We went on a trip beginning of September, bad timing of course, and the first chili’s where just ripening. By the time we would come back a part of the chili’s would probably be bad, so a harvest and preserving is necessary before we leave.
So a quick round trough the greenhouse and the chili patch outside gave a mountain of, mainly green, chili’s. I do prefer to wait until chili’s turn red, but with bad timing we will have to do with a lot of green once this time.
Cutting them took some time and then I put them in the dehydrator. I dehydrated them for about 15 hours at 70°C, which turned out to be a bit too long (I forgot to check on them in between) and the chili’s came out roasted. I hope they will not have a burned taste; we have not tried them yet.
I filled all chili’s in jars for storage.
We will use these to make sweet chili sauce and I am probably going to make some chili flakes or powder (what works best) to spice up some dishes.
We had some more tomatoes as we would eat trough and I saw a video of someone making tomato powder, which is nice to season food with and is a space saving storage way, so I wanted to try that out.
The amount of tomatoes I used did not quite fill up my dehydrator, but that is fine. I am just trying this out to see how it turns out and if I will be using the tomato powder at all.
Since I also had a lot of small tomatoes, the cutting took quite some time. I had set the dehydrator on 70°C for about 15 hours. I will be using the tomato powder in cooking, so there is no advantage in using a lower temperature.
After the dehydrator finished, I checked a few tomato slices and thought they where perfectly dry, but, while putting all of the dried tomato slices into my food processor, I noticed not all tomato slices where dry enough. I also do not know if the food processor is the right tool for this, but I did not really get a powder. I have more like some what sticky tomato crumbles, but that is ok, they will be used anyway. Just to be on the safe side, I will be storing this jar in the refrigerator.
For next year, if I will have enough tomatoes, I should check more of the tomato slices to see if they are dry enough and just let the dehydrator run maybe an hour longer or so.
Many many apples, apple moth maggots, making apple sauce and lots of apple juice
The large apple trees that where already on our property when we bought it are packed with apples again (last year we hat very little apples). A lot of apples started falling, but with that abundance hanging on the tree it was hardly noticeable. We gave a lot of the fallen fruit to the sheep, who loved it, and we started making apple sauce with the most useful apples. The apples falling from the trees where apples with maggots from the apple moth, so the first few batches of apple sauce needed some honey, since the apples where not really ripe yet and the apple sauce was a bit to sour for our taste.
At some point a lot of apples without maggots fell from the trees and we noticed that they where already ripe, earlier in the season as they where in previous years. We got ourselves an appointment at the juicing company and collected all of the apples from the ground for more apple sauce. This was the biggest batch of apple sauce I made at once so far. I filled a 15 litre pot until the edge with cubes of apples and boiled the apples with some apple juice until tender. I pureed the apple sauce, since we like it smooth and water bath canned 6 batches at 90°C for 30 min. (Weck-Style). For me this was a day’s work.
Over the course of several weeks we made a lot of apple sauce, but if it will be enough for the whole year…., time will tell.
After the apple sauce making and canning marathon, we picked all of the apples out of the three big apple trees we have. This took the better part of the day and filled up 15 grain bags. We ended up with 330 litres of apple juice, which is a lot more than we had 2 years ago, which is great, since we went out of apple juice early this summer. Maybe now we will have enough for the coming 2 years.
As with the plums we had been clearing as much of the apples with maggots in them as we could and we will have to keep an eye on things after apples start forming in the spring again. When fruit start falling again in the spring we will have to clear them to keep the maggot pressure low for the next season.
Beautiful Chaos 