Dear Readers,

Our customers will eat most of the vegetables that we grow pretty soon after harvest. Greens like lettuce and kale, tomatoes, summer squash, and most of our other veggies will keep for two weeks at most in your fridge. In the winter, we’ll rely on root vegetables for sustenance: carrots, parsnips, garlic, etc. And most importantly: potatoes.

That’s why the spring potato planting is a really, really big deal. If those potatoes do well, we’ll all have plenty to eat in the winter; potatoes can keep for months.

Last week, we put our potatoes in! It took a day and a half, with about 7 of us on the job. First, Rachel prepped about a half of an acre (1/3 of a football field) of empty field with the tractor, smoothing the bumpy soil over to create a flat surface in which to plant. Then she drove over the field again, this time using a tractor implement to draw furrows in the soil. We laid a tape measure next to the furrows, and planted a potato every foot.

That’s right: most farmers plant an actual potato, called a seed tuber, in the ground, rather than a potato seed. Potato seeds are a lot harder to grow; seed tubers are much more dependable. Plus, you can cut a seed tuber into pieces to multiply your number of plants. So long as each piece has an “eye,” or a little sprout, the piece will propagate potatoes when planted. You can plant any potato, so long as it’s sprouting. To sprout, or chit, your potato, just keep it around long enough to see those little eyes grow. Then plant it in the ground about 3 inches deep.

We’ll harvest our potatoes after the green foliage above ground has died– sometime in the early fall. We’ll dig beneath each plant to find a cluster of anywhere from 5 up to around 10 yummy potatoes. The seed tuber will still be there, but it will be mushy and goopy and gross. We’ll leave the seed tuber, and gather up the potatoes, and EAT THEM ALL!!! Just kidding, we’ll sell them. And eat some of them.

Potatoes are in the nightshade family (Solonaceae), which includes tomatoes, tobacco, peppers, and some very toxic plants like belladonna. The Soviet Union consumes the most potatoes per capita (no surprise there!). There used to be thousands of potato varieties; probably, there are around 5,000 out there now. They come in every color, and every shape in size.

One of my favorites is the Adirondack Red potato– rose pink on the inside, and red skinned, it is creamy and rich. I like to skin them, boil them, and mash them with olive oil, garlic salt, and parsley….. pink mashed potatoes!!! Delicious.

Laura Beth
(see the original post here).

Dear Readers,

Say you want to plant an apple tree. So you bite into a Honeycrisp apple, save the seeds, dig a hole in the yard, and put a seed in. You expect to have Honeycrisps in a couple of years’ time. Right?…

Wrong! The seed that you planted will create an apple tree, but that apple tree may not resemble a Honeycrisp tree at all. Lisa explained it like this: two people get together and have a baby. Can you expect that baby to be exactly like its parents? Not at all! Same with fruit trees. So your “Honeycrisp” tree may bear good apples; but it’s possible it will have yucky apples, or no apples at all, or it may be prone to disease, unlike its parent tree.

So, where do apple trees come from? Most orchards graft their trees, which means attaching the branch of one apple tree to the trunk of another. The result will be apples like those from the branch you’ve attached. There are several kinds of grafting; we used whip grafting.

Ike has a long list of apple varieties he wants to plant– see above. He ordered a few scions, or small, budding branches, of each variety. We grafted them onto the rootstalk, which is a generic apple tree that will provide the root system for the tree once it’s planted.

Here’s the fun part. Using a knife, the grafter makes a cut that exposes the inner wood on one end of the scion, and the same cut on one end of the rootstalk.

The grafter makes a slit in each cut so that the scion and rootstock will fit together.

The two pieces have to fit together as exactly as possible. They will heal into one piece, so the more exactly they fit, the easier it is for them to heal neatly.

Here’s the connected wood, all wrapped up to heal. That rubber band covers special grafting tape, both biodegradable. Once the tree has healed and grows, the bandages will snap off.

Each tree is labelled and put in a bucket of water, roots down.

Are you all ready to plant your own orchard now? Grafting is actually the easy part. What comes next is more challenging– keeping the tree healthy once it’s planted in the ground. Disease, pests like insects and rodents, and weather can be harsh enemies to young trees.

Claudia (on the far right above) was a rock star, grafting with Ike for hours and hours. The rest of us bandaged up the trees and labelled them. We listened to the Beatles, thanks to Karen’s Ipod, and Ike told stories of his various adventures. After such meticulous work for so long, we got pretty silly towards the end of the day. There were lots of giggles.

