Here I am in apricot tree reaching to clip a twig that I am sure does not belong.
Made a chicken dinner with my home-made pickled jalapenos and long cooked onions– everything full of flavor and the chicken falling off the bone. Yes, I know many people are bored with chicken, but I am not. I can think of so many wonderful ways to make it taste, as though it were fifteen or more meats in one! And a fine load of big fat asparagus gently turned in a bit of butter after being steamed. How often have I seen people mistakenly pick out the slender little stems of asparagus, not realizing that they are the stringy ones. The fattest asparagus are the best. We used to prowl the pear orchards of Gowen Farms in Stratham New Hampshire and pick the wild asparagus that grew there, and some were like broomsticks, standing taller than me (No jokes here, please, about my height). The same species, too as the asparagus you are familiar with from the stores. Over a yard of each stem would be good for the pot. Really old plants make for huge and incredibly succulent tender stems.
Alas, they bulldozed those orchards away and put in a housing development. What fools these greedy mortals can be!
So I didn’t prune today because age has taught me that the same work repeated too many days leads to bad tendon and muscle complaints. I was very good today and all the garden work was quite different in the sets of motions required.
These are my Golden Dorsets, as you see, erratic in type, but cheerful and prolific. This is one summer’s day worth from one mid-sized tree.
Don’t let anyone tell you that if you live in Coastal Southern California you are doomed to never grow a great apple. Don’t let them force Annas and Beverly Hills apples into your yard and call it an orchard. Aim higher. The chill required for certain apples may be a daunting figure, but at least I can suggest some that produce heavily here within a few miles of the coast where the ocean lies to our south, not our west. Check your chill hours, knowing that as climate change progresses, some of this will always be a gamble, and what we expect for chill may be changing. But go for apples you truly want to eat, not the varieties simply labelled easy. Easy is no good if it tastes like wet cardboard, or worse yet, styrofoam. (All right, I’m exaggerating– I have never knowingly consumed styrofoam.)
Take what land you have and make a place for a few good apple trees. Dig deep and wide before you even set out to purchase your trees, and do set in a gopher basket to protect your young trees’ tender roots for at least the first year.
I have the great good fortune of living in what Sunset Magazine calls Zone 24, where I start harvesting Golden Dorsets at intervals all year, sometimes starting in April. They need to be taken before they are golden ripe or they are tasteless mushy things, but picked on the green side and put in a pie, they are real competitors. I harvest Pettingills and Gordons between September and December– each of these comes in a short prolific burst and are excellent for raw or cooked purposes. Then in October, we begin the long Granny Smith season that often goes well into February.
Bananas from our plants and a basket of Granny Smiths.
I have a Red Delicious type– a variety known as Harrold Red originating from a limb sport, or point mutation of Starking,, productive from late September into November, but while I may fill out a pie with a green one or two I fear I think they give apples a bad name. I am sorry to say such a harsh thing about so consistent and willing a producer but it’s true. They are clearly not true Red Delicious, being squarer and shorter than the proper type, with a lot of streakiness in color and over all an erratic shape, but they share characters of Red Delicious, exhibiting the poor trait of water core, and the same basic characteristics of Red Delicious raw. I have neighbors who like it, appreciating the juiciness and low acid, and the firm crisp texture. For my part, I want stronger flavor and high acid. By the way, my comment about the origination of Harrold Red illustrates a caution about buying fruit trees– sometimes scions get mixed up in the field, or there’s a point mutation on an individual scion, and you end up with a tree labeled what it is not. The only way to find out is to invest the time to raise it into its productive years, so any apple tree might surprise you, even if clearly labeled at the nursery.
Harrolds in a wooden bowl with a pick of plumcots (Dandy).
My Fuji is another disappointment for flavor, though I have one friend who waits anxiously for notification that they are in, then gladly rushes over to pick when I give the word. They are a pain because they require assiduous thinning, tending to fertilize four to eight fruit on each spur. If you don’t practice good cultivation and leave these overburdened spurs to do as they please, ripening is uneven, development worse, and rot easily occurs between the crowded cheeks. The quality of fruit is degraded, and losses in tree resources high. Worst of all, you will have branch breakage, which is hard on the tree. The product is a very juicy item with pale green, almost celadon skin, and a white flesh. But fairly low acid and short keeping.
