Canning, Pickling, and Dehydrating!

[babsbag]

I too live on a rock infested hill, I tell everyone that I grow rocks. Run the tiller through the native soil and I will pull out buckets of softball and smaller sized cobble and sometimes bigger ones that require a rock bar to unearth them. And the soil does not hold water at all. I can water my orchard which is on a slight slope and use drip, 2 gallons per hour emitters, and have it show up as a puddle 50' away. I water slow and I water every day. My vegetable beds and blueberries are all raised beds, about 12-18" deep. Flower beds I built out of rock, imagine that, and they are about 12" deep. The native soil is good for absolutely nothing but growing weeds and oak trees.

The new orchard is going to be all dwarf trees either by root stock or by pruning but I have a tractor now with a tiller and a HUGE pile of goat manure and wasted bedding. So before I plant the new trees I will be tilling this manure into the dirt and running a rock rake through it. Hopefully it will a little more water retentive.

I have a nice sized area near the dairy that the goats can't use as pasture anymore, that is the reason for the new orchard; can't leave any land vacant.

 

[HomesteaderWife]

Glad to see this thread up and going again- we have been busy this season! Lots of pickles put up and tomatoes, along with some more jalapenos. Wish I could get my hands on some apples again!

 

[Mike CHS]

@babsbag- your place sounds like ours. We had a ditch running right down the middle of our main pasture that was a little over 3' wide and from 1-4 feet deep and ran about 1000'. The rock from what is now our main orchard bed filled that ditch and I finished it off with topsoil that we got from our shop excavation. I am leveling off the orchard (sort of) and literally replacing much of the rocky soil with some good river bottom loam that we got for a pretty good price. Bummer is that we have a pretty good garden spot on level soil at the edge of our place but that is going to be pasture for our dairy goats (this fall). I really want to turn a lot of "lawn" that serves no purpose into garden beds close to the house.

We are using mostly standard fruit tree varieties but we will keep them pruned to dwarf size. Most of the local orchards do that here and it works really well in our soil and climate.

Sorry for the book but I like this topic.

 

[Rescuechick76]

@Rescuechick76 That's when the thread was started but I revived it a few weeks ago when looking for a sweet pickle recipe so you're good.

I received my fermentation crock and the produce stand owner says the cukes should be ready soon. He got a late start this year as he had pneumonia. We have a super long growing season...no frost usually until Nov so he is running late but still in business. I just planted corn last week so he isn't the only one running late.

Lucky you! We're from Minnesota. Very short growing season :/

 

[babsbag]

My semi-dwarf trees are anything but and since I am a stickler for not picking green fruit the birds and compete a lot. Plus the apricots and some of my peaches can be iffy depending on frost so it will be nice to have a few of each that I can cover with frost blankets if needed. So this time I am going to prune heavy and hope to keep them all below 6 feet. Might mean less fruit but less every year is better than none some years. We will see...best laid plans.

 

[babsbag]

I learned a tip the other day for using peaches and nectarines that cling to their pit. Instead of cutting them in half with the groove, cut them the other way..around the "equator" and then just twist. Half of the fruit will pop right off of the pit. Now take the half with the pit and cut if in half again and twist again...pop. Now you have a quarter of the fruit stuck to the pit and not the entire thing. Cool trick and so far it has worked on my nectarines and peaches. The peaches are on a sucker from my Early Elberta tree and they taste pretty good, but I usually toss them to the chickens as I refused to work with the cling fruit. The nectarines are good and I had no idea of variety when I bought it. Happy to not waste the fruit anymore.

 

[Mike CHS]

Cherry Tomato overload - We have done the sun dried (dehydrator method) tomatoes before but always with sliced tomatoes. We have an over abundance of cherry tomatoes and decided to try some of them. It took almost 48 hours but they turned out wonderfully. All we did was drizzle some olive oil on the whole cherry tomatoes and toss in some basil and oregano. We have been keeping some on the counter to go along with our dried peach slices.

 

[Latestarter]

Trying to imagine cherry tomatoes with olive oil and peaches...Sorry, not a combo I would have tried.

 

[Mike CHS]

They give you that Sweet & Sour affect don't you know.