Speaking of giggles: there are some goofy apple variety names out there, like James Kirk, which Ike ordered because he likes Star Trek. We already grow Enterprise apples, so all Trekkies will feel welcome at our orchard. Here are some other funny ones, from hundreds of tree varieties that have been grafted at North Star:

Bloody Ploughman (yum…?)

Freiherr von Berlepsch (try pronouncing that, let alone saying it three times fast)

Lord Hindlip (sounds like a Princess Bride character)

Green Cheese (again. yum…?)

As always, feel free to comment and ask questions!

Laura Beth

I’ve gotten a number of questions lately about how to keep various vegetables from wilting in the refrigerator. People are often surprised to find carrots wobbly and soft after several days in the fridge, not to mention the condition of lettuce or chard after the same period of time.

Remember – most vegetables are very high in water content. The chilly air in a refrigerator is very dry, and sucks moisture out of all produce (even beets will get wilted!).

However, since our vegetables are picked so fresh, they should keep a very long time for you in the refrigerator….IF you make sure to keep that moisture contained! For most items, that simply means putting them in a tightly-sealed plastic bag or sealed container and trying to make sure most of the air is removed.

Plastic bags can be used over and over again for various vegetables, and you’ll find that even our fresh lettuces will keep upwards of two weeks in this manner! Carrots stay crispy, chard stays puffy and brilliant, you get the idea!

If Farmer Ike ever decides to quit farming, he should open a bistro. Seriously, since he took up cooking several years ago, this farm family has been treated to the most amazing and flavorful dishes, basically on a nightly basis! This is a great deal for me, since I really dislike cooking. I don’t mind cleaning up the kitchen, however, which is a task Ike really dislikes. So, we’ve got a great arrangement going.

I’m planning to post pictures and descriptions of his various creations over the coming months, both as a means to remember some of these dishes (which are often one-of-a-kind), and as an inspiration to some of you who perhaps are looking for some new ideas. Unfortunately, Farmer Ike does not use a cookbook, nor does he write down his ingredients or recipes. Honestly, if I ever have to cook again, I’ll be lost; I’m getting spoiled on awesome food! So, these photos and descriptions will have to do.

Ike’s basic ingredients are locally-grown produce, meats, cheeses, and herbs. Sometimes he’ll use commercial cheeses, but the meats are always sourced from local farmers.

The first item to whet your appetite is a creamy Swiss Chard/Corn soup he made just the other day. He used frozen sweet corn, Swiss Chard from our unheated winter greenhouse, broth and spices, and a bit of neufchatel cheese to make it creamy. It had a nifty color and an absolutely lovely flavor. I’m sorry it’s gone!

The phrase “dessert apple” may have become a bit obsolete. Nowadays, the combination of words conjures up images of pies, crisps, apple dumplings – sweet things that involve apples and follow a meal. An apple on its own is about the healthiest thing you could eat, right? Not dessert at all! But really the phrase really just means an apple that you would want to eat raw and fresh without first cooking, baking, or pressing it. So, really, pretty much everything that we grow at North Star is a “dessert apple.” Some are good for cooking as well, as the line between cooking and eating apples is not well defined in the U.S.

So, what’s with the name? I’m guessing that it hearkens back to an era when apples were synonymous with cider, and if you weren’t drinking your apples, you were likely drying or cooking them (or drying them and then cooking them). These apples were distinct from the ones popular today, with an unpalatable flavor or texture when raw. So, historically, for the masses, an apple that you would want to eat out of hand would be something of note. All those apple trees Johnny Appleseed planted? They were for pressing cider (which was, of course, the hard stuff), and the apples would have been too astringent and bitter to eat whole or unfermented. This is due to the prolific nature of apple genetics; plant an apple seed and you’ll get something dramatically different from its parent. So since Mr. John “Appleseed” Chapman was planting seeds, except for the one in a million, he was necessarily planting cider apples. In An Apple Harvest, Frank Browning and Sharon Silva explain: “If apples are nearly everywhere in the New World and the Old, they are not all uniformly delicious. Of the six thousand or so identified varieties, only a few hundred are good enough to be swallowed. Most are little green knots, their scant sugars drowned in bitter acid.” Furthermore, while American nurseries of a hundred years ago offered hundreds of varieties of apples for sale, today you’d be lucky to find upwards of thirty easily available. (These stable varieties are propagated by grafted cuttings rather than seed.) Some of those varieties gone by the wayside are the ones traditionally used for drying, which would have had an unpleasantly dry texture.