Winter Banana with its light fragrance, yellowish skin with a green cast, was a decent apple, with good intentions, but when the old tree, which had been poorly pruned, finally died a few years back, I put in a Gordon instead, because Winter Banana never truly excelled for me. It was more an applesauce apple than a pie or raw eating apple in my experience.
But Pettingill! Recommended by my father who was raised by a family of apple orchardists, it has a yellow skin blushed cheerfully with red, a tart sweet crisp and substantive flesh, suitable for eating out of hand or cooking. This year after last winter’s fine rains, we have picked hundreds of good fruit off the tree, even after I did a bit of thinning twice in the summer. It makes excellent pies as I’ve noted in my blog post on my best apple peeler. Gordon is a truly high quality fruit also, but low on production, with a greenish flesh; a good keeper. For my back-up apple, my long-keeping Granny Smith is a favorite for raw or cooked usage. That tree will steadily produce at a few apples in to February, after a start in early October. Yet I was firmly told not to try this variety in Southern California…. Hah!
Here are my Pettingills, basketed (top) and bowled. Organically raised– I have not had to spray at all so far.
Now if you have the space in your fridge, you can take the most perfect of your apples, wrap them in plain brown paper and store them for a few weeks in your vegetable drawer. I have the luxury of a second refrigerator where I store apples in some quantity. I have a pan of water to keep the humidity at a good level. I have thus extended my apple season so that by the time I eat the last Pettingill pie, the Golden Dorsets are starting to blush on the tree by my studio.
Pruning has a few simple rules. The best one is to have a friend come and talk to you while you are working so you don’t get bored. When to prune? Major pruning in the dormant season, usually December or January. But the truth is that pruning is necessary all year round.
Try to decide from the start what will be your leader, the strongest top center bough of the tree which reaches upwards. No other tip of branch should be higher than this leader. Fruit loses quality when it hits the ground, so don’t let the tree reach so high you can’t pick it, or reach to thin the excess set fruit. (some trees try to produce way too many fruit and they will break themselves doing it unless you twist off about a third of the tiny fruit before they grow.)
When you worry about taking off too much of the branches, remember that the tree will start to regrow as soon as you turn your back. Take out any crossing branches because they will fight with each other, try to lighten the branching so that air can circulate. You’ll hear that your tree should have a vase shape– a “V” in profile, for this gives the greatest resistance to breakage and helps with air movement as well as letting more light feed each leaf. You want each branch that you leave on the tree to have a good chance to have light and air. Cut flush to the branch or bough so that you don’t leave any short stub which will rot and introduce bacteria or fungi into the conductive tissues of the main branch. Let nature heal the cut, don’t use any of those petroleum based black goos that are sold for this– I have seen them damage the cut tissues, not save them.
Crop or cut off the ‘water sprouts’ that spear straight up, often off of the more horizontal branches. Flush cut the twigs and branches that point downwards or point into the center of the tree. Down-pointing branches will tear out when they have heavy fruit on them, doing real damage to conductive tissues and giving an entry to disease. Inward pointing branches will crowd the tree’s air space. Remember that every leaf needs light, at least indirect light, not deep shade, to produce energy for the whole tree.
If you are still uncertain about your cuts, think of it this way. Consider the sap that carries nutrients and water up and down the tree, like a river. The fewer deep bends or tangles it travels along, the better.
The last rule of pruning, is that it is never done. You can do a serious January prune, followed by light prunings all the year long, and still not be finished– you just begin again in the new year!
I wander through the garden before the warmer hours and blinding sun are full on, (cataracts make a difference in the dazzle when you’re outdoors, even with a hat.) Hanging from the netting, beans beckon, fistfuls of NorthEasters, a superb Roma type stringless and of superb flavor, Carminat long and slender the color of garnets in sunlight, and the old staple from the 1850’s, Kentucky Wonder. Then I must pay some attention to the Oriental Express eggplants, gleaming curves so purple they verge on black and shining smoothly under fuzzy leaves like felt.
