Harvest home.

For the past few weeks DF has been practicing the music for an ecumenical service that will take place near Thanksgiving. The song that sticks in my head most is “Harvest Home,” an 1844 hymn*. This quatrain in particular applies:

Come, ye thankful people, come

Raise the song of harvest home;

All is safely gathered in,

Ere the winter storms begin.

No storms yet, but it was 29 degrees when I got up the other day. We are thankful that all is safely gathered in.

It was a somewhat dismal summer for the second year in a row, and gardens were more than a month late in ripening. Some things didn’t produce well, or at all; for example, a local tree expert posted on Facebook that he didn’t get a single cherry from his five trees.

We didn’t get that many cherries ourselves: 28, to be exact. Then again, this is only the second year the tree’s been in the ground. Popular fruit-tree wisdom holds that “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.” However, I can’t hope for too much in 2025 because a moose got into the yard last week. It harried all three of our fruit trees before DF could scare it off the property by banging a hammer on a shovel.

This isn’t the moose that got into the yard, but I bet he knows the one who did.

Fortunately, we’d already harvested the apples the previous week. Moose can be real jerks.

We turned the apple crop into three gallons of dried apples and almost six quarts of pie filling, tasks made easier by two innovations. The first was DF’s turning of an old bottle-capping device into an apple-coring device. He still used an apple corer, but the capper cranked the utensil through with just a few smooth turns. The apple was held in place by a nail driven through a little wooden circle he picked up at Michael’s.

It sure beat pushing the corer through with our hands, which are wearing out due to years of computer use plus encroaching decrepitude. DF had seen apple coring devices at the hardware store. However, spending most of his growing-up years in the Alaska Bush made him the kind of guy who thinks, “Shoot, I could probably make one of those myself.”  

The second innovation also involved the cores. Someone on the Alaskan Apple Growers Facebook page mentioned that she never bothered coring the fruit – she just slices it, pokes out the seeds and dehydrates. The cute li’l star in the middle of some slices tickled her pink. It delighted us, too.

Isn’t that adorable?

Pie, pie, pie

In previous years, we froze sliced apples for pie. But right now we have a delightful dilemma: Our freezers are full of discounted meat and loads of berries from the yard. Rather than give up on pie – one of DF’s favorite treats – we decided to try the apple pie filling recipe from the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

The result (see below) is both beautiful and delicious. I will never go back to freezing apples, unless the two of us can no longer lift the water-bath canner and the Dutch oven. Before I canned, I made a test batch of the filling as per the NCHFP suggestion. My friend Linda B. says it’s the best pie she’s ever had. Possibly she’s being generous, but I must modestly admit that this stuff is entirely toothsome. Didn’t hurt a bit that the test pie’s crust was made with lard** – pork fat makes a supremely flaky pastry.

The process called for blanching the apples before making the filling. That proved challenging, since I was using one of those collapsible wire baskets to dip the fruit into the boiling water. I could do only relatively small batches at a time, because if I put in too many slices some of them floated up and out. The recipe said to keep the finished fruit warm while blanching subsequent batches – and since I needed 24 cups of sliced apples, that was a lot of blanching. I hit on the idea of emptying each batch of drained fruit into a warmed Dutch oven.

However, the basket kept folding up on itself when I tried to dump each batch into the Dutch oven. Very frustrating indeed, but I refused to give up. A few weeks later DF cleaned out a shed and unearthed a stockpot-sized pan with a perforated metal insert; definitely using that next year, because it would allow me to blanch a lot more fruit at a time, and it wouldn’t fold up when I tried to empty it.

On the subject of blanching, I learned an interesting fact from the NCHFP website: Fruits and vegetables contain oxygen. Boiling out some of that air during the two- to five-minute blanching process means the product will keep better, and also look better. Re the last, I’ll let you be the judge:

There should have been seven quarts, but I got only five quarts and one pint. Apparently I shouldn’t have pushed quite so many apples into each jar. Here’s hoping that the syrup-to-fruit ratio works when I make pies this winter.

A former co-worker’s mom owns several apple trees that dropped fruit until her daughter begged people to come and harvest. Well, okay. One rainy afternoon I picked until I felt as greedy as I was damp. On my way out of the yard I encountered the homeowner, who seemed disappointed that I’d taken so few.

“You could come back and get more,” she said hopefully.

And indeed I meant to, but it never happened. On the bright side, I got six quarts’ worth of applesauce out of what I did take:

Pro tip: If you use an immersion blender, you won’t have to peel the apples. That saves a lot of time. I don’t own an immersion blender; I borrow one from my niece, who acquired the appliance for $1 at a yard sale. This is in keeping with my pickup truck theory of life.

Dry, dry, dry

The red raspberries were so slow in ripening that I feared I might have to forage along the bike paths. Luckily, the golden raspberries produced like gangbusters, so we froze a ton. Aren’t these things gorgeous? 

The reds kicked in later, and the goldens were still producing, so we decided to try dehydrating them. We learned how by reading The Purposeful Pantry, a site worth bookmarking. Initially we were daunted by the recommended drying time of 24 to 36 hours, but we’re really happy with the resulting shelf-stable product. They’re good to eat out of hand, and we plan to add them to waffles and maybe to Lightning Cake.

The berries don’t change much in the drying process:

I’d mentioned “rhubarb Twizzlers” in a previous post. They turned out so well that we made multiple batches. Rhubarb is a hard plant to kill, so it did just fine with the cold, mostly cloudy summer; I believe we had three harvests’ worth. Good thing, since everyone who has tried the dried has absolutely loved it. A neighbor said it was “surprisingly delicious” – it does look kind of gnarly – and has vowed to add more rhubarb to her yard.