However, apple drying is not limited to those varieties; you can dry any number of dessert apples as well, and it’s a great way to spread out the harvest without taking up precious refrigerator space. Then you can snack on them as is all winter, or soak them in water or cider and use them in place of fresh apples for baking. There are several methods for drying (or “dehydrating”) apples. Fruits of all kinds have been dried in the sun since prehistory. Another of the oldest methods is to simply peel and core them and string them up whole in a warm drying room. Slicing them into rings speeds up the process. With the advent of modern ovens and specially-built food dehydrators, apple (or pear) rings can dry as quickly as overnight. Basically, the idea is to expose your food to warmth and air movement to lower its water content. If you live in a warm, breezy arid climate, you’re all set. But say it’s summer or fall in Pennsylvania, then you have a little less control over your drying conditions, and you’ll probably want to move your drying operation inside, and crank up your oven or dehydrator.

I currently have a top of the line ‘Excalibur’ dehydrator on long-term loan, and the Excalibur and I have been spending a lot of quality time together lately. I’ve got a routine down – about a half an hour to forty-five minutes in the evening peeling and slicing, run the dehydrator all night while I’m asleep, awake to a warm, apple-y smell rising from my kitchen, turn off the machine for the day, check on the fruit when I get home from work, and then run it a few more hours if anything needs more time. Home-scale dehydrators run the gamut – from the “Snackmaster” at around $40 to the “Excalibur Deluxe” topping out over $200. If you’re in the market, you’ll want to look for one with a thermostat and a fan.

Or, if you’re using your oven, put the fruit first onto wire cooling racks, cotton fabric, or cheesecloth, then onto your oven racks. If you use baking sheets, you’ll need to turn the fruit, since the air flow can’t travel through. Keep the oven as low as possible – no higher than 145°, or if your oven doesn’t go that low, turn it to “warm.” You might need to prop the door open a bit to encourage air circulation.

Either way, the process is pretty simple. Whether or not you peel the apples is up to you. The thickness of your apple slices also depends somewhat on you – how chewy or crispy you want your apple rings to be, and how long you want to spend drying them. In some scenarios, with some fruits, it might take up to even a few days. You do need to remove a certain amount of the water content to prevent the fruit from spoiling. Various sources say as dry as a raisin or until the fruit feels dry and leathery on the outside but slightly moist inside. If you’d like more of an “apple chip” just let them dry longer. If you’d like you can “pretreat” your apple slices – not with sulfur like commercially dried fruit – but with lemon juice and/or honey. This helps to keep your fruit from browning, but I’ve never really found this to be a problem. Dunk your fruit in lemon juice, a honey-lemon dip (1 cup honey: 1 cup water: the juice of one lemon), or a honey syrup of ¼ cup honey in 2 cups of hot water.

As you’re drying you’ll want to check in on your fruit from time to time, to turn it, or to remove any fruit that’s dry (it won’t all be done at exactly the same time). The amount of time needed varies widely with temperature, thickness, variety, etc., but I’ve found that overnight at about 135° is generally sufficient for most of the fruit I’ve dried. For more detailed instructions, check out http://www.pickyourown.org/apples_dried.htm which includes instructions on how to use your car as a dehydrator!

(For some great old fruit drying pictures: http://www.fruitfromwashington.com/History/fruit_prep.htm)

Resources:
An Apple Harvest by Frank Browning and Sharon Silva
Preserving Summer’s Bounty by the Staff of the Rodale Food Center

Could someone please tell me where the expression “easy as pie” came from? Pies are not easy. Like all skilled tasks, pie baking takes practice and repetition, usually a mentor of some sort, and a magic touch doesn’t hurt either. We’re talking about a very temperamental process that can be thwarted by humidity.

A life goal of mine is to make a good pie. Consistently. I’m getting there, but usually people of my generation are impressed with a pie of any caliber, so long as it’s made from scratch. Bumbling along on this assumption, I made a peach pie last season to take to a Backyard Fruit Growers’ meeting and potluck. Upon arriving, I discovered that there was some stiff competition in the pie department. I also learned a thing or two about the demographics of your average Backyard Fruit Growers attendee. Let’s just say there were some ladies present who had many long decades of pie-baking experience on me. They’d presumably had a lifetime of access to fruit fresh from their very own back yard, and they knew what to do with it. Humbled, I returned to my cookbooks and began my study of pie crust anew.