Tomatoes next, a puzzle of which can be left one more day to bring their sweetness up– but please pick before any one goes mushy. Black Krim, Amish Pink Paste, Cherokee Black, Brandywine, Striped German, Japanese Trifele, Marbonne, Nepal, Indigo Cherry, Rose, and of course Sungold. Who creates these names? Purple kale, cucumbers (Piccolino are fantastic),then some sprigs of rosemary, basil and a handful of hot peppers, Serrano of course.
I set the basket in the moving shade of our sycamore tree then take another basket to go after fruit. My navel oranges, Washington and Roberts are mostly past, so I take a few Fremont tangerines, three Mexican limes, some Eureka lemons, late-season apricots (only good for cooking), Dapple Dandy plumcots and a few ready-to-fall Pettengill apples. The first and second plantings of zucchini have given up but I have some nearly grown new plants out, and there will be more squash before two weeks are past. Pleanty for my give-away box at the end of the driveway.
Which reminds me, there’s been a wonderful aspect to this time, in that people are responding to that give-away in more personal and enthusiastic fashions. We receive envelopes with greetings, bottles of preserves made from our produce, and even though the bin has a big sign on it “FREE–GRATIS!” I’ve found embarrassing presents of money in it. I have a small collection of the hand-written notes, and fine memories of people calling out with a thank you or a description of what delicious meal they made with our produce.
It’s enough to keep me busy, planning meals around this garden’s generosity, but don’t forget, the corn’s ready too. Lovely ears only marred by corn borers. Does anyone know why corn borers are so variegated in hue and pattern? Are they really several species of these aggressive moth children, with an identical fondness for sweet corn? But they look the same to an uncritical eye when they emerge from their pupae. You’d think on such a diet they would reward the eye with colors and pinwheels of pattern, but no…dusty brown gray is all we get for the loss of tasty kernels.
Yesterday I set several sixpacks of soil I seeded with eggplant, zucchini, and even a few tomatoes into the coldframe my husband rebuilt. You look at me askance. Coldframe? It’s summer isn’t it? Yes, indeed it is, but remember we have an ocean influence here, so our nights drop into the fifties most of the year, even in summer. And temperature, as my father taught me, is vital in encouraging germination. I don’t know if he would have shaken his head over my trying a few late tomato sets, but I think it’s worth the experiment. I’ll report later, how that goes. The sun’s on full, and I’m retreating to think about food.
I started some weeks ago looking around to assess which of my neighbors in this raggletag neighborhood might be elderly and in need of extra support in this time of social distancing. Then I realized I’m elderly too…a little, around the edges, you might say. The idea made me smile, because of its sheer absurdity.
I may have arthritis and a skunk-streak of silver in my formerly black hair, but I can swing a pick axe to dig out a new vegetable bed, just fine. I can do hours of field work on my garden, or hours in the studio, or hours at the computer writing a novel, and it’s all work, and feels pretty good until the end of day, when some joints are impolite enough to comment on excessive enthusiasm. Spoilsports.
One thing I figure I can do is to keep my give-away bin streetside filled with citrus and fresh hot peppers. Washington navels, Fremont tangerines, Eureka lemons, Minneola tangelos, Trovita navels and Roberts, kumquats and Mexican limes. Sometimes strawberry guavas as well. I’m picking with disposable gloves on and not washing the fruit, and I put out a short note on the box telling the public I’m using gloves, also requesting people to select with their eyes and take all that they touch.
Now the local hospital is calling for not only factory-made masks, but home sewn ones. Another new job, and so I started thinking about how many pleats I should put in and whether I could insert a new twist tie to help the wearer mold the nose more tightly. Then I read an article https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577 and quote from it here “Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%”. So, no wonder they speak of the false sense of security that anything under a N-95 mask gives.
Thinking the project over, I believe it still makes sense to sew and donate masks. Here’s my thinking– over all, these masks protect not the wearer but the others who meet with that wearer. So if every suspected case upon entrance to the ER dons one, this may help protect the ER staff, our most valued resource. And if I can figure out how to do a fast turnaround, I might be able to create enough of these to preserve half a box worth of medical masks for the medical staff or the intake volunteers. Every mask counts.
