – great to chat with other folks doing this locally. Not a lot of good resources, hence my desire to provide some by way of the blog.