Now that fall is in the air, it’s time to bake. If you’ve got a solid pie crust up your sleeve, now’s the time to flaunt it. If not, don’t despair. There’s a whole world of baked goods out there waiting to be explored, and anything that involves fruit, a bit of sugar and butter, and arrives warm out of the oven will be more than appreciated. In fact, all those other baked fruit creations in the cobbler family are just as authentic to the heritage of our mid-Atlantic region. Pie, whether of the fruit, vegetable, or meat variety, is a solidly European creation, predating the cobbler by a few hundred years. It was when pie reached the far side of the Atlantic Ocean that it underwent transformation. According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, “without the resources of brick ovens… colonial cooks often made cobblers – also called slumps or grunts – and their cousins, pandowdies, in pots over an open fire. In these types of pies, a filling made of fruit, meat or vegetable goes into a pot first; then a skin of dough is placed over the filling, followed by the pot’s lid. As cobblers cook, the filling stews and creates its own sauce and gravy, while the pastry puffs up and dries.”

It also seems that pies and their kinfolk, before the late 19th century, were served with all meals and at all times of day. I point proudly to tales of pie breakfasts in my own family history and take this as an invitation to shed any last shred of guilt about eating peach cobbler for breakfast. I invite you to do the same.

So, here’s an incomplete inventory of all the things you might do with fruit, flour, sugar and butter. (I’ll leave the gluten-free, vegan, or any other finagling up to you.) I’ve included a sample recipe for each, some of which, for fun, are quite old. Luckily, while recipes and techniques may fade from style, the ingredients remain the same, so revive away…

Brown Betty
From The Joy of Cooking: “Nobody remembers who Betty was, but a brown betty is both layered and topped with sweet buttered crumbs. The crumbs should be dry, so that they will absorb the juices in the middle and bottom layers and remain crunchy on the top. (For homemade breadcrumbs, dry sliced bread in a 225°F oven until firm to the touch and crisp, about 1 hour. Let cool, then break up the dried bread with your hands or chop with a knife into about 1-inch square pieces. Crush with a rolling pin to produce a fine meal or process in a food processor.)”
Apple Brown Betty

Buckle
From The Joy of Cooking: “A buckle is another type of cake with fruit folded into the batter before baking and a generous crumbly streusel topping. The cake buckles, or crumples, in spots from the weight of the topping before the batter sets, creating pockets of caramelized sugar and butter.”
Almond-Plum Buckle

Clafouti
From In The Sweet Kitchen: “Easy, fresh, light, very country, but also very elegant, clafouti is a traditional rustic Provençal dessert somewhere between a baked custard, a light pancake and a cakey soufflé. Traditionally made with cherries, clafouti is also wonderful made with apricots, berries, fresh figs, pears or even peaches or apricots…”
Black Plum Clafoutis

Cobbler
From The Joy of Cooking: “Cobblers are simply deep-dish single-crusted fruit pies; the crust is usually on the top, though occasionally it is on the bottom. Cobblers used to be made with pie dough, but a sweet, rich biscuit dough is more common today. For a tender crust, do not overmix the dough; stir in the liquid quickly and knead gently a few times to form the dough.”
Apple Cobbler

Crisps, Crunches, & Crumbles
From The Joy of Cooking: “These simple and popular desserts consist of sweetened fruit – usually lightly thickened to produce syrupy juices – baked with crumbly toppings of flour, butter, and sugar and sometimes oats, cookie or cake crumbs, nuts, and spices. For a crisp, the flour, butter, and sugar are mixed together like pie dough before the liquid is added, and the mixture scattered over the top like a streusel or crumb topping. An approximate ratio of three parts fruit to one part topping makes a perfect crisp. A crunch is fruit sandwiched between two layers of sweetened, buttered crumbs; it is served cut into squares, like bar cookies, but is a bit more fragile. Keep the butter cold for crisps and crunches and handle lightly to assure that the toppings will be both crisp and tender… Crumble is the British name for a crisp or crunch with oatmeal in the topping.”
Harvest Pear Crisp with Candied Ginger
Plum Crumble

Dumplings
From The Joy of Cooking: “Any pie dough, puff pastry, or biscuit dough can be used to make fruit dumplings or turnovers. Dumplings are formed by gathering the edges of the dough up around the filling like a purse or pouch; the resulting packets may be baked or boiled. (The texture of baked pastry contrasts particularly nicely with the filling.) Turnovers are made by folding the dough over the filling and can be formed in any size from miniature to large. The dough can be made well ahead and kept chilled until ready to use. These little ‘pies’ are best eaten the day they are baked.”
Apple Dumplings