It’s a storm, and a long one. It’s a war. Maybe every generation needs a war to start to think more widely about community. I could wish we didn’t need it, but I am seeing some truly inspirational behavior among my neighbors and strangers.
This generation possibly more than any of the past may need to understand this and pass it on to their successors… the evolutionary fact that, that when there are this many of any one species populating the earth, pandemics are inevitable.
We cannot stand alone any longer, believing we can be independent and rugged posing against the sun, because there’s always someone else in sight… hopefully at least six feet away.
Yes, it’s perhaps boastful, but I’m honestly more than a little startled myself that this can be what I harvested out of the garden last weekend. Eggplants, green beans, hot serrano chiles and tomatoes? In the middle of November?
Yes, this is Southern Coastal California, but even so, this is an unusual year. What did I cook after this harvest? A ground turkey moussaka, rich with cinnamon, the red wine reduced down to a syrup before I added the tomatoes. Poached green beans, done in salted water to keep the flavor up, and the color as well. Great comfort food for a season turning short, dark, and chilly… though looking at this produce who would think we were cold here? But it’s dipped into the forties on some of these nights.
I should add that the next types of apples are coming ready also– my Granny Smiths are prolific, the Fujis are fading, but the Golden Dorset is headed into its third harvest for the year– just in time for some of the green ones to make my Thanksgiving apple pies. Pomegranates are darkening on the tree, and the Fuyu persimmons, who are slow this year, are finally ripening, glowing like lanterns in my trees while the crows swirl down in raucous appreciation.
Another type of harvest? I’m doing nanowrimo this month– National Novel Writing Month, and out of the hoped-for 50,000 words I’m around 32,000…and procrastinating, or I wouldn’t be writing a blog post! Science fiction this time, based on a dream I had long years ago in New Hampshire when I was a sophomore in high school. My characters are in trouble and the tone has turned grimmer than I anticipated and I have to decide, do I go there, or do I recast it at a different level and keep all spirits up?
I believe the embossed label reads Sinclai(r?) Scott Co Baltimore Patent, but it’s hard to say. The “r” from Sinclair is definitely missing, and not because it’s been removed or worn off… .
I grew up with this small machine in the old farmhouse in New Hampshire, and I’m sure it peeled hundreds of bushels of apples over the years. When my father brought it to me to use in California, I was honored, and more delighted than you might understand. After all, you might say, there are apple peelers you can buy brand new, that core and spiral-slice apples as they peel them. Why not go for the entire deal?
That could be okay if you want to make apple mush pies. I don’t. I want to slice my own, controlling the thickness, which is vital to a good pie. None of these new-fangled ‘time-savers’ that go too far and ruin the very product they’re supposed to make more accessible, and easier to process! Also, with the care you need in cleaning when the apples are organic, you want to do your own cutting to be sure no unwanted elements get into the food.
This machine is a marvel of logical easy function, every part moving easily to the simple cranking of the wooden handle. The cutter is on a spring loaded arm, so it accomodates itself to any size of apple, and my organically raised bumpy ones get excellent treatment despite their irregularities.
A good apple pie, made with Baldwins, or slightly green Courtlands, Empires or Pettingills, or perhaps a bowl of Gordons, should have not only fragrance and spiciness, tartness balanced with sweetness and ample juice, but the slices of apple should be discernable, tender, with a slight resistance that reminds you of the origin of this best of treats. Add a generous splash of fresh lemon juice to a large bowl of sliced apples, half a cup of brown sugar mixed with some cornstarch and a bit of flour, a good lashing of ground cinnamon, a hearty grate of nutmeg and a double pinch only of cloves–no more because cloves can ruin things. They simply come on too strong and they don’t let anyone else in the pie have a say. Like the sugar– best in moderation.
