I’d had enough of reading about Karlynn‘s foraging successes, especially having spent far too much time harvesting far too few berries of the low-bush variety. Rather than a sheet pan one layer deep of low-bush, roughly the same amount of time spent picking highbush yielded 21 lbs of fruit. As you can see in the photo, highbush cranberry grows rather … Read More
Low-bush Cranberries
At a recent farm stay over the weekend, the smell was everywhere – that pungent, somewhat stinky odor…not of manure, but of fall cranberries. I looked, and looked, and looked – nothing. Until I looked down instead of up. I’m good and used to harvesting high-bush cranberries, and even have some planted in my yard, but have never come across … Read More
Saskatoons
This is one underrated fruit. It has pretty blooms in the spring, vibrant red foliage in the fall, produces fruit that in my opinion is tastier than blueberries, requires no special attention, and is super hardy to our climate. Let’s face it, it grows wild here. It requires no green thumb. If you like blue fruits in general, it makes … Read More
The Strawberry Gap
At the moment, in my mind, these bad boys take top spot at proving how shitty and dumbed down imported-out-of-season-food can be. Fresh strawberries from a plant that was actually bred to produce tasty strawberries, kick ass. If they were a wine, I’d score them 95+ while the crap-styrofoamy-immitation strawberries we get from abroad [no offense, cali-foilks, but the strawberries … Read More
Oak Tasting
I’m waiting for some wine samples of batch 2 to come up to room temp from cellar temp to do a tasting/assessment as they are all under different oak treatments at the moment. The two far ones have different toasts of oak going on. The last one has both toasts, but in twice the volume of wine. I’m trying to … Read More
Saskatoon Wine – 2009 Batch 1 Update
Batch 1 of 09 Saskatoon wine was bottled this week, and I figured it would be useful for other would-be-saskatoon-wine-makers to have some thoughts in the otherwise gaping void of online information about tackling this. First, I’m pretty sure this wine will mature nicely. For a long time, the wine had a tart cherry vibe that was awkward, nearly metallic, … Read More
Saskatoon Wine – 2009 Batch 2
Batch 1 Update: has been hangin’ with medium plus toast american oak for a week now, and is showing enough wood to come off in the next few days for this batch. I think. Reality is that I have no guidelines to work with. The infusion spirals are fully extracted at 6 weeks. Where prior to that is a good … Read More
Saskatoon Wine – 2009 Batch 1
As with quite a few other items lately, I’m posting about making ‘Saskatoon Wine’ because there seems to be a hole in online information about the topic. After doing some research, I realized that it’s partly because it’s very Canadiana to even call them saskatoons. Amélanche, juneberry, serviceberry, shadberry are more common names elsewhere. I’ll use the terms interchangeably, just … Read More
Saskatoon Picking: Day 2
No, apparently the 75 lbs of berries picked Friday was not enough. We’d committed to at least giving the crop one more shot before resigning the bulk of it to the birds and rot. My earlier estimates of there being 200-300 lbs of berries was revised today to perhaps 1000-2000. So we optimized. The bushes at the ends of the … Read More
75 lbs of Saskatoons Day
A friend and I were up around 5 this morning to a) miss the heat of the day in the low 30sC, and b) take advantage of an offer from a friend of mine to go pick saskatoons at thier place while they were on holidays. The thing is, the acreage they bought used to be a saskatoon farm. So … Read More