Galette
From The Penguin Companion to Food: “… a flat, round cake; the word being derived from galet, a pebble weatherworn to the shape that is perfect for skipping…”
From The Joy of Cooking: “A galette – or in Italian, a crostata – consists of a flat crust of pastry or bread dough covered with sugar, pastry cream, or a thin layer of fruit… They are, in effect, dessert pizzas. Since galettes are baked on a flat sheet rather than in a pie or tart mold, they may be made in any shape that appeals to you. If the filling is juicy, bring the edge of the crust over the filling to catch drips; otherwise, simply double up the crust edge, then crimp or flute if you wish.”
Apple Galette

Grunts & Slumps
From The Joy of Cooking: “Grunts and slumps, both descended from puddings cooked in pots over the fire, are steamed fruit topped with dumplings. Grunts are steamed in a mold inside a kettle full of water and inverted when served; the result is something like a warm fruit shortcake. Slumps are cooked in a covered pan and served dumpling side up in bowls – more like a hot, sweet soup or stew under a dumpling… Grunts are best steamed in a soufflé dish, but pudding molds or heatproof bowls work as well; metal molds are not recommended, as they may overcook the fruit and impart a metallic taste. Cook slumps in stainless-steel, enamel cast-iron, or glass saucepans, but make sure the vessel has a tight-fitting lid to contain the steam. If the pan is uncovered before the dumplings are done, they will collapse into toughness.”
Apple Slump

Pandowdy
From The Penguin Companion to Food: “An old-fashioned deep-dish New England fruit dessert related to cobbler, grunt, and slump. Sliced or cut apples or other fruits are tossed with spices and butter, sweetened with molasses, maple syrup, or brown sugar, topped with a biscuit-like dough, and baked. Partway through the baking time, the crust is broken up and pressed down into the fruit so it can absorb the juices. This technique is called ‘dowdying’. After the crust is baked, it becomes crispy. Pandowdies are served warm with heavy cream, hard sauce, or a cream sauce flavoured with nutmeg.”
Apple Pandowdy

And if that isn’t enough to inspire you, take heed:

“It is utterly insufficient (to eat pie only twice a week), as anyone who knows the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy must admit. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, and its varying contents the calendar of the changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished.”

from The New York Times, 1902

(In response to an Englishman’s suggestion that Americans should reduce their daily pie eating to two days per week.)

Sources:

Regan Daley, In the Sweet Kitchen
Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food
Kim O’Donnel, “American as Cobbler,” (A Mighty Appetite: August 11, 2006), The Washington Post
Irma S. Rombauer et al., The All New All Purpose Joy of Cooking
Linda Stradley, What’s Cooking America.
Vintage Recipes

This week, a bit of a tutorial. Have you ever contemplated canning as a way to save some of your seasonal harvest for the forty weeks of the year when there’s not a fruit share?

If so, you’re not alone, as going homesteader is hip these days – or so I gather by a recent article gracing the front page of the weekend Philadelphia Inquirer on “21st Century Homesteading.”

Among other pastoral pursuits, the article highlights home canning: “Chris Scherzinger, general manager of Jarden Home Brands, maker of Ball and Kerr home-canning supplies, reports a 60 percent increase in sales from 2007 to 2009, the biggest hike since the 1970s. ‘The economy is certainly a factor,’ he says, ‘but so is the growing interest in gardening and fresh food.’” A poke around the internet turns up enthusiastic blogs such as (Philadelphia’s own) Food in Jars and Tigress in a Jam These are not your grandmother’s canning resources, with recent recipes such as Nectarine Preserves with Summer Savory and White Pepper and White Peach Sauce with Vanilla.

Well, if you’ve never tried canning and you’re interested in giving it a try, canning peaches (straight up, nothing fancy) is a great place to start. Forget Labor Day, or Back to School, the real harbinger of the end of summer is the peach finale. Just a few more weeks, folks, so get ‘em while they last. This realization set me in a bit of a panic this week, dropping everything for an afternoon or two so I could “put up” my personal stash of peaches for the winter.