I love Pettingills. Mine came into season this September through early October just in time for the Earth Sciences party that we host each year. Good rounded apples, deeply dished at stem and blossom end, yellow-skinned with a strong blush. Clear juice, a crisp noisy break to the flesh, and a strong acid sweet with apple fragrance close to a pear scent. I added a few of my Granny Smiths (which I have been authoritatively informed I cannot possibly grow in Southern California) because that poor tree was so overburdened with fruit even though I have repeatedly tried this summer to thin the set. You will see them on the counter in their green suits waiting for their turn.
We expected about eighty guests, maybe closer to ninety, and all definitely requiring pies. I made five Concord grape pies, two boysenberry/blackberry pies, and four apple pies. This year I grabbed the camera as I was purring at my peeler, deciding that I would finally give this delightful mechanism its due.
As you see, it takes two passes to completely peel the apple.
I think I should also pause to praise my Pettingill apple tree, which was planted in our little orchard on my father’s recommendation twenty two years ago. Not a recommendation to be taken lightly, coming from a man raised on an apple farm in the Northeast. This year it has gifted us with several hundred fruit. I don’t spray, so you will see in the photos that I have some insect damage. But despite the flaws, any effect is mainly cosmetic and the fruit are sound.
Aside from the pies, we cooked about a dozen slabs of barbecued ribs, six great flanks of salmon with two types of sauce, brown bread rolls, white honey rolls (about a hundred or so rolls,) a twelve inch four layered cake with passionfruit curd filling and cream cheese icing, and perhaps eight pounds of kidney beans, vegetarian, but two flavors. The guest brought an imaginative range of contributions, full of new spices and textures.
Now that the massive cooking effort is over, the guests gone, the trash cleared, the bins of compost and recyclables picked over and the cans and bottles washed, I look at my photos and feel a bit apologetic about their quality. I was in a bit of a rush and I really ought to have double-checked my focus. But I hope that the images are clear enough to serve.
Here is the machine proving it can accomodate even quite an undersized apple– in fact this one didn’t need a second pass to peel it enough for the pie.
I was watching a video on the problems of food waste in landfill. It’s interesting to contemplate the small steps we have as a household made over the years towards trying to decrease our negative impact upon our land and neighborhood. I never used a lot of toxins, except in my profession as a painter in oils, but there were many other steps we took over the years.
I have a great respect and appreciation for farmers. The pressure to produce only perfect vegetables and fruit have put an impossible weight upon them. A farmer simply cannot produce all perfection from a living system without using artificial influences like malathion and antifungals. If you want to take some pressure off the farmers, buy organic– but don’t just pick out the flawless items leaving the bruised or lightly scarred behind. When you insist on perfection, your demands on the system result in waste, because more imperfect and likely more natural production methods will be squeezed out of the marketplace. Every bruised or scabbed fruit becomes more damaged by rejecting hands. No grocer wants the display to be left pawed over and depressing When the grocer fails to get value for the purchase made from an organic farmer, he’ll cut that supplier off. Pressure is on that farmer again to use more toxic but easier to apply and more effective toxins. Supply and demand.
Note also, when you chose slightly bruised fruit, or fruit with easily damaged skin, most of the time these are the ripest items in the group, and the best flavored. Smell them, to check. There’s a personal benefit to taking these, because used promptly, they taste rich. I frequently see thoughtless shoppers raking through piles of vegetables or fruit with a rough dismissive grab, not mindful that every such motion decreases quality for the next consumer. And yes, in case you didn’t already guess, I was raised in part a New Hampshire farmer who spent a summer working at a greengrocer’s market in Boston, grooming the shelves and doing the resupply from the back cooler.
Sugar Baby watermelon, home grown
So what do we do at home? Well we grow a constant though incomplete range of vegetables and fruit for our own consumption and sharing with neighbors. We mulch heavily (but not too close to the trunks of the trees) because we have frequent drought and only seasonal rainfall. Our main fertilizer is horse manure from the stables across the street, plus our compost, and Bokashi bucket liquor (more anon about that.) Animal waste is in my estimation one of the best fertilizers, though given a choice I’d prefer cows next door. I like the horses, love to watch them, and they smell best, but the fertilizing effects of cow manure are superior. If I didn’t know too much about chickens, I would have a small flock, but their waste reeks when you ferment it for fertilizer, and they do make a fair bit of noise. We have a small property of a little more than half an acre, thus I hesitate to encumber the land with chickens.