They really are better than they look. Honest!

 

I did freeze some finely diced rhubarb this year, having found a marvelous (and simple) cake recipe. In previous years I’ve frozen chopped rhubarb along with raspberries and (store-bought) blueberries for pie fillings. This year, it all went to rhubarb Twizzlers and, in late spring, to some rhubarb compote. That’s a rather pompous name for boiled and pureed stalks, honestly. But it sure is good when stirred into homemade yogurt.

Pretty, too:

 

Green, green, green

The tomatoes and cukes struggled in the greenhouse, to the point where we feared they wouldn’t  grow, let alone ripen. We were wrong. The lack of sun and cooler temps did mean that the Chelsea Prize cucumbers from Renee’s Garden didn’t produce nearly as many fruits as usual. But the ones that did show up were marvelous, as usual: huge and as sweet as melons.

This one’s a real showoff:

Because they’re a self-pollinating variety, Chelsea Prize is pretty hands-off; no worrying about whether honeybees are available, and no need to hand-pollinate. Just plant them, train them to grow up strings toward the greenhouse roof, and get the heck out of their way. (As a Renee’s Garden affiliate, I receive a small fee for purchases made through my links.)

Once the tomatoes took off, they lost their minds. We grew Sweet 100, a cherry tomato, plus Mat-Su Express and Mat-Su Backcross, two varieties developed out in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley especially for Alaska gardeners. Starting in mid-August, we ate all the tomatoes we wanted, and invited my niece over for tomato sandwiches.

We took the plants down in late September because a freeze threatened, but still have probably 15 pounds of ripe and ripening fruit left despite eating them all day, every day. These plants aren’t available commercially yet, but I hope the guy who created them patents them. They really are a superior product.

DF has saved us some seeds, as usual, and we’ll also be giving them away on an Alaska gardeners Facebook page. Last year we gave away a ton of those golden raspberry and Toklat strawberry starts. We both dream of a return to the days when Anchorage yards routinely featured food crops. Containerized shipping made buying produce so cheap that lots of folks gave up, but we hope people will start gardening again to offset rising food prices.

Potatoes, peas and strawberries

The strawberries really took off this year, and we ate them until we couldn’t walk. We didn’t want to freeze them because they get mushy, but since we had so many we decided to try them in the dehydrator. As noted in a post called “Strawberries are in season,” we were delighted by the result.

A photo, in case you missed it:

We didn’t dehydrate the peas, because they’re so good fresh. Or freshly frozen: We got a little over six quarts from our relatively small patch, despite gusty winds that threatened to tear them from their moorings. They’re so sweet that they don’t need butter, and the texture is delightful when cooked for about five minutes. I add a little salt to mine; DF just eats them plain.

Their pods got used, too: We simmered them in the slow cooker to produce quarts of lovely pale-green broth. This becomes the base of a truly splendid split-pea soup.

We also didn’t dehydrate any potatoes this year. The crop wasn’t huge and they, too, are delicious when fresh. Those “new” potatoes at the supermarket are probably several weeks old by the time shoppers get them. If you’ve never had a freshly dug potato, you are missing out; the texture is soft and the skins are so delicate that they feel like part of the flesh.

Here’s a pair of new potatoes, drying next to the lettuce and tomatoes that would be served with it at supper. That salad also featured some type of Asian mustard that popped up unexpectedly; it had been years since we last planted Asian greens, but we keep finding them in the yard. Pro tip: Hit the greenhouse in late spring/early summer for what DF calls “orphan” plants. The four-pack of leggy lettuce starts we got for 50 cents in mid-June kept us in salad for two months.

Last year we did dry some of our potatoes, and we still have about half a gallon of them left. Sometimes DF rehydrates them in boiling water, then drains and fries them for breakfast; the water in which they soaked gets saved for making his so-simple rustic bread. When I make chicken or turkey pie, I rehydrate the spuds a bit and then cook them with peas and carrots to add to the meat and gravy. I think I speak for all of us when I say: Nom.

The final dehydrator project was making “green powder” – the pulverized leaves of many plants, to add extra nutrition to smoothies, meat loaf, chili and other foods. But this article is already too long, so I will write about that another time. We truly enjoy this dehydrator*** and look forward to trying new techniques. The appliance hasn’t had much impact on our electric bill, incidentally.

Despite it not being a banner year, we still enjoyed – and put aside – some great food. We’ve also got seeds set aside for next year’s garden, and will protect the berries and fruit trees with straw and trunk wraps so they’ll be ready for another bountiful season. Not only is this food cheaper and “miles fresher,” as the old Matanuska Maid dairy ads used to say, it’s also good for our souls.

Readers: Did you garden this year? More to the point, did you harvest anything or did dismal weather and/or pests ruin your plans?

*The first time I heard this song, it brought to mind the Thomas Tryon novel of the same name. If you want a nail-biter of a tale about small-town skulduggery with a strong “The Wicker Man” vibe, then “Harvest Home” might be right up your (scary and shadowy) alley. (As an Amazon affiliate partner, I may receive a small fee for purchases made through my links.)

**I found this particular lard in the supermarket’s dented-can section, because of course I did. It set me back $1.37.

***Like gardening, we consider dehydrating (and all food preservation, really) to be a fun hobby that we can eat. Maybe you will luck into a dehydrator on your local Buy Nothing group (they have been given away in my group), or find one at a thrift shop. If not, I can recommend the Nesco American Harvest dehydrator (model FD-80A) as a good choice for beginners. We also sprang for half a dozen tray liners. (As an Amazon affiliate, I receive a small fee for products bought through my link.)