Peaches are “easy” because they’re a high-acid food that you can raw pack. Translation: you can process them in a hot water bath (you don’t need a pressure canner), and you can pack them into jars without cooking them first, which saves you a step and some extra dirty dishes. Basic canning is not difficult; it just takes time and the ability to follow directions. The big concern in canning is preventing botulism. We can see, smell, or taste many problems caused by microorganisms in our food (moldy bread, spoiled milk), but this is not the case with botulism, and it’s no joke. The tiniest amount of botulism is deadly. But good news: it simply can’t survive in a high-acid environment, and this includes peaches. If this is your first time canning, please review the basics and make sure you’re being safe at the USDA’s Complete Guide to Home Canning or the Ball canning jar site, which has a useful FAQs section.

The best peaches to use are ones that are firmly ripe, probably about two days after you bring the fruit share home. Yellow or white or a mixture, it’s up to you. I found that about 6 medium peaches or nectarines fills one quart jar. You’ll want to prepare a syrup, which will help the peaches keep their shape, color, and flavor. You can use sugar or honey; I used a honey syrup that consisted of 1 cup honey to 3 cups hot water, and this amount was enough for six quart jars. The proportions for your syrup are flexible – even using water would be safe. For a light sugar syrup, combine ½ cup sugar with 2 cups water. For a heavy sugar syrup, combine 2 cups sugar with 2 cups water. Or you can choose any quantity in between.

Things you’ll need:
canning jars with (new) lids and screw bands*
a large pot big enough to hold your jars plus a few inches of water above them
a small pot large enough to contain your lids
a medium pot for boiling your syrup
a ready supply of clean dish towels
a skinny rubber spatula
peaches
sugar or honey

* You can reuse proper canning jars and the screw bands, but you should always use new lids. I prefer the wide mouth jars because they’re easier to fill and to clean. Either pints or quarts will work.

Things that are nice to have:
a canning rack (holds your jars in place during processing)
a canning funnel
canning tongs
a kitchen thermometer
several mixing bowls
lemon juice
whole spices, such as cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, or cloves

Step by Step:

1. Fill your large pot with your clean, empty jars and add enough water to cover them with about two inches of water. (Note: when the jars are filled, the contents will displace some of this water.) You can use a canning rack to hold your jars in place, or, if not, a trick I learned from the Italian grandma of a friend of a friend: cushion your jars with towels. You don’t want the jars to hit each other or the sides of the pot. Start heating the water. It’ll take awhile. You want to bring the water to about 140°, or when tiny bubbles just start to appear on the sides of the jars. Do not let it come to a boil at this point.
2. Place your new lids and screw bands in the small pot. Cover with water and bring to a simmer. Then just leave them in the hot water until you’re ready for them.
3. Make your syrup, and start heating it. You’ll need it to be at a boil when it’s time to fill your jars.
4. Prepare your peaches. You’ll want to slice and peel them. You can blanch the peaches in boiling water to help remove the skins, but I find that when they’re nice and ripe, it’s just as easy and less mess to simply peel them with a knife. I’ve found that a small, serrated knife works best. I like to cut the peaches into eighths or even smaller, so that they’re easier to pack into the jars. As you cut them, you can drop them into a bowl of water to which you’ve added a teaspoon of lemon juice to prevent them from darkening.
5. Pack your hot jars with the peach slices. If you’d like, you can add whole spices, such as cinnamon, cardamom, or cloves. Pack the fruit in as tightly as you can, then top it off with your boiling syrup, leaving a ½ inch of headspace between the liquid and the rim of the jar. To remove any air pockets, run your spatula around the inside edges of the jar, and correct the amount of liquid if needed to maintain that ½ of empty space.
6. Carefully wipe the jars with a clean, damp cloth; you especially don’t want any food to be left on the rims of the jars (where the lid meets the jar), or it will prevent a good seal. Place the lids on the jars and gently screw on the bands.
7. Place the jars back into the water bath. Be careful that the water hasn’t reached a boil while you’ve been filling the jars – a drastic temperature difference could make the jars crack. Make sure that there is two inches of water over the tops of the jars. Cover the pot, and bring the water to a boil (this can take awhile).
8. As soon as your water boils, set a timer: 30 minutes for quart jars, 25 minutes for pint jars. Make sure that the pot stays covered and the water stays at a full boil and completely covers the jars for the entire processing time.
9. When the time is up, turn off the heat. I like to let the jars sit in the water bath for a good ten minutes; if you take them out immediately, the contents can leak out of the lid, ruining your seal. Remove the jars to a wooden rack or onto a counter covered with a few dry towels, to prevent cracking. Let them cool, untouched. Check them to see if the center of the lid is down and stays down when you press on it. If so, your jar has sealed. If not, you should reprocess your jar, keep it in the fridge, or throw it in the freezer.
10. Enjoy your peaches sometime in midwinter, when the last apples have been eaten and the fruit CSA seems like a distant memory. It might be a far cry from feeding your family all winter from a cellar-full of jarred goods, but it’s one small, satisfying step towards being a bit more involved in your personal food system.