Other birds, however, are a population I actively cultivate. I will sacrifice some fruit to them happily, seeing how they consume my insect problems. Offering sources of water and a birdbath are basic. Making sure that there are a variety of vegetation clumps for nests and protection are second. Yes, the water means other animals come, but keeping the property without birdbaths and small fountains would be no more than a conceit, for water is readily available at the nearby arroyo. I’d have those rodents and lagomorphs anyway!
As those who’ve read my blog before may know, I have rat and gopher problems, even rabbits on occasion. All I dare use for these is mechanical and electronic traps… because we have owls, hawks, and neighbors whose outdoor cats all catch and eat rats, mice and rabbits on our property. Poison would have a terrible effect upon these friends. And my wish to cause minimal suffering would be outraged by using poison. Do not ask me about the evil invention of glue traps.
four cat pile for a cold day
Here, by the way is a sore spot. In principle, I don’t feel cats should range free. They kill and cripple more than they ever eat. Being outdoors puts them also at risk of disease and injury and major predators such as our bobcats, dogs and coyotes. Plus, there are simply too many of them. Because we humans have interfered with their spread and density as a species, their influence is devastating to native animals, reptiles and birds. I have tried to save many a hapless lizard from my cat neighbors’ jaws. My own cats, have to date been indoors only, because of our feelings on this matter. All of that said, do I chase my neighbor’s free-range cats away so they will leave my rodents alone? No. It’s a leaky bucket however you look at it. As I said, I feel we’re morally compromised on this.
Watson with prey
So, I started with food trash as a topic…. We use a Bokashi bucket for our kitchen food waste, which is a semi-closed system, thus generating less in the way of greenhouse gases during decomposition. No rotten smell, by the way, only a vinegary scent from the pickling medium as even bones are decomposed in a stout bucket. We get a fine liquid fertilizer as a by-product and after three weeks we dig the incompletely decomposed left-overs into the soil of the garden. They complete their disaggregation swiftly after the Bokashi pickling. Coarse preparation by-products like the peels of oranges, or corn cobs go into the closed compost bins in the yard. Of these, we have three. In general, by these small adjustments, we manage to keep out contributions to food waste in land-fills to a minimum.
Bokashi buckets, stacked, in shop
Bokashi bucket from top, open
What a long and rambling blog post. I’d be interested in your comments and any ideas you’d like to share!
Today they promised rain; they sent warnings of flooding and potential mudslides. I look to heavy clouds upon the mountains over the city with anticipation. We have been so dry, for years now, counting each drop. Might this year restore some balance to our water supply?
How often they say rain will come— several inches, beware of flooding! Then the storm shifts away and we are left without even a tenth of an inch to savor.
I walk through the orchard. Yesterday we planted three new bare root fruit trees, two apples: a Sundowner and a Gordon, plus a Babcock peach. That brought home to me how dry the earth under its mulch actually was, a sobering realization.
Our neighbor Jaime has been hauling manure from the stables to our property for some weeks now— it saves the stables haulage fees, and I know how to value such largesse. But I’ve had so many other ideas and plots and plans over Christmas and New Years, that now I see the promise in the sky and realize I have a lot of work to do. You can’t just dump mounds of manure and stable sweepings all over your orchard, because it mats and repels the water falling from the sky. So I determine that I’ll do my best to move the majority of the manure sweepings under the canopy of certain trees. Not under the bare-branched fruit trees like the peaches and apples and plums, but under the citrus who are green all year and shelter the ground with their leaves anyway. The sweepings can be tucked under and no harm done, so long as you keep the base of each trunk free.
The rest of the best manure, with the least of shavings and the most of ‘horse buns’ need to be shoveled into my wheelbarrow, then taken and scattered over the main garden bed. I have visions of broccoli, escarole, summer eggplants and tomatoes, string beans and fava beans, all sorts of happy plants reaching green in my imagination.