If this piques your interest, and you’d like to learn more, a few good places to start are Preserving Summer’s Bounty by the Rodale Food Center (where I got most all of this information) and The Complete Book of Year-Round Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Delicious Recipes by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard, which is geared toward someone canning in rather small batches in the home kitchen.

Comments or questions? You can contact me at northstarerin@gmail.com.
Past, present, and future writings posted on my blog (link to: http://fruitsunheardof.wordpress.com/)

How to pick a peach depends upon who’s picking it: the commercial farmer, the grocery store shopper, the local small farmer, and the farmers’ market shopper. Let’s look at all of them!

The Commercial Farmer: By this, I mean the big mega orchard grower (growing hundreds or even thousands of acres of peach trees!), who wholesales most, if not all of his production. Typically, this grower will pick on a calendar schedule, regardless how not-ripe the peaches are. His goal is to pick a peach which is hard enough to withstand not only shipping over long distances (across country or into a different country altogether) but also can hold up to bouncing around in trucks, ships, and planes for several weeks to a month before it is selected by a customer (usually at a grocery store). To make things easier for this grower, fruit breeders have bred for more and more red skin color on peaches. (By breeding, I don’t mean genetic tomfoolery but good old-fashioned sexual propagation between two peach trees). In heirloom or old traditional varieties of peaches, the little bit of red blush they developed was a sign of ripeness. So, as people grew to equate ‘red’ with ‘ripe’ on a peach, fruit breeders did their darndest to breed peaches that were as red as possible before ripening. To this end, we now have countless varieties of peaches that are practically all red, with little yellow (or white, in the case of white peaches) showing way before when they are truly ripe and ready to be picked. This suits the big mega peach farmer quite well, so he picks when the red color is there and ships them off.

The Grocery Store Shopper: This may have been you at one point or another (it was certainly me many years ago!). You go into a grocery store where they have, piled in tall pyramids of red color, heaps of lovely-looking peaches. Perhaps they’re labeled tree-ripened or local. Perhaps they’re just labeled with a price. Regardless, they look so lovely you just have to take some home. The question next is how to get those rock-hard beauties to soften up? This is where the “ripen in a paper bag” notion came in. As commercial (ie. the aforementioned red-before-they’re-ready) peaches came to the forefront, it became obvious that it was difficult to get the danged things to soften up at home. Fruit gives off ethylene gas, which is a ripening agent. So, by placing the peaches in a paper bag, the notion is the gases will be trapped in the bag and hasten ripening. Problem is, when peaches are picked way-too-early, they essentially die and cannot give off ethylene in the first place. Additionally, since they’ve been shipped and stored in refrigerators for weeks-on-end, any potential flavor components are essentially shot. So, oftentimes those grocery store peaches end up either never softening up properly or they’re mealy or end up moldy before they are eatable. As I always say, just as with grocery store tomatoes…just say NO to grocery store peaches! There’s no point in wasting your money.

The Local Small Farmer: A small farmer (like us!) who sells all (or most, depending on the farm) of their peaches directly to the customer, has a lot more work to do, actually, than the big mega-farmer, in order to pick peaches. For those like us, we want to make sure the peaches are ripe enough that they’ll develop the proper juicy texture and luscious flavors. But in order to do this, we can’t just pick based on red color. We have to look at the ‘undercolor’ of the peach, which can vary from white to brilliant orange depending on the variety. We also have to do some taste-testing (a nice perk of growing fruit, although there really can be too much of a good thing sometimes!). Each and every variety is different in appearance, ripening time, color and undercolor, and flavor, so picking at the optimal time can take several years of learning, evaluating, and note-taking. We also like to make sure that peaches don’t end up already bruised at the farmers’ market or CSA share, so we have to figure out when the optimal time is to pick them that they only have two or three days to go before they’re perfectly juicy and delicious. We have to ‘spot pick’ each tree about 3 times, picking the peaches as they mature instead of all at once. And then we have to get them into the hands of the people who will eat them in fairly short order. Whew!

The Farmers’ Market Shopper: When you shop at a farmers’ market for a peach (remember, you’ve said NO to grocery store peaches!), usually all you need to do is decide which peach to get. If you are buying from a reputable orchardist, the hard part (as mentioned above) has been done for you. Your job is to decide: white or yellow? (whites tend to be sweeter; yellows tend to be ‘peachier’) Peach or nectarine? (nectarines are essentially peaches without fuzz…so give them a try – but not from the grocery store!), large or small fruits (although size doesn’t necessarily matter. Some varieties are genetically smaller and some are larger). If there are several varieties available for sale…which to choose? Most small growers raise many kinds of peaches. Each variety ripens over 7 to 10 days and then the next variety comes into rotation. While many growers just lump them altogether as ‘peaches’, some (like us) like to keep each variety separate and named. Oftentimes, most peaches taste very similar (which is why many growers just lump them together), but sometimes there are standout varieties. So, which to choose? Just ask which one we like the best. You might often get a “well, they’re all pretty much the same and yummy”, but some weeks there will be a definite favorite. Then, just take them home and set them on the counter for a day or two or three (NOT in a bag!). Give them the ‘squeeze’ test. When soft to your liking, grab a napkin and enjoy!

1. Locate a producer-only market near you. (This means, the vendor is the farmer/producer of the product. Be cautious, as many times something called a “Farmer’s Market”…particularly indoor, multi-day markets, have very few actual farmers!) If you don’t know where they are, check out LocalHarvest.org for easy help.

2. Plan your shopping strategy. Just like shopping at a store, it’s nice to have a shopping list and not go on an empty stomach! But here’s some other farmers’ market specific tips:
A. Dress for the weather (raingear, hat/sunblock, etc.)
B. Scope out parking strategy and plan accordingly. Note: most markets have parking info on their websites, so check them out before you go for the first time!
C. Bring necessaries: reusable totebags, wheeled cart if you’ll have a lot to carry, beverage of choice, money and/or checks in an easily accessible location (there’s nothing worse than needing to dig in a huge purse while holding onto your toddler and 3 bags of goodies!)

3. Plan your attack…er, timing. Many busy markets occur on the weekend, and lots of folks try to get there as early as possible for the best selection. While this may hold some merit, it can also lead to huge crowds, long lines, and crabby people (such as shoppers, farmers, kids, drivers, and the guy who just wants to browse). Unless you absolutely MUST HAVE something that is in short supply, try going a bit later in the market day to avoid crowds/lines and find closer parking. Some farmers will take orders in advance…so it never hurts to ask the week before if the farmer can set something aside for you the following week, so that you can come later in the day.

4. Make things easy for yourself. It’s much easier to shop if you do not also have to worry about your hyperactive dog, tired toddler who needs a nap, or other major distraction. Fortunately, I’ve never seen a tiger at a farmers’ market, but you get the idea. Shop with a partner who can lend a hand when need arises. (or bring yummy snacks to entertain the tiger).

5. Shop the market. It’s always a great idea to take a walk around the whole market and peruse the offerings before you start making purchases. It’s a bummer if you just start shopping and find that the strawberries a few stands down look much nicer than the ones you just bought as you entered the market! So, take a look around first (here’s where that beverage of choice…like coffee,..plays a nice role!), then start purchasing. It’s also common for folks to get hooked on certain vendors and only go to them. But you should still peruse the market. You may find there’s a brand-new tiny little stand tucked in a corner that you hadn’t noticed before….and they have JUST the item you want! Plus, many farms grow/produce different items and varieties from year to year, so don’t miss out on something because you only ever go to a couple of stands at the market. Discovery is part of farmers’ market experience!

6. Ask questions. Farmers/Producers at markets like these have great pride in their product, and they want you to be happy with your purchases. Don’t hesitate to ask the farmer questions! You can ask about cooking or storage tips, inquire about a new variety on the table, or ask how the item is grown. And if your curious (and it’s not too busy at the market), you can ask deeper questions like ‘why did you get into farming?’ or ‘what’s the hardest part about being a farmer?’. Markets are about the food, certainly, but they’re also about community building. Ask questions, get to know the food and each other. The market experience will be all the richer for it!

7. Tell your friends/family/neighbors/coworkers. Better yet, make a morning (or afternoon) of it, and go to the market together. Talk about community…there you go! Commune with your friends and the farmers. As you do, you’ll have a good time and you’ll encourage the growth of more markets and more small farms!

8. Discover and enjoy!