I know most gardeners don’t work in skirts these days, but I much prefer it. Superior freedom of movement, and even though sometimes my skirts are moving in one direction and I in another, that’s just because I don’t like to move slowly. Skirts don’t bind in such circumstances. So I do the dance of the manure this afternoon, shoveling and raking at the fastest pace I can to clear the way for the rain.
A hot shower later, here I sit in a glow of accomplishment, listening hopefully to the soft shift and whisper of raindrops through the leaves outside. May it be a long rain and a deep one.
I ate five bananas this morning. I know that sounds piggish but truly, they were the size of your little finger, if you have small hands. They came from one of our plants in the yard here, our second variety. We’ve been ripening the fruit on their stem for a month or more, and today we had a few for breakfast.
Living here in Southern California means you can grow an amazing variety of fruiting plants, from bananas to apples (and don’t let anyone tell you it’s too warm for a good apple here. I grow Granny Smith, Pettingill, Fuji, Harrold, and Gordon in what Sunset calls Zone 24.) The first banana we purchased from the Banana people in La Conchita, wonderful gardens now long gone, has no label left. It’s a chunky, reasonably good producer, best cooked, because it has a starchy not so sweet flavor. Whatever its name, that banana grows like a weed and I am kept busy chopping off its unwelcome advances into other parts of the yard.
A friend gave us a slip of the Ice Cream Banana, and it has taken years to nurture. My feeling is that it is delicate, more prone to frost than the first variety we grew. (We frost for one to two weeks of the year, enough to burn leaves, and these nights are not in a block but scattered through the winter, usually ending by March 1. You should see our yard on those nights, with plants shrouded in old blankets and sheets to protect them.) Several times Ice Cream attempted a stalk of bananas for us, and various accidents played their part in frustrating our expectations. Replacing the in-ground gas line was one of those events–not an episode of ‘delicacy’ on the part of the banana. Another time, the wind knocked down the bearing stalk before the fruit had sufficiently matured. But do remember that we are gardeners who ascribe to the survival of the fittest school, so when you look at our yard, it’s a jungle out there.
When the banana stalk has ceased to set new fruit, it’s time to cut it down. Hang the stalk in a cool dry place and wait for the bananas to ripen, which they will show by a quiet transition to a yellowish hue marked with brown or black. Then you can cut off the hands of bananas, so they are convenient to handle. As you see by the photo above, this stalk was a short one– I had already cut off about three hands to give away before I thought to take a photo to share.
The first taste of Ice Cream Banana was rewarding. A very firm, acidic and sweet banana, it reminds us of the standard Cavendish from the grocery store. Familiar, but better. Stronger in the acid, fragrant and possibly sweeter as well. But tiny—it reminds me of the bananas we used to call ‘Lady Finger’ in West Africa, which were charmingly miniaturized. If you are in the right zone, I strongly recommend it. But if you are undecided between growing a cherimoya or a banana, grow the cherimoya. You’ll gain higher yields than a banana, which only fruits once per growing stalk, and our perceptions say that the cherimoya is far more rewarding in flavor than any banana we have yet met. I have had good results with Booth cherimoya but there are many varieties. Some folk have been daunted by the idea that cherimoyas need hand pollination, but we have not troubled with that and in season have more fruit from our tree than we can eat by ourselves.
I must share with you the final tally in our effort to save our concord grapes from the rats. We put up eighteen pies’ worth of concord grapes in the freezer– this is seventy two cups after stemming. So yes, it was worth the labor and the invention of rat proofs!
Grape Pie
Oven 400 F
9″ unbaked pie shell
Topping:
3/4 c flour
1/2 c sugar
cut in 1/3 c butter until crumbly
Filling:Combine these three ingredients thoroughly.
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
dash of salt
————–
1 Tb lemon juice or more
1 Tb melted butter
4 cups concord-type grapes
Slip the skins from the grapes and put the sugar combination with the skins in a bowl. Simmer the grape innards until very soft, soft enough to easily press through a sieve to remove the seeds. I have tried other methods but none work as well as this one. Mix the now seedless grape pulp with the other filling ingredients including the melted butter and lemon juice. Pour into the pie crust and scatter the crumbly topping over the top before baking for 40 to 50 minutes. Best served at room temperature, not hot.
robinwinter 